Bay Area Schools

I went to Arroyo High School and while the conditions were not as severe as schools mentioned in the book, there are factors that I believe set me at a disadvantage. I went to the school for three years and every single year, I had a different counselor. In the whole school year, we only had three to four counselors at a time to service nearly two thousand students. There was a point when I didn't even know who my counselor was. This makes it very hard for any student to develop a relationship with their counselors. Due to the fact that I never had a reliable counselor, I made wrong decisions in class choices at my first year of Chabot College. My counselor had told me that I should take Biology 10, but that was not a transferable course so I had wasted my time. In schools mentioned in the book, advisers quote, "it is not uncommon for the ratio between students and counselors to be 250 to one" (94). The students did not have reliable counselors which results in poor performance of the students.

Class sizes in Arroyo and schools mentioned in the book also affected a students' performance. At Arroyo, there was an average of thirty-two to thirty-six people in one class room. It was very crowded. Resources such as text books, computers and calculators had to be shared. Many students are forced to stand in the back of the class or share desks with another student. The average class size in the schools mentioned in the books are 30 and they are also very crowded. There are similar affects on all schools.

In my senior year of high school, I had a wonderful Spanish teacher. She worked well with all the students and slowed down to those who didn't catch up fast enough. She found a better paying job at another school. In the middle of the semester, she was replaced with one of the worst teachers I've ever had. He made us watch Apacalipto, telling us it's "good to learn about the history of Mayans to better understand Spanish". I don't know what he was thinking, as the Mayans had nothing to do with the language. Kozol states, "The salary scale [is] too low to keep exciting, youthful teachers in the system [...]" (63). Because our teachers were not paid enough, we lost a lot of good ones. I could not tell you how many times I watched a great teacher be replaced with a crappy teacher. It was like every time I came to school, I saw a different face, whether it be a teacher or a counselor or an administer. We could not keep any of our staff.