Editor's note

Confessions of a lapsed parochial student

Most folks who know me would be surprised to learn I spent part of my youth in uniform.
I wasn’t in junior ROTC, and I wasn’t completing my GED in the military, even though this was back in the day when Uncle Sam didn’t require a high school diploma of his volunteers (or draftees).

Nope. My name is Brian, and I’m a veteran of parochial schools.
If that sounds like a confession better suited to a 12-step program than an editor’s note in a magazine covering California’s public schools, so be it. It feels like one, too. I am a little embarrassed to admit here that I spent my sophomore year in a private school that felt free to mix religions with the other three Rs.

The free-thinker in me is even more abashed to admit that I let those black-robed teachers and cigar-chomping administrators make me wear—wait for it—a tie.

And a buttoned-down shirt. And shoes, not sneakers. And don’t even think about denim.
My memory is a little hazy, but I think they even restricted the colors of our clothes. At any rate, I’d have been hard-pressed to match the school tie with my favorite paisley shirts from those days. This was back in the Age of Aquarius, if you haven’t guessed that already.

To compensate for my concessions to convention, I wore a peace sign over my tie (and often a sweater, in those cold, upstate New York winters) as if it were a badge of defiance.

Looking back now, I’m amused at my adolescent rebelliousness, and I’m sure my teachers understood.
And I turned out all right, if I do say so myself. I passed the algebra class that I’d failed in public school (the reason I was sent to Catholic school in the first place, after willfully resisting the discipline’s alphabet soup of formulaic thinking), and I actually excelled in French.

My parents eventually relented and let me return to the public high school that I went on to graduate from—on time, thank you very much, and with a scholarship to boot. But I look back wistfully on my time in uniform and judge myself a better person for it. “Clothes make the man,” as Mark Twain said. “Naked people,” he added, “have little or no influence in society.” But then, Mark Twain died in 1910.

I’m leery to think what Twain—whose characters were hard-pressed to wear shoes, after all— would have had to say about prescribed clothing, but thanks to staff writer Marsha Boutelle I know what some influential Californians think of the concept, as reported in her article beginning on page 30, “Uniforms: Are They a Good Fit?”
Uniform policies are often credited with guarding against everything from gang activity and campus intruders to pricy status symbols and plain old fashion faux pas (pardon my French). On the other hand, civil libertarians—and the 15-year-old rebel in me—object that uniforms crimp students’ style, so to speak, and some question whether the perceived benefits are worth the toll on our children’s creativity.

Sacramento-area Principal Mike Gulden takes a different tack, which he shared with Marsha. He sees “an instructional purpose” to dictating dress, telling his students “We wear uniforms because 1) that’s our policy and 2) you see me wearing it and 3) what if your parents came in to see me in the office, and I had my shirttails hanging out and three or four layers of clothes on? What would they think of me, do you suppose?” That, he added to Marsha, “usually gets the giggles going.”

Giggles are harder to come by in “Bridge Over Troubled Waters: Making Peace with Charter Schools” (page 20). It’s not staff writer Carol Brydolf’s fault, it’s just that the subject can be  controversial.
Carol takes a dispassionate look at the issue, tracing California’s charter experiment back to its origins and bringing the reader up-to-date on the latest developments at the state Board of Education.
“When I introduced the bill [that first authorized charters in 1992], the California Education Code ran something like 6,000 pages,” former state senator Gary Hart told Carol. “I heard so many complaints from school officials that they spent all their time dealing with what Sacramento sent their way, that they were becoming bureaucrats rather than educators. I expected to see districts chartering schools and becoming charter districts. That hasn’t happened.”

Much else has happened, of course, including the enrollment of nearly 203,000 students in 574 charter schools in 2005-06 and voter approval of Proposition 39, which in part requires school districts to provide facilities for charters. The state Board of Education approved new rules on the implementation of those requirements “—but only over the strenuous objections of CSBA and other members of the Education Coalition, who have threatened to challenge the regulations in court. At press time, those rules were under review by the Office of Administrative Law,” Carol wrote. (To find out how that turns out, you’ll have to rely on CSBA’s monthly newsletter, California School News, and our Web site, www.csba.org.)

All schools in California, charter or no, are obligated to provide their students with a sound physical education. Some heaving lifting is required to deliver on that responsibility, reports regular contributing writer Scott LaFee in “Let’s Get Physical,” starting on page 40). A 2004 California Department of Education study determined that “Results [of good P.E. programs] indicate a consistent positive relationship between overall fitness and academic achievement.”

To help schools develop those P.E. programs, Assistant Executive Director Martin Gonzalez told Scott, CSBA and the state departments of Education and Public Health are organizing the first-ever School Wellness Conference in Anaheim Oct. 1-2.

• There’s much more in this issue, including:
• CSBA Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin’s account of defending local, elected school governance before the National Conference of State Legislatures and living to tell the tale  (page 5)
• An interview with Dave Long, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new secretary of education (page 15)
• “Class Acts,” our renamed showcase for effective local programs, which often features CSBA Golden Bell Award-winners (page 12)
• A report from guest columnist Kathy Espinosa on the benefits that sensible ergonomic policies can have on the bottom lines of school districts and county offices of education
• What you won’t find in this issue are any letters to the editor, but you’ll find my e-mail address on page 6 if you’re inclined to write one—Réspondez, s’il vous plaît!”