EDUCATION advocate Paul F. Cummins has always stood out among L.A. activists. A member of the Westside elite — a former teacher at the Harvard School before it merged with Westlake, co-founder and former headmaster of the Crossroads School in Santa Monica — his philosophy about education and virtually everything else is anything but elitist.Though known for a signature private school and for championing charter schools, Cummins' biggest passion is meaningful reform of public schools; like Jonathan Kozol, he staunchly believes that America cannot survive, let alone thrive, as a free and just society until and unless it takes the job of educating its young people seriously and in a manner commensurate with its immense wealth.
It doesn't take an education expert to see that this has not happened. It's also clear that the inequities in public schools are so long-standing as to now be conventional wisdom: urban schools are by definition poor, colored and failing, while suburban schools are affluent, white and successful. Not even the current school-reform fervor, with its loud pledges to uphold standards and excellence, does much to disturb this fact.
In his book, "Two Americas, Two Educations: Funding Quality Schools for All Students," Cummins seeks to shock us out of our complacency by showing us the money. Most people assume that there is simply not enough money to fund schools adequately, let alone well; Cummins says that's bunk. He says the real culprit is a gross, carefully maintained imbalance of money that, like the poor state of education, we've come to accept. Cummins argues that such a status quo is not only bad for underfunded schools, it's bad for the health of democracy itself.
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