In California: Pay-as-You-Go Pedagogy

By D.L. Coutu

Even for a rainy Tuesday the courtyard seems empty. In one corner of the square, a cluster of boys with slicked-back hair and hair nets jostle one another. A black boy wanders by, a nylon stocking pulled over his head. The lunch bell summons everyone indoors. Only two people remain outside: the visitor and the longhaired boy who has the word LOVE tattooed in bold, blue letters across the fingers of his right hand. He asks: "Are you a new security guard or something?"

It is the second day of a desultory school week at Memorial Junior High in Logan Heights, one of the poorest barrios in San Diego, California's second largest city. Logan Heights is 18 miles from the Mexican border. Dogs are skinny here, buildings defaced. The average family income is $7,000 a year. There are no jobs to be had here mowing lawns on weekends; there are no lawns. There are no newspaper racks either. People, if they can read at all, read in Spanish. Logan Heights is a transitional point between Mexico and the interior of the U.S. Immigrants stop here before moving up, not to the middle class but to Los Angeles.

The less fortunate return to Mexico.

For every hundred students who start out in Memorial Junior High each September, 60 will not be around in June. Of those who actually do graduate, something like one-fourth fail to get into high school. Each fall teachers steel themselves to confront a steady stream of unfamiliar faces with all-too-familiar problems. But like a stratified rock in Geology I, the school tells more about where the town has been than where it is going. English Teacher Tizoe Romero recalls the '40s, when Memorial was the poor white man's school. Coach Harry Franson remembers twelve years ago, when Memorial was overwhelmingly black. Today Memorial is about 70% Hispanic. A copy of the 1980 yearbook lies open on a table in the art room: Maggie Lopez and Marcos Robles "Best Couple"--and Georgina Araujo and Alfonso Martinez--"Best Hair." One searches in vain for the pair selected "Most Likely to Succeed." There is no such category, only an equivalent called "Standouts."

Among more than 850 students, truancy last year averaged 9%, three times the overall absentee rate for the San Diego unified school district.

The principal, Bob Amparan, 44, is a man of deep convictions--or what our grandfathers used to call character--who worked his way through school repairing TV sets. Last fall he had an idea. With the approval of the San Diego school board, he started a "Cash for Class" project last fall. Each day a Memorial student attends all six periods, he earns 250, up to a ceiling of $5 a month. Initially the absentee rate dropped dramatically, to 2.8%, vs. 6% for a comparable month a year earlier. But by December it was only 6.2%, compared with the previous year's 7%. Says Sergio Nava, 14, the ninth-grade president: "I definitely think they should keep the program, but I guess they should, like, make it up to 500. Some kids are getting just a little tired of 250."

While the implications of Amparan's proposal are staggering, the plan itself is pretty tame--and quite simple. No cash ever changes hands. Instead, each month students are issued "privilege cards," which the graphic arts teacher prints up in his free time, using school equipment.

With the "paper" credit they amass, students can only pay library fines or buy paper, pencils, yearbooks and alarm clocks, which are stocked by the school store because so many students do not have an alarm clock at home.

The $10,000 needed to get the program going was advanced by the city school district. Officials felt they had little to lose.

California public schools forfeit $9 a day in state aid for each unauthorized student absence. Last year truancy alone cost Memorial $123,000 in uncollected state funds. Amparan is a reasonable man.

"For every student I bring back in," he notes, "I make 36 quarters."

No matter. There are those who would like to see Amparan drawn and quartered for his innovation. The angry letters that trickle in to Memorial Junior High overwhelmingly brand the program as quackery, bribery, even blasphemy. A Los Angeles woman wrote in to nominate the principal as "Jackass of the Year." "Paying students for attending classes," wrote another Californian, would be "as effective as trying to alter the course of human events by redesigning the flyswatter."

Amparan agrees. "Twenty-five cents won't convince the hard-core truant," he concedes. "I'm after the borderline kids."

He fingers his wedding band. "I'm first generation Mexican American," he says.

"I grew up in East L.A., was part of a gang. Four of us still keep in touch. One is a priest. Another a fine printer." The other one has been in and out of state penitentiaries. Amparan stares at the diplomas hanging on the walls of his office as if they are about to fall down at any moment. When he speaks again, it is to quote Governor Jerry Brown: "It costs seven times as much to put a person in prison as to put him in college." More than just a quarter.

Music Teacher Tricia Whipple grew up in Pacific Palisades, Ronald Reagan's neighborhood. She is 24, and this is her first full year teaching at the school. "I understand why parents keep their kids home," she begins, trying to hide her anger. "The smaller children need babysitting. There was one ninth-grader who chronically cut first periods. He had to work until 11 and 12 at night as a dishwasher to support his brothers and sisters. His mother had simply taken off. I look at the empty seat in the classroom, and I say, 'How can the parents do that to a kid?' " By Thursday, the day for the weekly parents' conferences, community aides have phoned 180 families, trying to lure mothers and fathers to the morning session, where they can talk with teachers and counselors about their children's progress. Seven parents turn up. Six of them speak little or no English. The principal chats with them in Spanish. Why, he asks them, don't more parents see to it that their children go to school? One mother attempts to answer in English. "Families break up," she says, slowly. "No like Mexico. No grandmothers. Children no listening." "We're becoming Americanized," the principal says ironically, and the parents laugh approvingly.

In a classroom four student leaders are hunched around a work table. They are gathered to discuss complaints about school lunch. (Some things never change.) Almost all are youngest children, and all seem articulate, assertive and full of ambition. "They all come from large families with older brothers either out of work or out of hope," says Teacher Mary Jensen. "The young ones, if they're strong, can see they've got to find a way out of the ghetto." As if to underscore the observation, Eighth-Grade President Fabian Munez speaks up. "I had a brother who came to this school a long time ago," he explains.

"He used to skip. He would, like, fight. I took my brother for a wrong example, and that's how come I come to school."

Munez is small for 14, but there is a wheeler-dealer self-confidence about him that the very poor sometimes share with the very rich. Where do all these young leaders see themselves in five or ten years' time? "In high school," one volunteers, and then, reconsidering, "in college." "Junior college," pipes up another. Fabian's eyes are burning. "President of the United States!" For a first generation American, the presidency may be asking too much. But a great deal else seems possible for him.

Five miles down the road from Memorial, Chicano Activist Herman Baca is fulminating against the Cash for Class project: "Paying 250 to chicano children," says he, "is an insult to the chicano community. It does not address the real problem." Principal Amparan sits in his office and listens to the rain. "Maybe," he says softly, "but I'm not going to just give up.

In places like Logan Heights, every little two bits helps." --By D.L. Coutu

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