On the Demolition‏ of Leuzinger High School (and Public Education)

The Lawndale-Hawthorne community is up in arms about a bunch of old buildings being knocked down in a local high school.
The debate on this issue is both demeaning and revealing:

The historical society who launched the lawsuit contends that the district failed to file an EIR Report. A fundamentally hollow argument, since the government has made it near-impossible to build anything without red tape impeding every step of the process. The real question remains: are these renovations necessary?

Those who favor the demolition, including the Superintendent, want to guilt-trip the community into thinking that a dedicated constituency wants to handicap the schooling of low-income students. But these students are getting an education. They are getting a schooling, or at least they are getting schooled into thinking that they are learning something.

In reality, these young people are not getting what they deserve. New buildings wear out, whether by design or destruction, but students need a new lease on life, like the freedom to pursue interests akin to what they want to do. Some students come to class afraid, poor, and down-and-out. An empty schooling does not prepare them to cope with these hardships, nor can one teacher, no matter how dedicated, overcome them with by-rote lesson plans forced upon the faculty by an inane curriculum.

Patrick Holmes comments that the Centinela Valley School Board is "putting themselves above the law." In many school districts, school boards have authorized expenditures, dismissed complaints, and resisted change precisely because interested parties have attempted to hold their leaders accountable, when they should do away with the whole leadership model outright.
Whether the local school boards have already demonstrated this canny, flagrant capacity a number of times or not, how much money has this school district wasted on frivolous junkets, perks, and other niceties that have nothing to do with educating people? And yet, all the public does is complain. I am saddened to admit it, but I fear that too many people have simply gotten used to the status quo of sub-standard education that focuses on standardized tests as opposed to raising a young person's standards for himself or herself.

Ongoing political wranglings about a bunch of buildings are really about one more attempt to tame the immoral behavior of school boards and teacher's unions that have taken state power to further interests not allied with those of the students. Understandably frustrated, the community is attacking something rotten in Centinela Valley. People want to recall school board members, unions change leadership, teachers seek better venues to teach in: but is anything getting better?

All of this politicking and suspected corruption should not surprise us, and it appears that it will never will. Currently, public education is a turning into crass case of Orwellian double-speak. Hardly "public", these institutions operate without serious public scrutiny, making deals and votes that have little impact or benefit for the primary consumers, the students--and unwilling consumers, at that. Not in the slightest "education", public schools hustle students from one class to another to learn stuff that has little value to them, a Kafkaesque nightmare from which they and their parents cannot escape because they are limited by their zip code to attend sub-standard schools with state-of-the-art facilities whose novelty is certain to fade.

Really, the quality of an education is the uprbringing of a student, not the tearing down and building up of new buildings. Why not focus on giving students alternatives to the impoverished mess that has become public schooling? And I mean more than charters. Even though a number of students have actually complained that Da Vinci schools promised a lot, but never delivered, at least families have a choice. If students settle on enrolling back in Centinela Valley, as if choosing the slightly lesser of two evils, at least they are choosing to enroll there -- and an atmosphere of voluntary association breeds respect and involvement from everyone involved.

Focusing less on what gets constructed, what gets knocked down will facilitate focusing on the real avenues for reform: school choice, financial accountability through local stakeholders, and the diminution of school boards and teacher's unions whose interests do not intersect squarely with the needs of schools, staff, and students.