When NSFWCORP sent me to Victorville this January, I little expected that the neighboring town of Adelanto would become ground zero for a fight between billionaires on one side, and poor, vulnerable minority parents and children on the other.<\/p>\n
I first heard about the fight through the local right-wing paper, the Victorville Daily Press, which gleefully announced on its front page that a local school, Desert Trails Elementary, had just made history as the first school in the nation to be privatized under California’s new “parent trigger” law. The paper described the takeover as \u201cpromising a fresh start to the failing elementary school,\u201d and claimed it had received widespread support from parents.<\/p>\n
The national press gushed in similarly glowing terms. The LA Weekly described the Adelanto privatization as an \u201chistoric moment for the education-reform movement picking up steam across the nation.\u201d The New York Times dutifully compared the takeover of Desert Trails to \u201cWon\u2019t Back Down.\u201d An \u201cissues\u201d movie starring Face of Indie Maggie Gyllenhaal, \u201cWon\u2019t Back Down\u201d promotes the parent-trigger law as a panacea for America\u2019s public-education problems, one that \u201cempowers\u201d parents to fight back against self-interested public school teachers and their union.<\/p>\n
All in all, everyone agreed that this takeover of Desert Trails Elementary represented a triumphant moment for parents and their children, a victory for the people over rapacious elementary school teachers and their unions.<\/p>\n
But something didn\u2019t seem right about this story \u2014 it was too pat, too much like a triumph-of-the-spirit Disney tale, too much like Maggie\u2019s movie. So I made some calls and started spending some time in Adelanto, to find out what really went on there.
\n* *<\/p>\n
Motorists entering the City of Adelanto are greeted with a big blue sign that reads: “The City With Unlimited Possibilities.” It’s not clear who came up with this slogan, or when. But, these days, the sign is a cruel joke.<\/p>\n
Founded in 1915 by the guy who invented the modern electric iron, Adelanto never amounted to much. Mostly it served as pit stop and junkyard to a nearby George Air Force Base. The base closed more than a decade ago, and home values have collapsed since the last real-estate bubble popped. Entire neighborhoods emptied out, and building companies went belly up, leaving behind half-finished \u201cmaster planned communities\u201d that still stand there, desiccating in the dry heat. Signs advertise brand-new three-bedroom McTractHomes for zero down and $800 a month.<\/p>\n
Today, Adelanto is the end of the line. A poor, desert town, the city serves as a dumping ground for low-income minority families who have been squeezed out of the Greater Los Angeles-Orange County region and pushed out over the San Bernardino Mountains into the bleak expanse of the Mojave Desert, where housing is dirt cheap and jobs almost non-existent.<\/p>\n
The numbers tell the story: Of the 32,000 people who call Adelanto home, one out of three are below the poverty line. Per-capita income is just under $12,000 \u2014 nearly three times lower than the California average, and about as much as the average person earns in Mexico. There are almost no jobs here, and Starbucks ranks among the city\u2019s top-ten employers.<\/p>\n
Nearly two-thirds of the population are Latinos, many of them undocumented. Another one in five are African-American. Then there are the 5 percent of the population that the census bureau classifies as \u201cinstitutionalized,\u201d which is nothing but a wishy-washy bureaucratic way of saying that 1 out of 20 Adelanto residents is currently rotting in jail \u2014 a rate five times higher than the national average. Adelanto does not have its own high school, but dropout rates in the neighboring suburb of Victorville, also hard-hit by the subprime bubble, are among the worst in the state \u2014 hovering somewhere around 50%.<\/p>\n