GUEST OPINION
Thurgood Marshall (File Photo – ColoradoBlvd.net)
As PUSD finally comes around to making the tough decisions about school closures, after decades of lower birthrates and the financial challenges that accompany that demographic reality, we begin to hear cries of “unfair” from one particular community: Marshall, the not-so-Fundamental school.
By Pablo Miralles
“We have better outcomes” is their main argument. They say they will “leave the district” if the school closes, even as the facts dictate that a school must close for the sake of the entire public school community.
When I visited a class at Marshall in 2020, I asked, “What is a ‘Fundamental’ school?” No one raised their hand, not even the teacher. Now they say, “We are not a Fundamental school—oh, and it’s Thurgood, not John.”
Since its creation in the wake of the Desegregation Ruling of 1970, Marshall has had an open enrollment policy. Parents had to “apply” to send their child to a school that touted its “Fundamental” policies: a conservative focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic over “liberal” social studies and electives, along with a policy of corporal punishment to keep those deemed unruly (generally boys of color) in line.
Normally, a public school serves an attendance zone. Every child living in that zone is allowed to attend. It is open to all. Schools do not “select” their families. The top-performing students at every other school do just as well as the best Marshall students, but Marshall proponents want to rely on “school-based comparisons.” How convenient, when they have a curated enrollment.
The year Marshall opened, there were twice as many students in the district. Today, PHS and Muir have more than enough space to accommodate the current student population and, with that critical mass of students, can offer full academic, elective, and sports programming, something that is not possible when you have three to four high schools in a district this size.
Public education is not a place for elitism. Every child, regardless of the neighborhood they live in or the school they attend, should have an equal opportunity for an excellent education. If you say “our school is better,” you are, in essence, saying “their school is worse.”
If you support an “all good schools” district, then you support closing the “formerly Fundamental” Marshall.
Pablo Miralles is the award-winning filmmaker behind “Can We All Get Along? The Segregation of John Muir High School.”
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Finally coming around to closures? Attempts to “stabilize” the district through closing schools has been tried for many years; one-third of the district’s schools that were open in 2005 aren’t open any more. It hasn’t worked, and it hasn’t generated savings of a level that compares at all to the huge driving costs of increased employee costs of salaries, health care and district pension contributions. The district knows this and not long ago issued a consolidation fact sheet saying closing a school doesn’t generate substantial revenue without having an already income-producing tenant/plan. So the argument about saving money by consolidation to avoid layoffs doesn’t hold water. Fiscally, closures would likely cost the district just as much money, as they have before, from families leaving the district, and probably even more from charters taking over campuses and taking more students from PUSD.
And Marshall does have a neighborhood preference zone, not that serving neighborhoods should be a priority as historically neighborhood schools has meant segregation. Further, the denigration of NW families’ active choices in choosing to go elsewhere, seeking out a school that meets their needs, is denigrating a critical role that parents and students play in education: matching expectations they have with those the school has. Choice can’t only be good when a NW parent chooses to have their child stay in their school’s attendance area. And families are going to continue choosing what works for them as the happiness of their children is paramount. And saying Marshall selects its students is not at all an accurate way to describe a lottery and the fact that families choose Marshall.
Also the argument that the top students at Muir do as well as those at Marshall is not the point. The point is when ALL students in a school are prioritized, which the author claims to support, Marshall’s overall test scores are way higher, e. g., when the same subgroups representing students of color or poorer families are compared. Marshall clearly has higher expectations for academic achievement of lower income families. So which school is serving the greater good? NW families have known this for decades (And btw, it’s long past time for the author to leave the conditions of Marshall’s founding in the distant past and stop insinuating that Marshall now is somehow tainted by that.) These differences in expectations are well-known. Muir’s principal is not shy about saying that test scores don’t matter to him, and Muir staff argue that all students should get A’s, etc.
As for using the surrounding low poverty, high-achieving school districts’ having only one high school as a model, that’s really apples and oranges. Their “excellence” is based on the wealth of the families and the related much higher proportion of home owners vs. renters and thus more stable demographics, the corresponding high expectations and education levels of the parents, the hours and hours spent outside of school in private tutoring, etc., and not on having only one high school. Of course, Muir supporters like the author may just want to have more students for their sports teams to feed school pride that way; they may not mean academic excellence. That’s not really the highest goal of education, though, and certainly not worth breaking up a school that is working academically.
And that’s the point, Marshall’s model of attracting families via choice and growing students from 6th to 12th into their AP program is working. There’s no reason to mess with it. It produces more integration than at other schools, something critically important that the author is actively involved in promoting as he knows it helps all students. As a champion of integration, he should support Marshall.
PUSD is an open enrollment district, all schools are choice schools. Marshall’s programs are what attract students, as does Dual Enrollment does for Muir, or IB does for Blair. So the basis of this argument is flawed at best, misleading at worst. Closing any schools at this point in time would be devastating for the community at large, considering it is still recovering from the Eaton Fires and another year of massive Reduction in Force layoffs. So personal feelings aside, data shows that school closures do not have a net positive affect, to close a well performing schools would just be an injustice to the PUSD community overall. To do anything this drastic on such a quick timeline would be unwise and disastrous to a district who just narrowly escaped takeover by LACOE because of mismanagement. So in conclusion, stop the rhetoric and focus on stabilizing the district before making anymore drastic changes.
Let’s take your argument point by point.
“PUSD is an open enrollment district, all schools are choice schools” Partially true. But Marshall is entirely open enrollment. No attendance zone. Right now Muir is in demand, but it must take the students in its Attendance Zone BEFORE it can allow students from elsewhere in the district or out of the district. It is very likely going to have a waiting list for next semester.
“Marshall’s programs are what attract students” And what programs are those that can not be transferred to another campus or aren’t replicated at the other schools already?,
“Dual Enrollment does for Muir”… Because it had the space for PCC classes on the campus. “
“or IB does for Blair”. Yes, and though it is possible to change IB to another campus (call the IB offices in Geneva Switzerland, that’s what they told me) that program is, for the moment, tied to that campus.
“So the basis of this argument is flawed at best, misleading at worst”. Neither.
“Closing any schools at this point in time would be devastating for the community at large,” not closing any schools is what would devastate the district, but agree to disagree.
“considering it is still recovering from the Eaton Fires and another year of massive Reduction in Force layoffs” As someone who lost a home, I agree it has been a devastating year, but the argument that the lay-offs would be better if we do not close a school is ludicrous. Right now the district hires four High School Principals, four custodial staff, four sets of security, four sets of school administrators, maintains four athletic facilities, and four cafeteria staff. The current lay-offs hurt so much because we are laying off the very people that are most required to educate our kids, teachers. By reducing the overhead when closing campuses the cuts can be more evenly distributed and have less drastic effects.
“personal feelings aside, data shows that school closures do not have a net positive effect,” Perhaps in the short term, that may be true, but to not right-size the district is stealing opportunities for all of the students in the long run. You only need to look at the districts immediately around PUSD. All focus on having one exceptional high school rather than several which dilute the districts resources.
“to close a well performing schools would just be an injustice to the PUSD community overall.” First – all the schools are well performing. Graduates from all PUSD high schools go on to top universities. Stop crying that Marshall is somehow more special than the others. Someone will have to close. I have an argument that it should be Marshall and you have not proven me wrong so far. See, the thing that is harming the district is the drop in birth rates. A problem that exists everywhere in the developed world. Many years ago I lived in China and they had a one child law because of fears of over-population. 500 million people joined the middle-class and now they are closing schools because families are smaller and people are having children later in life.
“To do anything this drastic on such a quick timeline would be unwise and disastrous to a district who just narrowly escaped takeover by LACOE because of mismanagement.” It doesn’t have to be drastic. Stop admitting freshmen in the fall of 2026 and within three years the Marshall experiment in selective enrollment will be done and we can move forward supporting the remaining schools with more resources. As for the LACOE, I kind of wished they would have taken over. So long as there are school board members who have children in some of the schools that should be closed many of us feel real positive change will not happen.
“So in conclusion, stop the rhetoric and focus on stabilizing the district before making anymore drastic changes”. Unless you are going to make everyone have more babies, this problem will not disappear, and will only get worse. That’s just facts.