Executive Summary...

There are many underlying factors that directly affect the proper education of our children. Economic, Social, cultural, and gender factors all play a significant role, especially in traditionally low and moderate income communities. Unfortunately, our public school system is in a worldwind decline; and the victims of this subpar operation is our youth. The public school system, simply put, is failing.

Many minority students are not achieving at the highest possible or necessary level. African American students are especially underserved. They are not connecting with the teachers, the curriculum, or the importance of education. African American students are not engaged in learning.

According to the Sandia report, “Perspectives on Education in America,” produced by the Sandia National Laboratories in April 1996, and published a year later by the Journal of Educational Research, Washington, D.C., identified six issues that pose the greatest challenges for the country’s educational system. They include:

1. Forming a national consensus on the changes needed in public education;
2. Finding strong leadership to carry out educational improvement;
3. Improving the performance of disadvantaged minority and urban students;
4. Adjusting to immigration and other demographic changes;
5. Upgrading the quality of the available data collection;
6. Active participation from parent groups and the community.

In their 1995 book, "The Manufactured Crisis," David C. Berliner and Bruce J. Biddle say that, in attacking public education, many people are concerned about the wrong issues. Berliner and Biddle say the real problems, which face American education that must be resolved are:

Societal problems e.g., income and wealth inequity; stagnation of the economy and thus of family income; racial ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity; prejudice and discrimination; the existence of ghettos instead of viable city centers; violence and drugs; the aging of the population; competing demands for funds; the restructuring of work.

Every day features of education and their effects e.g., age-graded classrooms; public competitions, pitting success against failure; comprehensive schools and tracking systems; the fact that teaching is seen as a "feminine" profession; bureaucratization; our system of public, parochial and private schools; inefficiencies of having local school districts; multiple and competing tasks districts are required to perform.

The dilemmas of radical expansion as we attempt to educate a dramatically larger portion of the student population;

Unequal support of schools; and,

The changing student population.

Many California reform reports and policy makers agree that there are issues that need to be addressed and improved, by California’s public education system: teacher preservice and inservice education; K-12 alignment with higher education programs; school finance system; and facilities.

It is these elements of our educational system that have caused parents and communities alike, to step out and find a solution to a recurrent problem that is having detrimental affects on the minority youth in our society.

AAP/CCEE has a solution . . .