Change Will Test Schools in 21st Century

The fundamental challenge to education today is to foresee the vast economic, social and political changes occurring in society and to shape them to our benefit--not to become their victim.

The schools of the future will have to serve the needs of a community far larger and more complex that today’s San Diego.

That is why Thomas Payzant, superintendent of San Diego city schools, established a 17-member Schools of the Future Commission made up of a broad cross section of prominent San Diegans. The commission was charged with examining the changes that are occurring in San Diego and making recommendations on what the city’s public schools should be like in the 21st Century.

The changes taking place in California’s second largest city mirror those occurring throughout the state.

Economically, the state’s basic resource-dependent industries, which propelled California into world prominence, are fading away to foreign competition. “In a single generation, hundreds of lumber mills, auto and tire factories, steel plants, canneries, railroad yards, shipyards and other basic industries have closed their doors,” Sacramento Bee reporter Dan Walters wrote in his book “The New California: Facing the 21st Century.” Manufacturing is giving way to service and trade industries that will require higher levels of literacy from California workers. In San Diego, 46% of all jobs are projected to be either in the service or trade sectors by the year 2000. Only 14% of all jobs are projected to be in manufacturing.

Not only will employees need to be more literate, but they will have to be knowledgeable of foreign culture and languages. California is an international gateway to markets in the Pacific Rim and Latin America, and San Diego is on the border of that gateway. A pilot study conducted in 1986 by the Census Bureau estimates that San Diego’s annual exports total $1.5 billion, of which nearly one-third are shipped to Mexico and one-third to Asia.

California’s population is changing as rapidly as its economy. The state, already the most populous in the nation, will grow by nearly 50%, from the 23.8 million residents in 1980 to more than 32 million by 2000. San Diego is the state’s fastest growing metropolitan area. The city, now the nation’s eighth largest in population, is expected to have 1.1 million people by 2000. This population boom will require funds to build new schools and changes in school organization, such as year-round school schedules and double-session kindergarten classes, to ease the facilities crisis.

The 21st Century will also bring dramatic change in the nature of the student body. Three-quarters of the state’s population growth will be among Hispanics and Asians. In San Diego, the city’s public school enrollment has already shifted from a 64% majority-36% minority population 10 years ago to 46% majority-54% minority in 1987. By the year 2000, the composition of students is expected to stabilize at roughly 42% white, 24% Hispanic, 19% Asian and 15% black. This will mean greater numbers of children will need second-language and bilingual education programs.

In addition, a growing number of students will come from single-parent or two-job families, putting a greater demand on preschool and after-school programs.

As the school-age population undergoes these dramatic changes, the people who pay taxes to fund schools will be undergoing equally dramatic shifts. The number of people over 65 is increasing, while the number of parents of school-age children is declining. So we will need to actively build support among seniors and those without children to adequately fund education.

The Schools of the Future Commission believes in San Diego’s bright future as a democratic, pluralistic, vital, creative and livable city. But we also recognize that our future can be battered by the destructive elements of change if we do not act decisively to protect, improve, adapt and pioneer new paths of public education.

The San Diego public schools--and public schools across California--are not serving all students well today. While Senate Bill 813 and other education reforms of 1982-83 tightened up the curricula and increased standards for admission to higher education, California still ranks about 40th of all states in keeping young people in high school until graduation. The dropout rate of minorities is 50% higher than for white students, and only 8.5% of all high school graduates eligible for admission to the University of California are Hispanic or black. When young people drop out of school, they enter a cycle of ignorance, poverty and despair that burdens them and the community.

While it is clear that the state will have to spend more and do better just to stay even, the Proposition 13 and Gann limits are forcing schools to compete in Sacramento with demands for better roads, medical care and other vital public services. If California is to maintain its economic position and avoid expending huge sums of money on social services to remedy the effects of a large, uneducated population, the voters will have to invest in all their young people, not just the most privileged or gifted. In moving toward the future, we must foresee the particular needs of different individuals and groups so that a far greater number of young people graduate from high school.

The Commission has studied national educational reform proposals, particularly the two highly publicized reports from the California Commission on the Teaching Profession and the Carnegie Task Force on Education and the Economy, and we have examined experiments at the local level, such as the Boston schools-community educational compact. We have hammered out a preliminary vision of the future for San Diego’s public schools.

We have contemplated innovative, decentralized schools that empower principals, teachers, parents and students to make choices about how best to teach and manage their schools--decisions currently regulated by state and local school boards. We have examined the role technology could play to individualize lesson plans, teach critical thinking skills and create incentive systems based on school performance.

Our vision encompasses a partnership between the schools and the community. San Diego’s superintendent of schools has joined with the mayor, the president of the Chamber of Commerce, the commander of the Navy base, the presidents of the major universities and the chairman of the Private Industry Council to replicate the successful elements of the Boston Compact.

The emerging San Diego Compact will attempt to bring together the business, university and public sectors to provide incentives of jobs, scholarships and services in return for measurable progress by the school district in increasing the achievement and graduation levels of greater numbers of students. This vision demands each giving for the benefit of all, and receiving back what only education can give--the intellectual, moral and scientific means to survive in a perilous and fragile world.

We owe it to our children to prepare them for the world they will inherit. We owe it to San Diego to preserve its unique quality of life while adapting to a changing environment. Public education is the key to closing the door of ignorance which has destroyed once-vigorous urban centers. We must seize our chance to shape the San Diego of the future through the schools of tomorrow. The future of public education begins today.