Dedicated Teacher Sizes Up Public Schools Before Taking a Leave

Michael Wilson, an English teacher at Taft High School in Woodland Hills, led the school’s academic decathlon team to a state championship and second place in the national finals this year.

Wilson, 36, last week began a two-year leave of absence from the Los Angeles Unified School District to teach American literature at a private school in Athens serving the international business and diplomatic community. He spoke with Times staff writer Henry Chu the day before his departure for Greece.

Question: Why are you leaving?

Answer: It’s a combination of the conditions and situations in Los Angeles and an obvious career opportunity to teach overseas in an environment that is new to me and challenging and exciting.

The class size where I’m going is half the size of the classes I have now. The environment is altogether safer, saner, cleaner. I’m just ready for the change after 11 years at Taft.

Q: Is public education on an irreversible slide?

A. There is something wrong with public education, but I would never say it’s on an irreversible slide.

There are institutional flaws. It is indeed top-heavy. In the larger cities, the bureaucracies are too big, too powerful. Everyone says that, and it’s become a tired theme, but it’s true. There’s a lot of money spent on education, but it’s somehow not getting into the classroom, and some statistics speak for that.

California ranks in the bottom five states in the money spent per student. Yet you talk to anyone on the street, and they all have the impression that we’re spending a fortune on education and getting nothing done.

Q: Is money basically the panacea?

A. I don’t know that money is the panacea, but I do know that if you put 35 to 40 students and sometimes more in a classroom, I don’t care how gifted, how inspired that teacher is, he or she can’t get much done. That’s the bottom line.

That simply means there aren’t enough teachers. And that means there’s not enough money.

With Proposition 13, people said, “We want our property tax back, but we want the services provided by our schools.” It’s like how everybody wants the deficit reduced, but people don’t want to pay taxes.

Well, people got their money back, but it put a tremendous burden on our public schools.

Q: What’s your view of the voucher initiative, which would give state money to parents who enroll their children in private schools?

A. I think it will pass, but it’s a disaster for public schools. I hear people talk about it sympathetically, cogently, clearly, but I have never heard anything that will convince me that this is not another masked form of white flight, of protecting those families that have some money and keeping those kids without money isolated in the inner cities. I cannot see that the voucher system will do anything but destroy the public school system.

And when I see the public school system of a society collapsing, I see the society collapsing.

It’s funny that I’m talking here, going off to a private school overseas. But I still believe in public schools.

Q: But what about the concept of competition between schools?

A. The idea of competition works to some extent in companies. But it just doesn’t work in a public school system. You can’t make capitalist demands on what is in essence a socialist institution--it doesn’t translate at all. You can’t measure the progress of a school in the tangible terms of “profit” or “capital return.”

If you go to the bottom line, and you talk about making schools more competitive, you have to draw up guidelines for comparison. And once you do that, what do you do with students who can’t compete, simply because they can’t perform? In the public schools, we try to meet all the needs of the children, and by doing that of course we cannot possibly compete with the schools that just serve the upper echelon and try to keep their test scores and tuitions high.

Look at schools like Harvard-Westlake and Marlborough. What has competition done to them? It’s made them exclusive. It’s made them elitist.

Q: Is it possible that one system can meet all these needs--kids who don’t speak English, kids who have disabilities?

A. No. We’ve always asked too much of public schools. But I don’t know what the alternative would be at this point.

In political theory, and philosophically, we’re supposed to try. That’s what America is: Give us your tired, give us your poor. But there is no question that it’s not working right now.

There are teachers who have no training at all for this. They’re supposed to teach American literature or history or calculus. They don’t have any training in psychology, social work, intervention, drug abuse, suicide. But what can we do?

Q: What about a breakup of L.A. Unified?

A. The idea of breaking up the district is theoretically a good one. In the abstract, it’s too large--it creates a tremendous amount of problems, of corruption, of incompetence.

If we can ensure in breaking up the district that the schools are once again integrated and no one particular part of the city is shortchanged, it would be better.

But once again I’m afraid it could be like the voucher system--just another form of separating the few from what people perceive as the problem: the inner city. There’s no sense of community in L. A. schools. People aren’t willing to help out--they’re looking to get out, with the exception of the heroic ones.

Q: Are the changes proposed by the Los Angeles Educational Alliance for Restructuring Now and approved by the school board a viable way of changing the schools?

A. I don’t think there’s support for the LEARN reforms among the teachers in the system. The perception of LEARN again is that it’s something coming down from the top, something being imposed--which I don’t think is true, but that’s the perception. And because of that I think it’s doomed.

Q: If you had a school-age child, would you be comfortable enrolling him or her in a public school here in Los Angeles?

A. What a tricky question. I don’t have a child, but I would not enroll my young child in an elementary school unless I was certain that the class sizes would be reduced. I would not put them in these large classes.

I would put my kid in a public high school. But in first, second, or third grade, I don’t think I would. Generally I don’t think they’re getting the attention they need.

Q: What is happening to the teacher corps in Los Angeles? Are we pushing away the best and brightest?

A. We seem to be doing that, yes. So many have left--they’re just burnt out and frustrated by the fact that they’re being asked to do too much. I don’t know any teacher who’s a friend of mine or a remote colleague who isn’t dreaming about leaving. Some are actively planning for it.

My own experience at Taft High has been an extremely positive one, almost all the way, and I’ve had support from people downtown and at Taft. Good things are happening in the public schools. That’s why we have to save them.

Q: So do you expect to return to public education?

A. My plan is now to come back. I’m tired. I’m frustrated. But I’m not done.

I am frustrated by what seems to be a failing social institution and a society that seems resigned to letting it die, generally. But something will come out of it, better or worse, that will still meet the needs of the kids that’s free.

There can’t not be. There have to be places for these kids to go.