By Nicholas Melvoin
When the Los Angeles Unified School District laid off thousands of teachers last spring, the school where I teach, Markham Middle School in Watts, was decimated. Already one of the lowest performing in the state, Markham lost more than half its teachers…
Because experienced teachers from throughout the district weren’t lining up to transfer here, the school was left scrambling to staff classes. Today, months into the school year, many students are still without permanent teachers
Currently, more than 20% of Markham’s teaching staff consists of long-term substitutes, and as late as December, we still had six vacant classrooms where students were taught by a constantly rotating parade of substitutes at a school like ours, where many students are desperately poor and often have language difficulties as well, it has been catastrophic.
I applaud the lawsuit filed last week by a coalition of civil rights attorneys to defend California’s most neglected children by seeking to stop the layoffs at three inner-city middle schools.
The lawsuit argues that students at schools like Markham have been denied their constitutional right to equal educational opportunities as a result of the layoffs.
Opportunities for instruction have been wasted in classrooms where struggling substitutes cope by handing out crossword puzzles or by having students copy pages out of a textbook.
It can be tough to establish discipline in middle school classrooms in the best of circumstances, and with so many different substitutes, many classrooms were too chaotic for learning to occur.
The lawsuit cites the story of one student who lost her 4.0 GPA because a teacher simply didn’t have enough information to evaluate her, and so assigned an arbitrary grade.
Even in classrooms where teachers have now been hired permanently, students are desperately far behind
they face daunting challenges in classrooms where children have gone months without stable, qualified instructors. The system has failed both the students in the classroom and the teachers who are trying to educate them.
Half a century after Brown vs. Board of Education, and years after we committed ourselves to leaving no child behind, we still have a long way to go
The city and its schools need to come to grips with this situation. If there is another round of layoffs, many of our children will lose more than their teachers. They will lose their futures.
Nicholas Melvoin teaches English as a second language at Markham Middle School.
(This article can be read at: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-melvoin2-2010mar02,0,3154086,print.story)