One Step Up And Two Steps Back
By Mitch Berg
Superintendent Silva S released her plan for overhauling te Saint Paul schools yesterday. And all I can say is, I’m glad my kids are done with the SPPS.
The plan involves some ideas that are, frankly, perfectly good and drawn from common sense:
The decades-old option for St. Paul parents to bus their children to virtually any school in the city would be largely dismantled as part of a three-year plan laid out Tuesday by Superintendent Valeria Silva that also pledges cost-savings, higher student achievement and greater consistency among schools.
Saint Paul switched to a school-choice system back in the eighties, in the wake of an epochal federal lawsuit against the Kansas City schools that required the district to offer the same choices to every student that were available in the wealthiest district – a requirement that was translated into a plethora of magnet programs, and massive busing to get students to the programs.
The plan has its ups and downs:
Neighborhood Schools: I’ve advocated for neighborhood schools – small, geographic schools located near where the kids live – for a long time.
The plan gets the “Geography” part, more or less. But the keys to making small neighborhood schools work are
- They’ve gotta be small
- They have to be places parents feel good sending the kids.
The problem is, a lot of these “neighborhood” schools will be the same big warehouses we have today, only drawing their students from a different blotch on a map.
The Good Effort After Bad?: Among my biggest concerns: reading between the lines of Silva’s statements, it looks as if she’s looking to focus her efforts on improving district test scores. Speaking of the magnet system, Silva notes…:
…it works well for the high-achievers, she said, while offering virtually no benefit to low-income students and students of color and thus not making a dent in the “significant achievement gap in St. Paul Public Schools.”
And so the high achiever is going to have to plunk down into a seat and plod along until their less-school-oriented classmates decide to catch up?
This is, of course, one of the great dangers of the factory-model public school system; the idea that you have a one-size-fits-all “model” of education that has to work for every student. But that’s a separate discussion, one we’ve had before.
And one we’ll have again soon – because it’s another of the “features” of Silva’s plan:
The Home Office: Silva wants the school’s programs to be more…alike:
Overall, Silva pledged to implement more centralized control over the way material is taught in classrooms and money is used by schools, as a way to ensure a consistent experience from school to school.
The devil is in the details with this one; at its worst, it means that the city’s teachers are going to be even more driven by centralized curriculum planners than they are now.
Magnets: It seems to be a big rollback of the idea of the Magnet school. Conservatives bag on the magnet schools, largely for the wrong reasons. It’s a simple fact that not every kid is wired to respond to the same program. Different peoples’ brains – and kids are people, let’s remember – respond to different subjects. Every brain is different- and trying to force them all to be the same just makes the different-enough ones that don’t have the support or compulsion to “make it” check out of the idea of “education”, sometimes for years, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Speaking for myself, junior high was a complete wasteland except for languages and music. Some kids’ brains get cranked up by working with their hands, some by science, some by reading, some by just getting outside and running, for crying out loud. The one-size-fits-all cookie cutter school is a good way to make sure most of the kids we just describe think of school as a gruelling duty to plod through (at best).
Unfortunately, in my experience the Saint Paul schools didn’t do magnets especially well. Most of the magnets did double duty as “neighborhood” schools; the “magnet” program in art or science had to also account for not a few kids who weren’t there to learn art or science!
One of Silva’s motivations is to reverse the slide of students and families from the district schools; while the district is losing students slower than Minneapols, it’s still lost 1/8 of its enrollment in recent years.
We’ll see.ite.
January 12th, 2011 at 6:57 am
Interestinly enough, this plan comes out after the announcement on Monday that MN Public Screwel students receive a sub-standard education.
January 12th, 2011 at 7:47 am
How long can the K-12 aristocracy stand against the evidence that their kingdom is built on sand? We know the Lords of Learning will never concede to actual competition, but will they ever admit defeat?
January 12th, 2011 at 9:24 am
it works well for the high-achievers, she said, while offering virtually no benefit to low-income students and students of color
Oh, yes, of course. The soft bigotry of Low Expectations.
January 12th, 2011 at 9:32 am
The foundation may be of sand, but the edifice is huge and densely built, nearly possessing its own gravity. This makes it hard to move. That doesn’t stop the system from arguing about the appropriate wall-paper for the teachers lounge or whether to use indoor-outdoor carpet in the dungeons. It will take a very large wave to budge it, and likely a tsnunami to destroy it. My childrens’ future was too important to my wife and I, and we left that system to its own medieval devices long ago. Perhaps one day we will come across the wreckage, like the statue of Ozymandias, in the wastes of time. (And yes, that was a deliberate pun, and yes, my children know who Ozymandias “was”).
January 12th, 2011 at 9:57 am
Wasn’t he a pair of feet?
January 12th, 2011 at 10:01 am
The only solution to improve SPPS system is MORE MONEY, dontchaknow?
January 12th, 2011 at 10:04 am
Isn’t Ozymandias playing at the Target center tonight? Oops, wrong Oz.
January 12th, 2011 at 11:01 am
Night: Well stated. There will be a time when public ed collapses from the weight of its own inefficiencies. You call it a tsunami, I analogize it to a star imploding. Either way, the destruction will be so thorough only cockroaches and union executives will survive.
January 12th, 2011 at 11:02 am
“The devil is in the details with this one; at its worst, it means that the city’s teachers are going to be even more driven by centralized curriculum planners than they are now.”
It may be part of an even bigger play by the AFT (PDF alert):
http://www.aft.org/pdfs/americaneducator/winter1011/Editors.pdf
“The reason we have fallen behind so many of our international peers is that we have been pursuing the peripheral while they have been pursuing the fundamental. While we have been dabbling in pedagogical, management, and accountability fads, they have written common core curricula — and that has made all the difference.”
(more available here: http://www.aft.org/newspubs/periodicals/ae/).
Yay! The latest “pedagogical fad”: a Common Core Curriculum. More central planning and power to counteract this horrible “accountability fad”.
January 12th, 2011 at 11:09 am
You will recognize the cockroaches. They’ll be the ones fending for themselves.
January 12th, 2011 at 11:42 am
I was going to add PTR to Stink’s reference to “cockroaches and union executives”, but now I think Kermit nailed it.
January 12th, 2011 at 1:08 pm
Listen; I just heard Tom Dooher on the radio say that EdMN has always been 100% on-board with teacher evaluations and says many of us would be “shocked to learn” that in some districts, teachers go for years without being evaluated.
I’m tellin’ ya, these scumbags are up to something and whatever their game is, it won’t be to the benefit of the students.
January 12th, 2011 at 1:48 pm
According to our dear friends in the MSM, it’s rhetoric like “scumbags” that causes guns to fire automatically in crowds. Let’s be sensitive to our verbiage. An ill-placed modifier could cause a semi-automatic response.
January 12th, 2011 at 1:55 pm
it works well for the high-achievers, she said, while offering virtually no benefit to low-income students and students of color
So the opposite of high-achiever is low income or black?
January 12th, 2011 at 2:18 pm
Yes we don’t want anyone “going postal” on educators. Oh, can I say “going postal”? It was a popular term back in the days of civil discourse and polite rhetoric.
January 12th, 2011 at 2:30 pm
So the opposite of high-achiever is low income or black?
Go ahead, Terry…you earned it.
January 12th, 2011 at 2:32 pm
According to our dear friends in the MSM, it’s rhetoric like “scumbags” that causes guns to fire automatically in crowds.
If that was true there’d be shooting every time AssClown walked in the door at home.
January 12th, 2011 at 2:52 pm
And you know that there isn’t?
January 12th, 2011 at 3:12 pm
If that was true there’d be shooting every time AssClown walked in the door at home.
I didn’t think shipping crates had doors, swiftee.
January 12th, 2011 at 3:42 pm
It’s those guns with the little flag that pops out of the barrel with BANG! printed on it.
January 12th, 2011 at 4:37 pm
It’s those guns with the little flag that pops out of the barrel with BANG! printed on it.
So AssClown Jr. was adopted?
February 11th, 2011 at 12:01 pm
[…] the same Saint Paul School District “reorganization” proposal that, if you recall, I attacked last month. When St. Paul Public Schools Superintendent Valeria Silva posted the district’s new Strong […]