“Bilingual education was the biggest mistake ever,” former President of the State Board of Education Reed Hastings said at an education roundtable, “Improving our Schools-Getting Beyond the Rhetoric,” Thursday night at the Henry J. Mello Center for the Performing Arts, put on by the Beacon Education Network.

Hastings did not appear to be bothered by hisses from a few crowd members.

The 300-person audience threw the most pressing questions in education at a panel of education experts, which included Superintendent of Santa Cruz County Office of Education Michael Watkins, Hastings, Stanford University Professor of Education Michael Kirst and Cabrillo College President Brian King.

“Teaching English-language learners in their native language was a terrible idea,” said Hastings, who is also the CEO of Netflix. “Without exposure to English, the kids will get farther and farther behind.”

Hastings gave $1 million to Beacon, a group that seeks to build charter schools throughout the county.

“There is no one-size-fits-all for English-language learners,” Watkins said.

In addition to immigrants’ education, the panel went back and forth on minorities in California’s public schools.

The number of minorities in advanced placement classes and high-performing public schools is disturbingly low, said Santa Cruz Sentinel education reporter Matt King, who served as a moderator.

At Harbor High School there are a mere two Latino students in AP classes, Matt King said.

The charter school movement has a dangerous potential to re-segregate public schools, Migrant Education Director Faris Sabbah said, and asked what Beacon planners are doing to ensure that their charter schools would reflect the surrounding population.

Some educators in Watsonville are concerned with Beacon building a charter school within the Pajaro Valley Unified School District, because Beacon founder Tom Brown was one of the founders of Pacific Collegiate Charter School. Pacific Collegiate received national recognition for its academics, but has almost no Latinos or English-language learners enrolled.

“The definition of ‘segregation’ is something done to you,” said Lisa Keegan, CEO of Education Leadership Council and panel expert.

Where students go to school is based on their neighborhood and where their parents work, and since people choose where they live and work, people have segregated themselves, Hastings said, followed by scoffs from the audience.

Charter schools give parents and students the flexibility of choice, Keegan said. If they do not like the school, they can leave.

Hastings went on to question if segregation was really a bad thing, pointing to a high-performing charter school in San Jose that is 70 percent Latino.

Racially isolated minority schools are 11 times more likely to experience poverty, which relates to educational inequalities, plummeting academic achievement and fewer college-bound graduates, wrote a report released in December 2006 by The Civil Rights Project of Harvard University.

“The consequences of attending unequal schools are alarming in this period when college admissions standards are rising, mandatory tests are being implemented, remedial courses are being cut and affirmative action is being eliminated,” said the study.

Brian King said that a high school diploma used to be “the ticket to the middle class.” This year, however, climbing the social ladder up to middle class status requires some college education.

“And if that sounds like a shameless plug for community college, it is,” he said.

Because minority students are the most failed by traditional public schools, these students were the first to seek alternative avenues and transferred to charter schools across the nation, Keegan said.

Audience members corrected Keegan by informing her that the number of upper- and middle-class white students attending Santa Cruz County’s charter schools is a greater percentage than the population at large.

An alarming trend of re-segregation in public schools is slowly reversing the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown V. Board of Education, wrote the Harvard study.

“Latinos, who are becoming the largest minority group in the country, are the most severely segregated. Seventy-seven percent of Latino children are in predominantly minority schools,” the study said.

Studies on the effect charter schools, a relatively new phenomenon, have on segregation are still unclear and contradictory.

Watkins said that encouraging more black and Hispanic students to become teachers would be instrumental in providing bi-cultural role models in all schools for tomorrow’s youth.

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(Published in 2/10/07 edition)

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