It has been great to see good people coming together this week to take out uber racist Harald Martin, who was recently appointed to the Anaheim Union High School District. But what about Santa Ana?
Our Mayor, Miguel Pulido, appointed a Minuteman, Lupe Moreno, to the Santa Ana Library Board. And he helped his buddy Rob Richardson get elected to the Santa Ana Unified School District’s Board of Education – where as Chairman of the School Board, Richardson has overseen the loss of millions of dollars due to the bungling of the District’s Class Size Reduction program.
The SAUSD school board is surely one of the most inept boards in Orange County, if not the state. But Pulido has enabled the dysfunction instead of doing something about it.
What a contrast we see in Los Angeles, where troubled Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa “spent $3.5 million on behalf of three candidates who recently won seats on the Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education,” according to the L.A. Times.
“To help his candidates, Villaraigosa turned to an array of companies seeking to do business at City Hall, including real estate developers, media companies and potential tenants at Los Angeles International Airport.”
Isn’t that what Pulido does every time he gets his puppets elected to the Santa Ana City Council? Why couldn’t he run a slate of candidates to take out the hugely ineffective screw-ups on the SAUSD School Board?
Of course the problem in Santa Ana is that Pulido helped the entire SAUSD School Board majority to get elected. He has been a major supporter of the aforementioned Richardson, and his fellow lame Trustees Rosie “God is mad at Santa Ana” Avila and Audrey Noji.
In L.A., the Mayor believes that “we have to fundamentally reform our schools.” In Santa Ana the Mayor helped his political hack friends to take over the local school board – with no results in sight. What a contrast indeed.
With all due respect Mr. Pedroza, even though SAUSD has its problems, they can not be blamed on Mayor Pulido.
After all we voters put Richardson in office.
Second, student performance can be more influenced by parental involvement than who sits on the school board.
If you compare LAUSD’s grad rates to SAUSD’s (2005-2006 data), it shows that SAUSD’s 79% grad rate exceeds by far that of LAUSD’s (63%). http://dq.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/
SAUSD does have its problems to be sure but I think mayoral influence will have little impact in the long run. At the end of the day, we parents must do our share individually with our children.
check out the site. It has great data on it.
take care
Rossie said it, I believe it, and that settles it.
“SAUSD’s 79% grad rate exceeds by far that of LAUSD’s (63%)”
Those numbers are bogus.
How those numbers are derived is that 79 % & 63 % of kids that start their senior year in high school graduate.
The ACTUAL graduation rate tends to be far less than 50 % and some place it in the 30’s to 40’s
How many kids start kindergarten versus how many kids finish high school is the actual rate, but the state only requires the count from the strat of the senior year.
SAUSD loses many, many kids yearly, and the only reason they keep playing the game is for the ADA money.
When I worked at SAHS, 900 freshmen used to enter and 300 graduated 4 years later. That is a 66% dropout rate. You can’t believe how they messed with the numbers to show a much lower dropout rate.
Another interesting fact – students were not given their diplomas at graduation. They had to go to the Counseling Dept. and obtain their diploma from the Registrar. Before giving them their diploma, we had to ask them what their future plans were. Many had no plans. The conversation usually went like this, “Well, you’ll probably go to college, won’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know, Santa Ana College is basically free and they have lots of interesting classes there. You’ll probably go there, won’t you?”
I observed students eventually saying “yes” just to get their diploma and go home. Couldn’t understand why such pressure was placed on students to say they were going to college. Registrar was pressured to show that most graduates were going to college and those stats eventually ended up in publications put out by the district!
whether those figures are bogus as you claim, the point of my comment was to say that I would rather go to an SAUSD school (as I did) than LAUSD. We are smaller and hence easier to run.
by the way #3 I would love to see the source that you used to show fraud in the grad rate.
We ought to share that with the Register. Please provide that.
I re-read your post #3, what you were questioning was whether to measure the high school dropout rate with the baseline starting in kindergarten or starting in high school.
I think starting in high school is a legitimate start, only because if you start in kindergarten the starting variable has a higher percentage of being an inaccurate measure unless you discount the children that moved to other school districts or other children that came into the school district after kindergarten.
If you start in High school those things can happen to but at a much smaller scale.
I guess it is a matter of opinion but I would not call the figures bogus based on your premise.