True Student Rebels Won't Walk Out

My wife, Pam, bravely stuck her hand into our 16-year-old son's backpack and pulled out something even more peculiar than usual.

Signed by the L.A. Unified School District's executive officer for educational services and printed on Board of Education stationery in English and Spanish, the March 27 letter to parents began:

"We certainly understand the sentiments and motivation behind the protests that have been occurring in the community and at many of our schools in the past several days. And, we respect the right of free speech.

"However, we would much prefer that students would limit voicing their protests to the school campus rather than leaving the campus, possibly endangering their safety and missing classroom time."

The letter concluded with this inelegant waffle: "We will do everything we can to ensure that those students who do leave the campus are supervised as they leave the campus."

This new weekly column will chart my quest to articulate and answer some key questions about how we educate our children.

The letter prompted me to plunge in with this one: How much responsibility does a student have for his or her education?

Today is May Day. For many high school seniors, it's the deadline for deciding whether to attend, say, UC Berkeley or Brown. It's opening day of the Advanced Placement testing season. And today, many students will find themselves again deciding whether to scale schoolyard fences in protest of proposals to toughen immigration control.

Which brings us back to the letter.

I can't be the only parent to wonder what young people, struggling with boundaries, discipline and accountability, are supposed to think when an official voice of educational authority speaks with such pandering equivocation. But let's put that aside for a moment.

Let's put aside too the question of why school officials would think it's OK to offer this wink and nudge of solidarity on a matter so purely political, let alone so divisive.

More interesting, I think, is the whole notion of walkouts.

The current wave of student demonstrations has been inspired at least in part by the release of an HBO movie about the 1968 Chicano student protests in Los Angeles: "Walkout."