TCLA: Bill of Rights: Features: 7: Interview with Bill Koski

Aminah Hasan: Why is it important that students have educational resources in your opinion?

Bill Koski: I think that it is important because they are necessary tools to achieve certain outcomes, such as, getting a diploma, graduating. You want to have taken all of the classes and courses you need to go to college or you want to have learned all of the skills that are necessary so you can go out there in the world and get a good job. Resources are instrumentally important because you need them in order to get those skills and get that knowledge that you need in order to go to college. For instance, if you want to go to college this day and age, you better know how to use the Internet and how to use computers, and do word processing. That means you need those kinds of resources to better prepare yourself. I also think resources are important because you spend a lot of your day at school and if you don’t have good, high-quality resources, you are learning under unfair conditions. If you were a worker, you would be working under unfair working conditions. If you are in a room that has no air conditioning and it is somewhere out in the valley or if you have a desk that is all broken so much that it will fall apart and you’ll get hurt or something, those are unfair conditions. Resources have an inherent value because this is where you spend all your day and you want good quality resources.

AH: How are you using your research findings about standards and necessary resources to effect change?

BK: My hope is that I have used it to help support people who are working on this big lawsuit against the state—the Williams litigation—to help them form their opinions about what it is all kids in California need. I like what you guys have been talking about down at UCLA and the idea of a students’ Bill of Rights. I hope that the work that I do will be a part of that.

AH: If California doesn’t take responsibility, how will we fix this problem?

BK: I have run out of ideas myself. In the end, we are going to need some sort of shift in the way that the people of California think about education. Everybody in this State knows that education is important—rich, poor, black, white, brown, whatever. But what not everybody agrees on is that education is important for everybody. Families are very motivated to look out for their own kids’ interest. People with money are able to put money behind that and what we need to do is to convince people with money that it is important for their kids, their families, and the State as a whole, that all kids in the State deserve what their kids deserve. Once we sort of change that way of thinking, then we can change the policy climate and change the way that they do policies in Sacramento and more equitably provide educational resources. In the end, politics is going to have to solve this problem. The only way we are going to change politics is to change attitudes. Maybe I am a dreamer on this, but it is going to take a large attitudinal shift on the part of people who have money and power in the State. It is about getting the word out and talking about how difficult it is in your classrooms if you don’t have the resources that you need, how unfair your opportunities are, and how smart you are and saying that if you just give me a chance, I will make it.

AH: How do you feel about high school exit exams?

BK: This is a tricky question. I think that there is a place for testing and assessment. I think you want to be able to judge how much kids are learning, whether or not they are learning the right stuff and if they are not learning the right stuff, you want to be able to go back and help them. You can use assessments to diagnose and fix problems. For instance, if you notice that there is one school in your district that kids are not doing very well on their English Language Arts assessments, you want to go back and use that information to fix things. I don’t think that these assessments should be used for high-stake decisions, such as, promoting kids from grade to grade or for graduation from high school and certainly they shouldn’t be used in a situation in which kids are not given the resources that are necessary to pass those tests. You can’t be expected to pass that kind of an examination if are not given good high-quality teachers, computers and textbooks. So there is a place for high-quality assessments, but the way that we are using them in high-stake decisions are not the way to use them.

AH: What should schools have to report properly about the quantity and quality of educational resources?

BK: I think that they should talk about how many of their teachers have gone through a professional training program, if they are fully certified and qualified, and how many are on emergency credentials and waivers. If there are teachers who are on emergency credentials and waivers, what exactly is it that they are doing to demonstrate that they are still qualified to teach? Just because you get a waiver doesn’t mean that you are qualified to teach. Schools should also report on the quality and the quantity of their textbooks and other instructional materials. Are they current, updated, enough, and so on? Also, we need to address the access to technology and what kind of technology students have access to and the availability of it in real terms. For instance, say we have 7 computers in the English classroom and students rotate on and off that or we have computer labs available to 1,000 students. Of course, I’d like schools to talk about graduation rates, and some schools do talk about this. But to make it more clear, schools should talk about graduation rates, the rates of kids going to college, rates of kids taking all of the classes necessary to get into the UC system, attrition rates, better school discipline data, specifically regarding suspensions and expulsions, and why it is happening, so we can see if there is a difference between how some kinds of kids are treated as opposed to others.