The reason is simple. In a community that aspires to provide opportunity for all:

•  About half of low-income students will graduate from high school.
•  Those who do graduate perform, on average, at an eighth grade level.
•  Less than one in ten low-income students will graduate from college. *

(* National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2005; Ca Dept of Education Testing & Accountability 2005-09)

With support for AUSD, these terrible statistics can be brought to an end in a few short years. Without this support, the opportunities we deny our student majority will plague our community in 2020 and beyond.

The cause of this dreadful academic performance has been our past acceptance of the very large and static achievement gap between the low-income student majority and non-low-income students in Altadena’s Pasadena Unified schools. This gap is the difference between the economic freedoms obtained by those who find success in college and those who do not. While this achievement gap within Pasadena Unified has been unchanged for many years, the achievement gap between Pasadena Unified’s students and the best among their low-income peers across California has been growing with increasing speed every year. So with no end in sight, this trend has become morally, economically, and socially unacceptable for many Altadenans.

It may be useful to know that our urgent dissatisfaction is consistent with the rich heritage of Altadenans being first in our region to step up to solving difficult issues, dating back to Altadena's founding when Altadenans provided jobs for those who had been excluded from work in neighboring communities and when our Altadena predecessors provided sanitariums for families who had come to our region seeking better health only to be sent away - to Altadena. Years later and beginning in 1967, three Altadena couples prevailed against Pasadena Unified in the US Supreme Court after our local school district became the first one outside the deep south to actively resist desegregation. Now with an emerging body of knowledge documenting how our very large and static academic achievement gap is being closed elsewhere, many Altadenans are saying now is the time to complete the work those three Altadena couples started.

At the elementary level, Altadena’s predominantly low-income student academic proficiencies are usually 30-50 percentile points below their top demographically comparable peers statewide per test results from the California Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) Program. After elementary school, our student's academic proficiencies get even worse. View District Dashboard for a summary.

To provide a more specific illustration, year after year, approximately 3 out of 5 students attending public schools in Altadena end their third grade less than proficient in English Language Arts. To put this statistic into greater context, a recent PUSD Superintendent said that the Federal Prison System surveys districts like PUSD by asking “How many of your third graders still can’t read?” Since the probability of those who can’t read by the end of their third grade blossoming into readers is known to be very low and our federal prisons are full of non-readers, the answer to this question has become a metric for forecasts of how many prison cells will be needed 20 years from now.

It ultimately boils down to what educators at each school spend their time on as an educational team, in the classroom, and in the community. Interestingly, educators with high penetrations of low-income African-American and Hispanic students like ours in Altadena but who have closed the academic achievement gaps in their schools have done so by executing the same 100 or so activities that have been documented in study after study.

We encourage all Altadenans to begin familiarizing themselves with the best practices for closing the achievement gap by reviewing the short videos in the Recommended Resources section of our home page. But for those for whom this is too much material, we can leave you with this one key lesson: The number of educators who actually close the academic achievement gap is a tiny fraction of the many who talk about it. Which means that if we want to close Altadena’s achievement gap quickly, we will need to learn how to attract board candidates who bring a very different set of skills to the table than those we’ve typically produced in our past. Not only will our voters need candidates they can elect who will know how to successfully edit their governing activities to their share of the 100 best practices, one of the most critical early activities the new board will need to succeed in will be their ability to retain a search firm with the strict proviso to never present a candidate for superintendent whom board members cannot objectively, measurably, and independently verify have already closed the achievement gap on their watch.

In summary, if we want to take adequate risk from our ability to close the gap quickly and keep it closed, we will need to learn as a community how to stop welcoming educators who have never closed the gap to darken our school's doorways.

This is the reason these two important activities were also kicked off in 2006:

1) Make every Altadenan aware of the appalling size of the academic achievement gap and what this is going to do to our community in 2020 and beyond, and
2) Inform Altadena voters of their role in bringing home to Altadena the rare and extraordinary educators who have closed the gap elsewhere and will be willing to do the same hard work here in Altadena.

Succeed with 1) and 2) before asking voters to 3) say “yes” to forming an AUSD, and these activities will have everything to do with closing the achievement gap! In fact, taken together these activities have the potential of serving as a future model for our nation’s closure of its academic achievement gap, an effort some have called “the key civil rights challenge of our generation."

Interested in helping with this important work? Please click Get Involved.

As for higher test scores - absolutely. We know by the results found at a small but growing number of schools across California that with proper focus, we can close our academic achievement gap and bring our students to 100% academic proficiency regardless of family background - and do so in as quickly as a few short years. We also know that the old paradigms of leveling blame at this group or that for our problems doesn't work. Instead and from close examination of the available data, we know that while the hypothetical addition of wealthier families to our public school district would make the district look more proficient academically, only a very strong emphasis on closing the academic achievement gap will end our continual masking of the gap between our underprivileged and middle class students. And since we know that the number of educators who actually close the academic achievement gap is a tiny fraction of those who talk about it, nothing short of making the retention of those special few public educators who have an independently verifiable record of closing the gap as our top priority will quickly close our gap and keep it closed.

Altadenans have been working and volunteering in local public schools since the day PUSD was created. So despite the fact that over 10,000 private school students in the PUSD service area of Altadena, Pasadena, and Sierra Madre now account for 33% of the service area’s combined K-12 private and public enrollment, giving PUSD the highest private to public enrollment penetration of any district PUSD’s size in the USA, we know that apart from professional educators making the closing of the academic achievement gap and bringing all students to grade level proficiency their top priority, very large gaps like Altadena’s do not shrink in size or reliability until the low-income population drops well below 10% of the enrolled. This is hardly a realistic expectation for Altadena when year after year, nearly 2/3 of our public school enrolled have been identified as low-income students.

Meanwhile and in spite of Altadenan’s best efforts, PUSD schools have not gained meaningful academic ground on public schools statewide in many years. Forecasts of the date by when the academic achievement gap between PUSD’s low-income students and non-low-income students will be closed are now measured in centuries. With these facts in mind, we believe hope for the never-ending stream of PUSD initiatives such as 2000’s “Charter Reform”, 2002’s “Best in CA in 3-5 Years”, “2007’s Approach to Excellence” and 2010’s “PUSD Strategic Vision for 2020” will only insure that Altadena’s demographic majority will be even less prepared for success in college in 2020 than they are today. See FAQ #1 for more details regarding Altadena’s academic trend.

For these reasons, many in our community believe Altadena needs to step up to learning how to detect the school board candidates who will be trustworthy to retain the very rare superintendent who will attract, retain, and develop the rare educators that can successfully implement the hard work of closing the gap and raising our demographic majority to grade-level proficiency in every subject in a few short years.

It is also important to point out the scope of this challenge. No community in the USA that has a low-income student majority has brought their students to academic proficiency in every grade and subject at more than one school. This effort intends to bring an estimated 4,000 Altadena students across ten schools to grade-level proficiency at what may prove to be a first-in-the-nation scale. To achieve these results, this effort intends to make Altadena Unified an attractive career move for top educators from across the USA with an independently verifiable record of quickly closing the achievement gap in every grade and subject. Existing PUSD teachers will also have an important role in this objective. See FAQ #21 for more details.

Per LACOE, most of the study’s effort and timeline will be focused on a mandated Environmental Impact Report (EIR). The other subjects will include insuring that the district will have enough students and that the district’s organization will preserve the affected district's ability to educate students in an integrated environment and without promoting racial or ethnic discrimination or segregation. With at least as many K-12 students in the petition area as La Canada Unified and with demographics that are similar to Pasadena’s, we are confident that the study will come back positive for Altadena. Beyond that, repeating what an LACOE representative once told us, "Ninety percent of the questions people have about unification can't be answered until after the feasibility study has been completed."

In other words, we'll need to wait.

Once the LA County Registrar and LA County Superintendent of Schools have declared a minimum of 6,291 Altadena voter signatures “sufficient”, an Environmental Impact Report (also known as the EIR or CEQA) is commissioned followed by a feasibility study and a series of hearings to insure that the legal requirements for authorizing a new unified school district have been met. The key statutory requirements in the feasibility study include insuring that the district will have enough students and that the district’s organization will preserve the affected district's ability to educate students in an integrated environment and without promoting racial or ethnic discrimination or segregation. We expect these hurdles to be cleared quickly. The statutory requirement that is expected to take the longest amount of time is the EIR, also known as the CEQA. It is estimated that these steps, from the submission of over 7,000 signatures through the calling of an election for final voter approval, will take approximately 18-24 months.

Can you help tell our fellow Altadenans how we can close the academic achievement gap in a few short years? Please let us know by clicking Get Involved. Thank you!

We believe so, and we hope that the unification of an AUSD will help spur PUSD to increasing the academic performance of every student. Competition is usually healthy, and we believe that PUSD may become more motivated to close its academic achievement gap when it is bordered by a district with substantially similar demographics dedicated to closing and keeping closed its own large achievement gap.

That's one of the things we'll learn more about once the LA County Office of Education (LACOE) has completed their feasibility study as required by law to determine if the new district will meet all legal requirements before going to the voters. All else that can be said on this subject carries the risk of speculation, but with that caveat in mind, many have noticed that Eliot would be a likely candidate.

Much like the answer to FAQ #7, we'll need to wait for an answer to this question.

Per the CA Education Code Section 47605, charter schools renew their charters with their host school district except for those cases where the charter was granted by the county or state board of education and the host school district declines to renew the charter. So with that exception in mind, we can expect that charter schools in the AUSD territory at the time the new school district is organized will renew their charters with AUSD instead of PUSD.

Altadena has an admirable legacy of care for our less fortunate neighbors, a legacy that dates back to when the predecessors to Altadena’s group homes were founded over 100 years ago.

Occasionally we hear from someone who questions Altadena’s widely held commitment to these most vulnerable children, many of whom also qualify for special education services. It should be noted that the total licensed capacity for group homes in Altadena is 176 beds. This is less than ½ of 1% of Altadena’s population. Additionally, over two-thirds of Altadena’s group home capacity comes from just two facilities. These two facilities typically operate at between 50% and 100% of their licensed capacity. Please see the Community Care Licensing Division Search Form and the Altadena Census for further information.

So the next time someone offers a defense of the status quo with the statement that “Altadena’s group home population percent is the highest in the County and State”, we encourage you to consider if Altadena’s unyielding commitment to so tiny a population is a worthy pretext for allowing our community’s enormous academic achievement gap to persist.

That said, we believe the urgent moral and social imperatives of doing the hard work of providing academic and life outcomes for our disadvantaged student majority commensurate with those enjoyed by our non-low-income public and private school students trumps any speculation on what the impact our doing the right thing could someday have on future property values.

In 2005, the Altadena Town Council raised the issue, but again no active steps were taken.

In 2006, three Altadena residents - Maurice Morse, Shirlee Smith, and Bruce Wasson - with the very significant and much-appreciated assistance of other community members, worked with the LA County Offices of Education, Registrar, and Legal Counsel to provide the information needed to draft a legally appropriate petition for unification. By so doing, these Altadena residents became the Chief Petitioners that California's Education Code §35701 requires of the unification process.