{"id":17335,"date":"2011-01-12T06:31:20","date_gmt":"2011-01-12T12:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=17335"},"modified":"2011-01-12T06:31:20","modified_gmt":"2011-01-12T12:31:20","slug":"one-step-up-and-two-steps-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=17335","title":{"rendered":"One Step Up And Two Steps Back"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Superintendent Silva\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.twincities.com\/ci_17070076?nclick_check=1\">S released her plan for overhauling te Saint Paul schools<\/a> yesterday. \u00a0And all I can say is, I&#8217;m glad my kids are done with the SPPS.<\/p>\n<p>The plan involves some ideas that are, frankly, perfectly good and drawn from common sense:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>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 <em>every <\/em>student that were available in the wealthiest district &#8211; a requirement that was translated into a plethora of magnet programs, and massive busing to get students to the programs.<\/p>\n<p>The plan has its ups and downs:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Neighborhood Schools<\/strong>: \u00a0I&#8217;ve advocated for neighborhood schools &#8211; small, geographic schools located near where the kids live &#8211; for a long time.<\/p>\n<p>The plan gets the &#8220;Geography&#8221; part, more or less. \u00a0But the keys to making small neighborhood schools work are<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>They&#8217;ve gotta be small<\/li>\n<li>They have to be places parents feel good sending the kids.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The problem is, a lot of these &#8220;neighborhood&#8221; schools will be the same big warehouses we have today, only drawing their students from a different blotch on a map.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Good Effort After Bad?<\/strong>: Among my biggest concerns: reading between the lines of Silva&#8217;s statements, it looks as if she&#8217;s looking to focus her efforts on improving district test scores. \u00a0Speaking of the magnet system, Silva notes&#8230;:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8230;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 &#8220;significant achievement gap in St. Paul Public Schools.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>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?<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;model&#8221; of education that has to work for every student. \u00a0But that&#8217;s a separate discussion, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=6619\">one we&#8217;ve had before<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>And one we&#8217;ll have again soon &#8211; because it&#8217;s \u00a0another of the &#8220;features&#8221; of Silva&#8217;s plan:<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Home Office<\/strong>: \u00a0Silva wants the school&#8217;s programs to be more&#8230;alike:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The devil is in the details with this one; at its worst, it means that the city&#8217;s teachers are going to be even more driven by centralized curriculum planners than they are now.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Magnets<\/strong>: \u00a0It seems to be a big rollback of the idea of the Magnet school. \u00a0Conservatives bag on the magnet schools, largely for the wrong reasons. \u00a0It&#8217;s a simple fact that not every kid is <em>wired <\/em>to respond to the same program. \u00a0Different peoples&#8217; brains &#8211; and kids are people, let&#8217;s remember &#8211; respond to different subjects. \u00a0Every brain is different- and trying to force them all to be the same just makes the different-enough ones that don&#8217;t have the support or compulsion to &#8220;make it&#8221; check out of the idea of &#8220;education&#8221;, sometimes for years, sometimes for the rest of their lives. \u00a0Speaking for myself, junior high was a complete wasteland except for languages and music. Some kids&#8217; 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. \u00a0The 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).<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, in my experience the Saint Paul schools didn&#8217;t do magnets especially well. \u00a0Most of the \u00a0magnets did double duty as &#8220;neighborhood&#8221; schools; the &#8220;magnet&#8221; program in art or science had to also account for not a few kids who weren&#8217;t there to learn art or science!<\/p>\n<p>One of Silva&#8217;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&#8217;s still lost 1\/8 of its enrollment in recent years.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll see.ite.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Superintendent Silva\u00a0S released her plan for overhauling te Saint Paul schools yesterday. \u00a0And all I can say is, I&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-st-paul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17335"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17339,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17335\/revisions\/17339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}