All Drama, No KIDS
That’s how I characterized the recent brouhahas of the Christina School Board with their RTT fiascos in correspondence with Pandora.
Now we have the next act of the Christina School District All Drama, no KIDS extravaganza as Councilman Jea Street weighs in to call for the State to take over the District.
There is no doubt that the CSD has more than its fair share of problems, and there is no doubt that the CSD school board hasn’t been especially functional recently. But what doesn’t help anything is an effort from the political class that doesn’t do anything other than add to the dysfunctional drama. And make no mistake — this letter from Councilman Street and the Delaware Black Caucus is about the Drama, it doesn’t have anything to do with the KIDS.
Starting with building a case for a takeover that includes old issues that have been largely resolved, wrongly characterizing all of the Christina city schools as being under academic watch or review, and presenting the issues that the CSD Board has had with its Superintendent and the DOE Secretary as somehow dangerous to African American kids. As if these two executives were *only* overseeing the education of African American kids. Academic performance of schools or kids is glancingly mentioned towards the end of the letter, which is how you know that Street is here to add to the Drama and get his fair share of the publicity here.
Now, I happen to think that Street has the germ of a point here — and that is that some people’s children *are* the ones available for ideological in-fighting over. But if the Delaware Black Caucus was interested in making sure that the kids actually get a fair shake, they would have approached this thing with some education-focused solutions. Or even some solutions for helping the CSD Board get abit more functional or responsive. But piling on (and not even an especially smart or honest piling on) helps no one, except the people looking for more TV face time, a few more newspaper column inches, a way to *look* like they care about a problem without having to do (or be responsible for) any of the hard work to help fix it. You can tell from the cc list that this isn’t meant to be much more than a new bit of attention-getting.
Leadership means getting a bunch of people working together to accomplish some goal. It is a really simple idea, but a hard thing to do — because you have to work at understanding the problems, the influences on that problem, vetting the solutions, and getting the right people to get those solutions implemented. All too often, the Delaware Black Caucus is way too interested in taking actions that make them *look* like they are concerned with issues of Delaware’s African-American community. Time for them to now figure out how to demonstrate some leadership on these issues, and time for their constituents to ask these members to be accountable for some *results*. Because ideological fights that have no results in concrete change is just an empty effort that was never about the KIDS in the first place.
Tags: Christina School District, Delaware Black Caucus, Jea Street
The first politician/school board member/administrator that demands smaller class sizes for failing schools… I’m all ears. Everything thing else is just noise.
Smaller class sizes allow students to catch up. It allows teachers to stay on top of the problems. What it also requires is for schools that have everything to give up something to fund it. And that’s the problem.
Pandora,
I have voted against the class size waiver that allows school boards to waive state mandated size caps. I have done this both years of service on the board. If CSD admin requests the waiver again, I will vote against it, again. We desperately need smaller class sizes, especially at elementary levels and in high needs schools.
The first politician/school board member/administrator that demands smaller class sizes for failing schools… I’m all ears. Everything thing else is just noise.
Obviously class sizes need to be smaller… This would have to come from a governor as part of a package that includes tax increases to fund it.
And class size has nothing to do with RTTT… RTTT money is temporary. We are lucky to have the luxury of arguing how to spend it. It will be gone soon.
Pandora
The problem with the research on smaller classes is this (and it has been repeated on multiple occasions with the same result, primarily in urban settings): unless you can reduce the class size below 12 students (some studies say 10), then there is not a consistent measurable difference in outcome. Going from, say, 24 students to 17 students doesn’t appear to do it.
That said, I think you have a point, but possibly a different one than you intended.
In any normal school situation you couldn’t go to 12-student classes, not just because of the cost of teachers but because of the number of classrooms it would require.
However, in some of our failing schools, where lots of kids have already choiced out, you might well be able to do something creative.
Take the higher-performing kids (there are always some) and put them in slightly larger classes (say go from 24 to 28 in a class); research also suggests that with higher-performing kids this doesn’t actually hurt.
Then use the space created by people choicing out and the teaching units saved by slightly larger college-prep classes to actually put togethr some of these 12 student per classroom classes in key subjects like math and ELA.
That’s being done some places (in Michigan I think) with pretty good success.
Sorry I don’t have links but I just wanted to comment and didnt have timeto go find them.
That’s a great idea, so let’s try it! I’m just so tired of lip service and everyone in power always telling us why it “can’t” be done.