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AN EXCERPT
Distributed in Person at an annual meeting attended by hundreds on Thursday, November 7, 2013, 8:00AM
To: CA State Board of Education
Subject: Local Control Funding Formula, Discussion of Proposed Changes to California's Local
Educational Agency and School Planning and Accountability System

Unanswered
  Recognizing the probability  that I may not have any opportunity to speak publicly or privately with any member of the State Board of Education, I have prepared this document and attachments for submission to you in public in the hope that some attention to the following issues that have been reported to your agencies and officials and to many other agencies, appointed and elected officials at municipal, county, state and federal levels and to community organization from local to national levels throughout 23 years will finally get some attention. Copies of this document will also be provided to members of the public. Hopefully, someone will follow up.
1.   The Teacher Credentialing Process has been used as a political weapon to exclude more highly qualified candidates when they oppose race, race+ sex and other discrimination. Complaints are ignored.
2.   Often children being tutored in No Child Left Behind have unnoticed, unaddressed needs for glasses, hearing aids and dyslexia. Parent requests for help are also ignored.
3.   Anti-immigrant attitudes are pervasive in K-12 schools and in universities. Community colleges are more welcoming and supportive. . .
5.   Barely qualified and/or under-qualified overwhelmingly white applicants, most with GEDs, none with preparation in education, were awarded $200,000 in grant funds to establish community-based, in school truancy programs over a culturally diverse team of educators with master and doctoral degrees and more than 100 years of combined experience. The schools to be served had among the highest drop-out rates with students of color making up most of the student population, while faculty, staff and administration did not have a comparable ethnic/cultural/racial makeup. . . .
7.   Discrimination in schools is ignored and enforcement of anti-discrimination laws for education and employment are not adequately enforced. What enforcement does take place is more often in public schools. Non-public/religious affiliated schools often believe they are exempt from laws against discrimination, a belief reinforced by the resistance of enforcement agencies to understand and address the laws against discrimination which apply to all educational institutions. Enforcement agencies add to the barriers faced by complainants while accommodating defendants. Reports such as "Closing the Gap," some university "studies" and some district plans exclude any mention of discrimination which means no effort is made to address these problems because they are never recognized as existing. Those who draw attention to the realities of discrimination are treated as pariahs and subjected to retaliation.
9.   The impact of youth deaths from curable diseases, suicides, addictions, domestic violence, institutional violence, human trafficking, gangs, auto accidents and bullying (more accurately termed assaults) is not being addressed for the physical, psychological, emotional and social destructiveness that results. They are not certain they will live to adulthood.
 
This is not a comprehensive list of concerns, but a starting place to immediately get to work to save lives and sanity. As long as these conditions continue so flagrantly, there is little accountability in the educational institutions of California. In one school district, the "plan" to close the gap in achievement for students of color was a 60 plus year plan. . . It is impossible to understand how the perpetual failure to address the needs of students of color as understood by those in their families and communities who are closest to the masses of grassroots/working class people who make up the largest percentages of each group is repeated over and over again. Even worse, those who succeed most with these populations are driven out, denied employment and fair employment practices.  . . . A "talented 10th” approach insures that the masses will remain fodder for the prisons and economic, undereducated slaves blamed for their own conditions.