Los Angeles Schools:
No Education for the Working Class!

Oct 13, 2014

After eight weeks of school, hundreds of students at Jefferson High School in South Los Angeles are still not assigned to classes they need to graduate.

District officials blame this outrageous situation on the district’s computer system.

Really? Two months into the school year??

No, class schedules could have been made by hand, with paper and pencil, in a day or two.

After two months, California Superior Court Judge George Hernandez, Jr. said that students “have suffered and continue to suffer severe and pervasive educational deprivations.” He also observed that “there is no evidence of any organized effort” on the part of district or school officials “to remedy this shocking loss of instructional time.”

All very true, but will the problem be fixed now? Well, don’t hold your breath–the judge did not impose any sanctions on district officials. He let them off the hook, in fact, by “ordering” state officials to fix Jefferson’s problems instead.

In other words, Jefferson students are being told to wait, once again, as the big shots keep throwing the ball to each other.

The Los Angeles school district has some excellent schools–in affluent areas, as well as a few token “magnet” schools for a minority of students in working-class areas. As for the rest of L.A.’s working-class schools, Jefferson’s problems are nothing new. District officials and politicians who run the state have always short-changed working-class students–except that, these days they seem bolder in axing public education, and blaming it on a budgetary crisis.