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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed suit on February 24, 2010 against LAUSD and the State of California for budget cuts that have disproportionately affected 3 predominantly schools of color."The lawsuit was filed in superior court by the ACLU of Southern California, Public Counsel Law Center and the law firm of Morrison & Foerster LLP, on behalf of students at the three schools."

While there is no question that the education offered to predominantly students of color at these and other schools within LAUSD has been impacted by budget cuts, there are many other factors as to why these cuts are more detrimental to inner city schools. To understand this requires people put together a sequence of circumstances that for some reason the ACLU and its associates in this case seem unwilling to address:

1. Teachers are able to pick what school they want to work at based on their seniority. Therefore, the teachers that wind up teaching at poor inner city schools have the least amount of seniority and are presently subject to lay offs and dismissals in bad budgetary times, before their colleagues with more seniority -- last hired, first fired. This is why "seventy-two percent of the teachers received layoff notices; at Markham, [where] the layoffs included almost the entire English department along with every eighth grade history teacher." In an education system that is driven by jobs and the maintenance of political power, academic achievement will always be sacrificed first.

2. Behavioral issues are much more pronounced at schools like the three that are involved in the law suit, because the students have been put in classes years beyond their ability to understand. They are incapable of being engaged at their present age determined grade-level, that is far beyond their subjective abilities. The sheer number of students that are disrupting classrooms makes it impossible for administration to enforce discipline due to this problem of their own creation. Even the few students that have mastered the prerequisite grade level standards are in classes that are often held hostage by disruptive students that the administration is either unable or unwilling to discipline, because of ADA considerations in bad economic times. As a teacher, try and go through a semester's worth of course standards in your class, while a three-ring-circus is going on.

3. The parents of the students who are presently being denied an education were themselves my students when I started teaching 23 years ago. How can we assume that these parents have the skill set necessary to advocate on behalf of their children or help with school work, when they never were taught these skills. The 14 year-old girl in 1989 at Audubon Middle School was probably right when she told me that her mother didn't love her, because the reality was that she had unintentionally stolen her mother's childhood. If people have never been socialized into a society, how can you expect them to break a cycle and become real partners in changing this system? The well-educated people that run the system seem powerless to pose real solutions and not just fantasies. I talked with a nice lady today in the California Department of Education whose children had all graduated from college and gone on to make their mother proud with their achievements. Is this person really capable of understanding the reality of inner city families when she says, "We are not able to change things, because the parents are not helping"? The people running the education in this state sound a little bit like Marie Antoinette at Versailles wondering why the peasants in Paris couldn't eat the small breads if there was no more baguette.

4. All three of these schools have very low API scores. Gompers Middle School has 558 for 2009, down from 559 in 2008; Liechty has 647 in 2009, up from 635 in 2008; and Markham has 526 in 2009, down from 536 in 2008. So what does this mean? Students at these schools are predominantly low functioning and as we have already said, years behind where they should be academically. Better schools in LAUSD have scores in the 700s -- not so great -- with a few in the 800s. Suburban schools even have scores in the 900s. Given a choice and no incentive to do otherwise, more seasoned teachers with greater seniority see no reason to go into a war zone ever day. Forget combat pay, it would just be nice to know that the District had your back, while you're trying to do the thankless job of teaching students that are years behind where they should be.

5. Secondary school teachers are mostly single-subject credentialed with no skill set to address the deficits that the vast majority of undereducated students bring with them. The simple fact that 32 percent of LAUSD are English language learners, which does not even include other native born minority children whose mastery of standard English is no better than immigrant students. Teaching a World History class from middle school on presupposes an English language skill set that is not present in the vast majority of ALL LAUSD students. Whether born in the United States or elsewhere, these students require a skill set of remediation in Language Arts and Math that are not possessed by the majority of LAUSD teachers, so District policy just ignores this reality and wonders why all its programs and reforms come to naught. One might find themselves questioning whether or not LAUSD really wanted reform...

The following is from a letter that I wrote the ACLU on January 28, 2009. If the ACLU brought a lawsuit based more on the following suggestions, we might actually have a chance at changing LAUSD culture into something that functions the way a public school district should:

"In the simplest terms, fraud is a deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual. When grades and examinations are fixed to allow students with 4th grade reading abilities to get a high school diploma, it not only hurts them, but also undermines the value of the high school diploma for all those who diligently achieved the standard that the high school diploma is supposed to measure. It also undermines the viability of this country.

I would like the ACLU to seek a prohibitory injunction to stop social promotion and a mandatory injunction to institute independently proctored annual examinations- irrespective of subject grades- that must be passed before a student is allowed to go into the next grade.

Furthermore, I would like to see a reapportionment of LAUSD's teaching priorities to insure that the most highly prepared teachers are used to address the needs of students who fail these annual grade-level competency exams. This system has been functioning in Europe and Asia for many years and would go a long way to address the fact that United States public education is now significantly more segregated than it was before Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

"At a time when California is already 46th in the nation in per-pupil spending -- and is about to drop lower -- our state and school district have chosen to balance their budgets by decimating the teaching corps at schools like Gompers, Liechty and Markham, schools which serve nearly exclusively students of color from low-income families," said Mark Rosenbaum, chief counsel for the ACLU/SC.

Our leaders, who seem to be presently co-opted by corporate interests, must recognize the primacy of public education as a foundational concern in all other issues that this country presently faces. Unless the underlying issue of social promotion is addressed, no amount of money will resolved our failed public education system. Those reform models in this country that have succeeded have only done so by not continuing to lie to themselves about the reality they face.

"If government can bail out the bankers of Wall Street, then it can bail out the children of Watts and Pico-Union."

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