In response to Elizabeth's post: Education in New York and Guatemala

Ellie, I really enjoyed reading your post! In many ways, it reminded me of the same issues facing Stockton's education system, but in many other ways, how different these places and their problems were. You talked about the lack of access to classes because of the extensive waiting lists and how community centers played a big role in Quetzaltenango to address that problem. You later suggested that New York could really benefit from community centers such as that in Quetzaltenango to fill the voids that government failed to do.

Stockton high schools and the local community college are facing similar struggles: the classes are over-crowded, the teachers feel unappreciated, the waitlists for required and elective classes are longer than Rapunzel's hair. Popular opinion points to these issues as the main reasons for why drop out rates in Stockton high schools have been sky-rocketing in the past decade. My PE organization is also a community/resource center that focuses on education reform on a community-based level. My literature review explores the spectrum of approaches to solving issues in Stockton, ranging from government-heavy interventions, to place-based and person-based government policies, to strictly community-based interventions. I have been thinking about the role government plays in addressing these issues, and to what extent resource centers are involved in addressing these issues as well. For the most part, I feel as if my PE organization and many community centers practice the same way yours does in Quetzaltenango - they fill the voids that government skipped over. However, in Stockton, the improvements have been slow and many of the community-based interventions cannot stand up against increasing gang violence and increasing drop-out rates unless there are more robust governmental policies to back them up.

One interesting move Stockton has done towards implementing more research-based, hard evidence (slowly moving away from community-based development) is recollect data on high school drop outs. They blame the high drop out rate numbers to be a result of bad data collection (http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2010/06/10/34stockton.h29.html). This article talks about how education administrators' roles were "beefed-up" when they no longer sat back and entered attendance records into the computer - instead, they were expected to follow up with "missing" students, cross-checking school districts for duplicate students, and playing an active role in ensuring students were atleast enrolled in a school district. The new data for drop outs is 17.7% from an original 52.5% before this robust system of data collection was implemented. These new statistics have redirected the focus on community-based interventions to more technocratic methods of alleviating the education problem. This makes me question my PE organization's future in education reform - it is not enough to implement ineffective after school programs and community-walker programs. In many ways, I see these interventions as instrumental and not political; they tackle minor symptoms but are not engaging with policy reform to tackle the root disease. I think community centers do play a central role in "filling in the voids," however, is it enough?