Let’s begin with the good things about El Portal Leadership
Academy. First, they have a good record for gang prevention.
Secondly, since the students at El Portal do not attend Gilroy High
School, GHS’s overall scores are probably higher than they would be
if the El Portal students’ scores were averaged in. I say probably
based on the assumption that El Portal students would be doing just
as badly if they attended GHS. But it is also quite possible that
El Portal students would be doing better academically if they
attended GHS.
Let’s begin with the good things about El Portal Leadership Academy. First, they have a good record for gang prevention. Secondly, since the students at El Portal do not attend Gilroy High School, GHS’s overall scores are probably higher than they would be if the El Portal students’ scores were averaged in. I say probably based on the assumption that El Portal students would be doing just as badly if they attended GHS. But it is also quite possible that El Portal students would be doing better academically if they attended GHS.
There is no thirdly. There are no other good things to say about El Portal. El Portal was originally billed as a school for high achievers. Several high achievers believed the hype and enrolled. After the first year, many of these high achievers left. Some left because they were not getting the superior education they had been promised. Others left out of disgust with the content of the assemblies, wherein the adult leaders of El Portal organized games of True Confessions.
Since then, the Mexican American Community Services Agency has continued to run El Portal and continued to fail to educate the students who attend. Fewer than 1 percent score as proficient or above in Algebra I. Only a third of El Portal’s sophomores pass the California High School Exit Exam, which is basically a test of 8th grade reading comprehension and 9th grade math skills. There is no excuse for such academic failure.
As a charter school, El Portal is free of the bureaucratic inanities that plague the California public school system. If El Portal wanted to actually educate the students entrusted to them, they could spend the entire freshman year on remediation, and still be able to teach Algebra I and English composition in time to pass the CAHSEE. The additional news that MACSA has skimmed about $400,000 from teacher retirement funds to pay, so they claim, for salaries and programs merely demonstrates that MACSA is crooked as well as incompetent.
According to Lucy Patereau, a former office coordinator at El Portal, the nonprofit was misusing retirement funds even in 2001. MACSA and its apologists, including Dina Campeau, are excusing the theft and the failure of El Portal. They are even saying that anyone who criticizes the theft or the failure is motivated by bigotry. Baloney. Stealing is stealing, and the teachers whose retirement funds were misappropriated were victims regardless of their ethnicity. Failure to educate in a school is malfeasance, and the students who are being denied an education are largely Hispanic.
Gilroy Unified School District has a comprehensive high school and is poised to open a second. We also have a remedial high school, Mt. Madonna, which has sometimes managed to educate a struggling student population. We do not need to keep a bad school running. I support charter schools in principle. But MACSA’s track record shows that they cannot be trusted with money or with the running of a school. The primary purpose of a school is to educate, and El Portal has failed to educate its students. Keeping El Portal going would waste tax dollars, and worse, would condemn the students ignorant enough to enroll there to a waste of four years.
It is interesting that when Amalia Rodriguez, former chief steward and El Portal employee, wrote in to defend MACSA, she could name only one student who actually graduated from college, and that student was from the San Jose charter. She could not even name one student from El Portal who graduated from college in spite of the fact that El Portal’s mission is “empowering students to excel personally, succeed in college, and flourish and lead within a diverse world to create positive change.”
MACSA has had almost a decade to get their act together. An overhaul would not be sufficient. More oversight was mandated by Gilroy Unified School District in June of 2000. More oversight was not sufficient then. Pull the plug, revoke the charter, close El Portal, and give the students of Gilroy a real education.
