Maps Help Charity Win Changes for California Schools

For more than two decades, enrollment in the Los Angeles Unified School District has skyrocketed — often

increasing by 10,000 to 15,000 students per year — as the number of school construction and expansion projects has tapered off to a trickle. And by the late 1990s, the discrepancy showed.

Overcrowding was rampant. A third of the district’s schools were open year-round, but with students rotating in and out of school on seat-sharing schedules that actually shortened their school year. In some schools, as many as 50 children crammed into classrooms designed to accommodate only 35.

To help find a solution to the problem, the Advancement Project, a civil-rights organization with offices in Washington and Los Angeles, called on a tool it had never used before, computer mapping, and then used that tool to press for government action.

Why Schools Were Full

As it began to investigate, the Advancement Project quickly identified what it thought was at the heart of the overcrowding: For many years, the Los Angeles school district had been unable to secure state bond funds to finance the construction of schools.

Using an Excel spreadsheet and data from the State Allocation Board, the agency that distributes the bond funds, the Advancement Project analyzed how much construction money each school district in the state received per new student from 1989 to 2000.

The group found wide disparities. Some school districts received tens of thousands of dollars per new pupil, while Los Angeles Unified received less than $1,000. Other school districts fared even worse.

The organization, though, had a hard time deciphering the numbers.

“There was no rhyme or reason that we could discern from the thousand districts in the state,” says Molly Munger, a co-director of the Advancement Project. “You had pages and pages and pages of Excel lists of districts. We organized them by county, but we just couldn’t see any pattern in them.”

The organization then decided to take the differences they were seeing in the lists and display them visually. Ms. Munger says that she and her colleagues thought, “If we map it, we may see some patterns in the disparities, and in any event, we’ll be able to show with dark, bright colors where the big-winner districts are and little pale colors for the starved districts.”

While several people at the Advancement Project are big fans of maps — a framed map showing the locations of the fires in the 1992 Los Angeles riots hangs in the organization’s office — no one knew how to go about making one themselves. So, the organization turned to cartographers the map fanciers held in high regard, the geography department at California State University at Northridge.

The AdvancementProject started working with Eugene Turner, a Cal State geography professor, over Thanksgiving weekend 1999, and within a few months, a set of maps was finished that Ms. Munger says was a revelation.

For the first map — which did not include city names — Mr. Turner used brown shading to show the districts in the state that had received few state bond funds, and green shading to show districts that had received larger amounts. Ms. Munger says staff members immediately noticed that Los Angeles was shaded brown, as was Sacramento.

“We would look at the map and go, ‘Well there’s a brown spot, what’s that? Fresno? Modesto? Oh, that’s Bakersfield,’” recalls Ms. Munger. “We were actually able to identify urban areas on this map by looking for brown spots.”

Competition for Aid

Meanwhile, the group’s other research, which included interviews with both policy makers in Sacramento and school-district officials, suggested that the process the state used to distribute school bond funds made it difficult for urban school districts to compete with suburban districts applying for the same money.

State bond money at the time was distributed on a first-come-first-served basis, but the regulations governing where a school can be built — encompassing such things as proximity to electrical wires and traffic — slowed down urban school districts’ efforts to develop proposals for school construction, as did the shortage of available land.

“Urbans were pinned down trying to do their traffic study, trying to deal with the Department of Toxic Substances, and trying to get the architect to custom-make the little school to fit on the tiny, little in-fill lot,” says Ms. Munger. The schools that were able to get their proposals in first, she says, were districts in the far suburbs where farmland was being developed into planned communities.

“Those areas didn’t have a lot of electrical wires,” she says. “They didn’t have industrial pollution. They didn’t have any traffic.”

Armed with the information it had collected — and with the maps showing where the bond money had gone — the Advancement Project sued the State Allocation Board — and won. In 2000, the board rewrote its regulations governing how it distributes bond funds to give priority to school districts with the most severe overcrowding.

Because at that point only $1.2-billion remained of the $9.2-billion in bond money that California voters had approved in 1998, the Advancement Project turned its attention to persuading California lawmakers to consider a new school-construction bond issue that would meet the state’s need for school buildings.

Once again, the organization used the maps to argue its case before a long line of concerned parties, including the Los Angeles mayor and city attorney, the speaker of the California Assembly, and several foundation officials. The organization also had the maps printed on butcher paper that could be rolled up and taken to meetings.

“They were just a constant companion, because they told the story so forcefully,” says Ms. Munger.

Bond Measure

In March 2002, California lawmakers passed legislation that scheduled two bond referendums on school construction. A $13-billion bond, to be distributed on the basis of need, was approved by voters in November, and a $12-billion bond will be on the March 2004 primary-election ballot.

Jackie Goldberg, chair of the California Assembly Education Committee, credits the Advancement Project — and its maps — for helping to persuade lawmakers to pass the new bond package.

“For years, the state penalized the districts with the most overcrowding and the least open space by having deadlines to secure school bond funds that were impossible to meet,” says Ms. Goldberg. “Because of the Advancement Project’s maps and charts, legislators could see that the existing formula was unfair.”

The total cost of creating the maps is hard to calculate, says Ms. Munger. The bill for California State University at Northridge’s services to develop the maps was around $3,000, she says, but tallying the costs of employee time is more complicated. She estimates that one of the Advancement Project’s paralegals spent half her time for almost a year working with the data from the State Allocation Board, and several of the group’s staff lawyers also worked on the project.

Ms. Munger says that the investment was well worth it — and that the success of the maps has persuaded the organization to undertake other projects, such as collaborating with several groups to show where social services are clustered.

She says it is difficult to overestimate the power of a good map, especially when charities are trying to persuade busy people to pay attention to a complicated issue.

“You would show them the map, and sometimes they would gasp,” says Ms. Munger. “I remember the guy who ran the State Allocation Board looking at the map and saying, ‘You know I sat on this commission doling out the funds, and I had no idea we were creating this pattern.’”