Monday, June 2, 2003 in
by Michael Warder
Manchester Avenue School is arguably the worst elementary school in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Its students tested last spring in the very lowest of the lowest 10 percent of California schools. And the state ranks among the poorest performers in the country.
And although it is true that, on average, the elementary schools of the LAUSD have shown some improvement in the last few years, 63 of the district’s elementary schools perform in the lowest 10 percent of schools in the state.
And when compared with schools in areas of similar socioeconomic status throughout the state, Manchester scored in the lowest 10 percent of such schools.
The reported median family income in ZIP code 90044, where Manchester is located, is about $24,402. About 5 percent of the adults who live there have at least a bachelor’s degree. Latinos and African-Americans make up more than 97 percent of the population.
While Mayor James Hahn attended Manchester Elementary as a young boy, it is no longer the same school. While it is true that three other elementary schools scored worse than Manchester, none was nearly as crowded.
Currently 1,694 students are crammed into the buildings in grades K-5. My respect for the administrators and teachers who faithfully do their job each day there is enormous.
My heart goes out to the parents who feel trapped and hopeless as they are forced to send very young children to such a crowded school.
They lack other options in these crucial formative years of education.
A few blocks down the street from Manchester is St. Michael’s, a K-8 elementary school. Currently it has 242 students, but it could hold 315.
Despite being a private school, it is not a school for the economic or social elite. About 84 percent of the children who attend St. Michael’s qualify for the federal lunch program. About 54 percent of its students are African-American, and 46 percent are Latino.
The basic tuition for children who are not part of the parish is $2,180, although the second child in a family would pay only $940. While tuition levels are low because of subsidies from the Catholic Church, children who attend need not be Catholic.
There is a wide body of scholarship showing that such private schools, even when controlling for demographics, do a better job at educating. This is especially the case when private schools are compared with the worst public schools.
In addition to St. Michael’s, there are 11 other private schools in that same ZIP code area. If some of those children could move to these private schools, where there is room, at the minimum it would relieve the overcrowding and the busing in the public schools.
Private philanthropy could help. The Los Angeles Children’s Scholarship Fund, for instance, provides partial-tuition scholarships for 145 children who live in 90044 with a total of $181,000. The average family income of the families in our program in that area is $18,060. The average tuition in the area is $2,734. This means that these families heroically pay about $1,486 a year of the tuition!
Throughout the city of Los Angeles, we offer 2,426 such scholarships. When they were first offered in 1999, we received more than 50,000 applications. There are perhaps 12,000 to 14,000 empty spaces in the 551 private schools located within the LAUSD geographic area.
To stimulate more scholarship philanthropy, California might look to what other states have done. Pennsylvania and Florida, for example, allow businesses to take a tax credit for money they contribute to give low-income children a chance to have partial-tuition scholarships.
The net income effect on the state budget is positive, because the cost of sending a child in this manner to private school is much lower than the per-pupil cost of sending a child to public schools. Arizona offers individual tax credits for such educational charity.
In California, tax credits might be targeted to economically depressed areas or to areas where there is severe overcrowding in the public schools. Such a program of educational philanthropy would immediately allow low-income families to take advantage of the space and the teachers now available in the private schools.
While perhaps not an ultimate solution — if, indeed, there were such a thing — such an opportunity would provide some families with an option. For those children stuck in the worst of the worst schools, such an option would give some hope in the midst of a very bleak reality.
Michael Warder is executive director of the Los Angeles Children’s Scholarship Fund. E-mail him at mwarder@lacsf.org.