Editor’s Note: We’re publishing a series of op-ed articles from students in The Writing Program at USC. Every student in the class taught by Stephanie Bower and Dr. John Murray was required to make a short documentary about education by profiling a local school and/or program. Following the film project, the students wrote op-ed articles in response to their experiences and tackled some of the issues they discovered while making the shorts. We will be posting a new op-ed daily for the next two weeks.

by Andrew Schneider

Recently, I spent time visiting an inner-city high school in Los Angeles, CA helping teach high school English students. At 32nd St. Magnet School, I learned that one of the students I had come particularly close with had recently transferred from another school. Interested, I asked him why. He told me it was because he wanted to learn. He had gone to a public school in Watts, in one of the poorest performing school districts in the state. He told me stories of how students would drop out due to gang problems or family issues. One kid, he told me, just “didn’t feel like coming to school anymore”. I could not understand what he meant. When he in turn asked me about my high school experience, I could think of nothing to say. I went to a public school in Moraga, CA, a quaint suburb 20 minutes east of San Francisco; I had never known anyone to drop out of school, regardless their situation.

Looking back on my experience in high school, I found myself wondering, what allowed my school to perform better than so many other schools, and why does this discrepancy exist? Obviously, attending school in a middle class neighborhood eliminates many of the problems of inner cities, but there had to be something about the school that affected education, something institutional. It had to be the teachers and the resources we had available to us.

Growing up, I attended some of the best public schools in the state. My high school, Campolindo, had graduates attending colleges from Harvard to UC Berkeley to USC. Campo, as we called it, currently is part of the second highest performing district in the state, Acalanes High School District, behind only Los Gatos-Saratoga Joint Union High. The campus is beautiful and spread out. We had a language lab - with forty computer stations set up with language software - two computer labs, and over six science labs. With a new performing arts center just opened in 2003, my school had it all. 400 miles south of me, however, was a completely different type of high school.

32nd St. is a K-12 science and technology magnet school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. As a magnet school, the best performing science students from around LAUSD commute to attend 32nd St. But upon arriving on campus, there is little here that would make this school seem like the best place to send the brightest students Los Angeles has to offer.

The school lacks most modern resources standard to students in suburban schools. Over 75 percent of the school is comprised of portable classrooms, “temporarily” set up when the student population grew beyond the main building’s capacity. The loud, hollow walls of the classrooms are where all learning takes place. Shockingly, there is not a single science lab in the entire campus. The children dissect their fetal pigs in biology class on the same desks on which two hours later they will be taking an English test. The school also lacks a computer lab. Each class is given 2 computers for student use, but that is hardly enough for the 24 student class sizes. One can only imagine the lack of resources available to a non-science magnet - no wonder test scores are falling in this state.

Interested in why students came to this lab-less school, I asked the teacher I was working with, Ms. Kacvinsky. She told me that it was for the teachers, not the resources. She said, “Bigger schools have many problems facing students. What the students get here is a caring environment in which to learn.” She told me how teachers in other schools just didn’t care. The best caring teachers went to schools that paid better and had students who actually wanted to learn.

Ms. Kacvinsky believed the discrepancy between suburban and urban schools is caused by the lack of good teachers in urban districts; I agree. Now one can try and debate what constitutes a good teacher, but the fact is that the best teachers will go for the best salaries, taking up higher paying jobs first. According to the California Department of Education, the average teacher salary in LAUSD is $63,391. The average salary for Acalanes is $73,421, over a $10,000 higher salary. Comparatively, in Oakland Unified the average salary is $54,158, where as in Los Gatos-Saratoga Joint Union the salary is $88,151. Now you tell me where the best teachers would want to work.

A recent study by the America’s Promise Alliance, a nonprofit group that studies dropout rates nation-wide, says that there is a large urban-suburban gap in graduation rates. The study found a 53 percent high school graduation rate in the nation’s 50 biggest cities, compared with 71 percent in the suburbs. An 18 percent difference is significant enough to make me realize that there is a substantial problem in the education system. But what do we do about the problem?

The state can’t fix the problem with money, because it has none. So it’s solution: cut programs. In order to save money and work in a balanced budget, the state has decided to cut education funding in California, the 48th worst public education system in the nation. Now, with less money going towards education, there is less money to spend on teacher salaries and new materials. It is impractical to expect students to enter the marketplace prepared when the last computer they used had Microsoft Word ‘98 on a Pentium II processor; but, that is all most inner-city students get to learn on. Something has to change.

Recently, President Barack Obama signed into law his economic stimulus package. One of the educational provisions in the stimulus may help improve students’ instruction by ensuring that all schools, city or suburban, have equal access to qualified teachers. This is a proactive first step in combating the failures of our public education system. Even though we cannot yet tell how much of an impact the provision will have, more needs to be done. We cannot afford to continue with such a large education gap.