School District Featured in PBS Documentary

By Lookout Staff

Jan. 3 -- The local school district and Superintendent John Deasy will be featured in a PBS documentary this week that chronicles the demise of California’s schools and the current crisis they face.

Titled “First to Worst,” the documentary airs Wednesday at 9 p.m. on KOCE-TV and Thursday at 10 p.m. on KCET-TV.

The documentary traces the demise of the state’s public school system from the 1950s and 1960s, when local schools were funded and controlled by local communities, to the present, when a dearth of funding has led to cutbacks at already crowded, run-down schools.

The change began with challenges to the system triggered by the 1965 Watts riots, which highlighted funding inequities that saw well-off districts outspending poor ones by 4 to 1, according to the documentary.

A 1968 civil rights suit challenged the use of local property taxes, leading to a settlement in the mid-1970s that limited state spending per student statewide. The settlement coincided with a taxpayer revolt that led to the passage in 1978 of Proposition 13, which resulted in cuts to programs, staffs and facilities.

Without local property taxes to boost funding, schools across the state became more crowded and rundown with no money to build new facilities for the nation’s largest school system, which is home to one of every eight students in the country.

In the documentary, produced by the Merrow Report, Deasy discusses funding equities that result from donations to schools.

"The schools with PTAs that can raise substantial amounts of money have more classroom assistants than those that can’t,” Deasy said in an interview with Merrow. “That has a direct effect on the quality of education."

Deasy -- who recently proposed a controversial gift policy to help bridge the funding gap -- recalled how the funding inequities were brought home during a visit to two fundraisers one night.

“At one school I was stuck behind a series of limousines as parents were arriving at the open house,” Deasy said. “And when I finished welcoming those parents back, I scooted as fast as I could across town to another school. And there I saw parents walking to school and one of their children did not have shoes on their feet.”