opinion

The Politics of Empty Schools

Usually, when a school district decides to close a school, the conversation immediately stops being about education.

First, it is always the memories. Someone learned how to read there. Someone was there when the school won a championship and still remembers the court. There is always a parent with a kindergarten drop off memory, and there is a grandparent recalling a graduation. There are Friday night football games remembered, school plays revisited, and friendships that somehow survived decades. The hallways themselves somehow look the same even after all the years that have passed.

None of those memories are unimportant. Schools have a way of preserving a community’s history. They are among the few public institutions that remain constant across generations. Children become parents. Parents become grandparents. Through it all, the school remains.

Even if school consolidation is unpopular and brings a great deal of anger, memories do not bring students to a school.

The buildings are getting older while the student population keeps getting smaller. The population is aging. Housing costs continue to rise. Families that once filled neighborhoods with children are getting older, while younger families increasingly struggle to remain in the communities where they grew up. Across California, school enrollment continues to decline. Schools built for one generation are now serving far fewer students from the next.

No matter the reason for consolidation, the decision is often treated as a betrayal.

Someone is always accused of having an agenda. Consultants inevitably become part of the story. Public meetings fill with frustration. The discussion gradually moves further away from enrollment numbers and closer to questions of trust. Because every aspect of the consolidation discussion is personal, everyone seems to forget one simple, basic idea.

A school district exists to educate students, not preserve buildings.

The impact of that distinction is significant because maintaining school buildings is expensive. Roofs need to be replaced. Air conditioning systems break. Utility bills need to be paid. Parking lots need to be repaved. Equipment and technology eventually need to be upgraded or replaced. Whether classrooms are full or half empty, those costs continue to arrive.

At the same time, communities expect more from their schools. Parents want more counselors. Teachers want better facilities and stronger academic programs. Students need updated technology. School districts want to retain quality staff. None of these expectations are unreasonable. The challenge is that every one of those priorities competes for the same limited resources.

Most people are unwilling to discuss declining enrollment because it feels impersonal. It lacks the emotional force of a school closure protest or a packed community meeting. Demographics do not inspire rallies. Unfortunately, demographics are also stubborn.

You cannot vote away declining birth rates. You cannot organize a petition against population shifts. You cannot shame enrollment numbers into changing direction.

Many of the school closure debates taking place across California are really conversations about change. Communities are trying to reconcile what they have with what they remember. That tension is natural. Schools often become symbols of a community’s past, and people understandably fight to preserve what they value.

Most of us would rather talk about growth than decline. We celebrate new schools, new housing developments, and expanding communities. We are far less comfortable discussing what happens when those trends begin moving in the opposite direction.

Yet adaptation is not the same thing as failure.

A district that closes a school has not necessarily abandoned public education. In some cases, it may be attempting to preserve it. Consolidating resources, reducing operating costs, and aligning facilities with actual enrollment may strengthen the educational system that remains rather than weaken it.

Reasonable people can disagree about which schools should remain open and which should close. They can disagree about timelines, public engagement, and implementation. Those debates are worth having.

What should not be controversial is acknowledging reality. California’s enrollment challenges are not unique to any one district. They are part of a broader demographic shift unfolding throughout the state. More communities will face these difficult decisions in the years ahead.

The temptation will be to treat every school closure proposal as a controversy driven by individual personalities. Doing so may create headlines, but it often obscures the larger story. California spent decades building schools for a period of growth. The question many communities are now confronting is what happens after that growth slows.

It is not an easy conversation. It is not a popular conversation. It is certainly not one that wins many votes. It is, however, a necessary one.

Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and Print Pomona Art Book Fair. And he will charge you $ 2.5 million for event photography.

Most Americans Use Political Labels They Cannot Define

How Americans Stopped Arguing About Ideas and Started Joining Political Gangs

Photography Julian Lucas ©2017

A few weeks ago I made what I thought was a fairly harmless observation on a well known biased platform. The kind of platform that debating just leaves many circling the drain and losing brain cells.

Most Americans do not know the difference between a liberal, a progressive, a leftist, a moderate, a neoliberal, a socialist, or a communist. The reaction was immediate.

Some people informed me there was no difference between any of those categories. Others argued the distinctions existed but were meaningless. A few insisted that all of them represented the same thing anyway. One commenter declared moderate Democrats extinct. Another wanted to know why anyone would care. Someone else asked what my end goal was, as though distinguishing between political ideologies required an ulterior motive.

The more responses appeared, the more interesting the discussion became. Not because people disagreed. People disagree about politics every day. What caught my attention was how quickly the conversation moved away from the ideas themselves. Very few people wanted to discuss what separated one political tradition from another. Instead, the discussion became a debate about belonging. The labels appeared and of course the assumptions arrived shortly after. Before long, entire political traditions were being put into a handful of emotional categories. 

The liberal became the communist. The progressive became the socialist. Democrats became the leftist and the distinctions disappeared almost immediately.

One comment stayed with me. A man wrote that we are not living in a political science class and therefore nobody cares about labels. Judging by the reactions, many people agreed with him. Honestly, I understood the point.

Most people are not spending their evenings reading political philosophy. They are working jobs, paying their rent, worrying about healthcare, raising children, commuting to work, paying mortgages, and trying to survive an economy that seems determined to charge more for everything than it did yesterday. Politics enters most people’s lives through experience before it enters through theory.

Yet there remains something strange about holding strong opinions regarding categories that nobody wants to define.

Mention communism and someone points to China. Mention China and someone points to the Soviet Union. Mention socialism and someone points to California. The conversation always moves swiftly from label to conclusion without spending much time on definition. Whether modern China resembles classical Marxist theory, state capitalism, authoritarian nationalism, or some combination of all three rarely enters the discussion. The label does most of the work.

The same thing happens elsewhere across the political spectrum. A person can spend years attacking socialism without understanding how it differs from liberalism. Another can spend years criticizing conservatism without distinguishing between a libertarian, a constitutional conservative, a nationalist, a populist, or a neoconservative. The labels remain familiar while the meanings become increasingly vague.

After the first discussion, I made a similar observation about conservatives. Most Americans probably could not distinguish between libertarians, fiscal conservatives, constitutional conservatives, MAGA populists, evangelicals, nationalist Republicans, moderates, and neoconservatives either. However, the reaction was different.

Many of the strongest responses to the first observation came from self-identified conservatives who immediately added liberals, progressives, leftists, neoliberals, Democrats, socialists, and communists into a single category. Yet when distinctions appeared within conservative politics, those distinctions suddenly became easier to recognize. People who had argued that labels were meaningless now had opinions about the differences.

The contradiction appeared over and over and over again. Several people insisted labels did not matter while defending the labels they identified with. Others argued distinctions were meaningless while demanding that distinctions important to them be recognized. A few dismissed the entire conversation before spending considerable time participating in it.

An additional kink emerged when the original discussion concerning liberals, progressives, leftists, neoliberals, socialists, and communists eventually disappeared from the platform. A nearly identical discussion involving conservatives remained active. I have no idea why one stayed and the other vanished. Perhaps it was reported, well it was definitely reported and some moderators out voted against the post. What interested me more than the removal itself was the intensity of the reaction surrounding the first conversation. The experience left me thinking less about political labels and more about how people arrive at politics in the first place.

Most people do not arrive there through books. They arrive through family. Through church . Through neighborhoods. Through work. Through television. Through social media. Through economic frustrations. Through experiences that shape how they see the world long before they encounter political theory. By the time ideological labels enter the conversation, many loyalties have already been formed.

That reality does not make people irrational. It makes them human. But it does help explain why discussions about political ideology often become discussions about identity. The argument may begin with labels, but it rarely stays there for long. Before long, people are talking about who belongs, who does not belong, who can be trusted, who cannot be trusted, and which side represents people like them.

Reading through the responses felt less like reading a discussion about political philosophy and more like watching sports fans explain why their team matters and the other team does not. The details changed from person to person, but the pattern remained remarkably consistent.

What struck me most was not the confusion. It was the indifference. Many people were not arguing that the distinctions were wrong. They were arguing that the distinctions did not matter. That may be the more interesting observation. A society can survive disagreement. A society can survive competing political traditions. What becomes more difficult is maintaining meaningful public discussion when understanding itself begins to feel optional.

The original observation was never really about liberals, conservatives, socialists, communists, progressives, or populists. It was about whether ideas still deserve to be understood before they are embraced or rejected.

Judging from the responses, that question may be more important than the labels themselves. 

Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and Print Pomona Art Book Fair. And he will charge you 2.5 Million dollars for event photography.