Jan Jarboe Russell
The Equity Myth
How a $900 million increase in funding couldn’t save the state’s most famous poor school district.
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Yet Vasquez, who spent 31 years in Edgewood, knows how Edgewood bears some responsibility for its own problems. Year after year, Edgewood’s top graduates are offered scholarships to Ivy League schools, only to have their parents discourage them from leaving home. “I’ve seen some students smart enough to go to Harvard wind up flipping hamburgers,” Vasquez said. Political instability, too often a hallmark of poor school districts, has plagued the district. Voters want better schools but not at the price of change, especially when it is advocated by outsiders. Since 1992, the school board has hired three outsiders as superintendents; two had short tenures. In 2003 the board that Nava now heads capitulated to the prevailing suspicion of newcomers and chose Richard Bocanegra, a 30-year veteran of Edgewood, to lead the district. “We needed stability,” Nava explained.
In retrospect, it was naive to believe that a district as poor as Edgewood, with its long-standing underdog mentality, would be able to handle the spoils of equity without ferocious political infighting. It started with the first wave of increased state funding, some $57.5 million, in 1991 and 1992. Voters approved a $27 million bond package, backed by the pledge of state funds, to improve school facilities that were among the worst in the state. But according to newspaper reports, critics accused board members of awarding contracts to friends. Projects took years to get started. The Houston Chronicle reported that between 1993 and 1997, Edgewood ISD increased its budget for nonclassroom salaries by $1 million, adding twenty nonteaching jobs while reducing the number of teachers. Teacher morale plummeted.
The fate of the district’s namesake high school seems to sum up Edgewood’s problems. In 1996, faced with declining enrollment at Edgewood High, the school board voted to close the school and convert it to an academy for communications and fine arts, at a cost of $13.6 million. Leaky ceilings and sweltering classrooms were replaced with an air-conditioned building that included a modern television and radio studio; classrooms for music, dance, and art; fully equipped computer labs; and an auditorium for live performances. The ambitious idea was that the school would become such a jewel that Edgewood would open it to other students in San Antonio.
The new school touched off a turf war. Parents at Edgewood’s two other high schools—John F. Kennedy and Memorial—complained that the best students were being recruited to the academy. Residents who were loyal to Edgewood High didn’t like the idea of opening it to outsiders (students from Edgewood’s two other high schools will be able to take classes at the academy for the first time this fall). Besides, the new school didn’t have a football team, and longtime residents missed the Red Raiders.
Academically, the Edgewood Fine Arts Academy was a success. The valedictorian of the first graduating class, Juan Quijano, got a full scholarship to MIT last spring. The Texas Education Agency gave the academy three gold performance awards for advanced placement, attendance, and writing, for which at least 20 percent of its students achieved “commended performance” scoring. But the school, which started out with grades seven through twelve, has been unable to attract a large constituency. The entire enrollment is now around 420, a little more than half the capacity of the old high school, and the first graduating class consisted of only 19 students.
One of the graduates, Armando Cruz, took me on a tour of the school. He was most proud of the robotics lab. Cruz and his team (some of whom were from Edgewood’s other two high schools) had won first place at a regional contest in Houston for the robot they’d built. “I got a lot of attention here at the academy that I wouldn’t have gotten at any other school,” he said. In many ways, Cruz’s story is representative of the larger Edgewood story. Although he graduated with eighteen hours of college credit, he has decided to stay in San Antonio, where he will attend Palo Alto College, a two-year institution. As much as he liked the academy, he has four sisters who graduated from the old Edgewood High School and still regrets the loss of that school. “To tell you the truth, I always wanted to be a Red Raider myself,” he said. Not surprisingly, the future of the academy is in doubt. It’s difficult for the board to justify so large an expenditure for so few students and such little community support.
In the past four years, after Nava and two other trustees in their thirties were elected to the board, a reform-minded majority has attempted to upgrade the management of the district. Administrative jobs have been cut (Edgewood’s instructional expenditures now represent 65.8 percent of its budget, higher than Alamo Heights’ 63.5 percent), and starting teachers’ salaries have been increased. A beginning teacher in Edgewood this fall is scheduled to make $37,500, compared with $36,100 for a beginning teacher at Alamo Heights in 2004—2005.
Faced with dwindling enrollment and decrepit facilities at Edgewood’s elementary schools, the board made the decision last December to close four of them. Angry parents petitioned board members to reconsider. But the board held firm and is building two new schools—the first since the early seventies—to replace the old ones. “Slowly, the parents are starting to understand that this is what we have to do to make the schools better,” said Nava.
Raising test scores is also part of the solution. Ten years ago, barely one third of Edgewood’s tenth-graders passed the math portion of the required standardized test, and a little more than half of the third-graders passed both the reading and math portions. Last year, 41 percent of the tenth-graders passed the math portion of a more difficult test, and 71 percent of the third-graders passed both the reading and math portions. But Edgewood is still far behind: The statewide passing rate for tenth-grade math students was 64 percent, and for third-graders in reading and math, it was 86 percent. College remains a long shot for most Edgewood graduates. The average SAT score for the class of 2003 was 791, compared with the state average of 989.
So great are Edgewood’s problems that the only way to fix them may be to consolidate with another district, such as the San Antonio ISD. But Edgewood’s identity as the underdog that fought for educational civil rights is too ingrained. It goes back to the original school finance lawsuit, Rodriguez v. Texas State Board of Education et al., in 1968. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in a 5—4 decision in 1973 that the school finance system did not violate the U.S. Constitution and that school finance was the responsibility of the state. Demetrio Rodriguez, the plaintiff in that case, still lives in Edgewood, and the walls of his living room are lined with plaques for his achievements in civil rights. “This is one of those fights you never get finished with,” Rodriguez told me. “We made some progress, but the state doesn’t really want to give every child in Texas an equal share of the state’s wealth. Edgewood will always have to fight. It’s our destiny.”
Why keep fighting? I asked Rodriguez. Could he see a day when Edgewood would merge with a neighboring district, as Wilmer-Hutchins did recently with Dallas?
“No way,” Rodriguez said, laughing. “Who on earth would want us?”
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