a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court on behalf of parents, teachers & students at three schools against California state itself for literacy failure

California can seem like a very strange state.  Things can seem to happen there that seem unimaginable in other states.  That's not necessarily to say other states don't have strange things about them. Oregon has plenty of peculiarity in its history.  Portland probably still doesn't put any fluoride in its water supply; there's probably still that law on the books that says you can ask a doctor to help you commit suicide; and more notoriously, the Oregon Constitution explicitly denied citizenship, voting rights and the right to enter contracts on the part of blacks until that verbiage was struck down. 

Every state probably has something a bit unique in a bad way about it.

Something a lot of states do is find ways to make prisoners do work that would be more expensive to do if done by officially employed people.  California itself is apparently going to be the defendant in a recently filed suit alleging that it failed to provide three schools and its associated populace with the resources necessary to promote literacy. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/us/california-literacy-lawsuit.html

Parents and educators at struggling schools in California say students there are not reading well, and lawyers this week sued the state, arguing that it had failed to provide the children with the resources they needed to learn

 

The lawsuit was filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court on Tuesday on behalf of parents, teachers and students at three schools — La Salle Avenue Elementary School in Los Angeles; Van Buren Elementary School in Stockton; and Children of Promise Preparatory Academy, a charter school in Inglewood.

 

It said California had failed to follow up on its own report by state literacy experts that found there was a “critical need” to address the skills and development of students, particularly those who are learning English, have disabilities, are economically disadvantaged, or are African-American or Hispanic.

 

The suit, announced in a statement, is the first in the United States to seek recognition of the constitutional right to literacy, the lawyers said. It alleges that the state failed to intervene when students achieved low proficiency rates in reading and fell behind at the three schools, which are among the lowest performing in the state.

 

“It has been five years since the state identified urgent literacy issues and their remedies, but it is yet to implement a plan to address these issues,” said Michael Jacobs, a partner at Morrison & Foerster, which filed the suit along with the nonprofit law firm Public Counsel.

 

“In the meantime, children in underserved districts fall further behind and lack even the most basic literacy skills,” he said. “It’s time for the state to be held accountable for the success of every student.”

The state of California, its Education Department and Board, and the superintendent of public instruction, Tom Torlakson, were named as defendants in the lawsuit.

 

A spokesman for the Education Department, Bill Ainsworth, had no comment on the lawsuit. But he said that California had one of the nation’s “most ambitious” programs to serve low-income students, and that it was investing more than $10 billion annually to help underserved students.

 

The state also collects data to help educators figure out where to target resources, he said, adding that 228 districts will receive additional support next year, including the three schools named in the suit.

 

...

My parents played a substantial role in my learning how to read, my mom specifically.  I got drilled on phonetics with flash cards and stuff like that.  My math scores were often terrible but my reading level was considered average or above average for my age in school.  And here I am this year slowly working my way through Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and even slower through Gadamer's Truth and Method and I might even find a way to connect both of these books to a piece I'm incubating about the Michael Bay Transformers franchise as an iteration of what in an earlier era would have been called the total work of art. 

 

I'm not meaning to suggest California may not have given some schools the resources staff and students and parents wanted to have has to be ignored as a concern, but I do wonder what the thinking is that hopes that California state itself, as a defendant, can be found guilty on the basis of a superior court beholden to what would sure seem like California as well as federal laws.  Not being a Californian I can't even start to guess, really, how this will play out. I grew up in Oregon and the consensus within Oregon was that Californians were crazy, especially the further south they were.  Northern Californians you could basically pretend were Oregonians who hadn't come up to the state. SoCal was some alternate cosmos run by Cthulu.

 

No offense meant to great people who live and work down in southern California, just describing what is probably still a pervasive Oregonian sentiment. But the closing thought for this bit-of-news post is that as I get older I think about how the one thing that seems most vital to education is the thing that, to the frustration of parents and teachers alike is not something that can be foreseen or controlled for, the inherent curiosity of the student.  You can have the best materials and programs that money can buy and that tradition can inculcate but if you're presenting them to someone who has no curiosity about the world or the human condition and who regards the entirety of educational experience as some stupid set of hoops to jump through before you can get to interesting stuff to do then, well, there's not a whole lot you can do for those people if they are incurious.  Of course the nature of the reported suit sounds like it alleges that even with a collective will the state of California didn't dole out enough resources for literacy to happen.  Guess we'll just have to see what comes of this.