This issue has been percolating for awhile, especially since this was announced by the Governor’s office as a Major Education Initiative — and it turns out that this isn’t about education, but about moving around teachers and school leadership to continue to pretend to do something about Wilmington’s failing schools. The NJ writes about this today:
The Delaware Department of Education says six low-income schools in Wilmington are failing, and the way to fix them is to make the more than 200 teachers reapply for their jobs – and to hire elite principals at each school who won’t have to follow most district rules while earning annual salaries of $160,000.
Mark Murphy, secretary of education, says it’s necessary for teachers to reapply for their jobs to ensure that every educator in the six “priority” schools has the commitment and skill to improve student achievement, as measured by the state’s standardized tests.
Teachers and school leadership are evaluated to a fare-thee-well on at least a yearly basis — how is it that this effort to replace school personnel isn’t accompanied by some data that shows just how ineffective they are? I don’t doubt that there are some bad apples here and there, but an entire building? That just tells me that all of the effort to evaluate and push school personnel towards some higher performance simply has not worked. And why would the DOE just notice that it hasn’t worked? (Assuming that it hasn’t — we have no data on this still.) The Delaware DOE (and Red Clay and Christiana) have been on board with the effort to create separate but unequal schools, and now the *unequal* schools are an entrepreneurial opportunity for somebody. Absent any real evidence that the local school staff is seriously lacking, why not just start with empowering the people who are already doing the heavy lifting in these schools with the additional freedom to create a better school?
You only have to see how this works by looking at Philadelphia. Their public schools have not only been at risk for some time (with a state takeover), but middle class parents in Philly are starting to make their way out of the city. Which is pretty heartbreaking for a city that has worked very hard to entice folks back into the city. In some areas, you can see parents banding together to make sure that a neighborhood school thrives, and in others you see parents left out in the cold from the lotteries that get some kids into better schools. Philadelphia is turning into a place where it can be really fun to live, but really tough to get a good education for your kids. Wilmington famously is trying to figure out how to get 5000 people to move into the city — but I don’t see any of the folks involved in that effort dealing with making the schools the kind of places that people move to the city for. Instead, we have a multiple agendas at play here, few of them focused on genuine improvements to the educational experience for city kids.
This really is not rocket science. And it does not help that the State is pointing to charters that serve high-poverty kids as a model. As long as you start with a school that can choose its students, you are never comparing apples with apples. The kids at the schools that the state is targeting are the kids that can’t get to charters. So the challenges are even more concentrated. Yet there are models for changing high-poverty school achievement and all of them work in varying ways to help close the opportunity gap that is always present for high-poverty students. And closing that opportunity gap requires better resources for these schools. Whether it is wrapping the right social services around a student(and/or family) to make it easier for that student to walk in the door ready to learn or educational strategies that are focused on learning based on each student’s real needs (rather than the need of the administration for all to pass a test) or building the kinds of programs that suburban counterparts have access to, there are plenty of models of transformation of schools and even whole districts out there that don’t rely on privatization.
And where were the parents in all of this? I didn’t see parents at the press conference, but I would expect that people who keep mouthing the words “empowering parents”, that they would have arranged to make this announcement and be available to discuss this takeover in rooms full of Wilmington parents. Boston actually sent Harvard University out to figure out what their parents wanted in schools. Who is it in the current set of decision-makers here who are paying attention to Wilmington parents and Wilmington taxpayers? I don’t think that anyone is — given the Markell Administration’s serious disconnect here. On the one hand, Gov. Markell championed development incentives for downtowns (including Wilmington) and on the other hand can’t quite grapple with the kinds of schools that will support a thriving city. The question to ask Gov. Markell and Secretary Mark Murphy is what change would need to happen at (insert the name of any one of the 6 targeted schools) for them to feel comfortable in sending *their* kids there. I’d bet money there’d be alot of dancing around that question.
A takeover of these schools won’t get you to where these schools need to be. You can look at the takeover in Philadelphia for how that story plays out. I’m of the opinion that the kids in the city schools need some additional support — art and music classes, more tutoring, smaller class sized, more personal assessments and focus on learning, but also help for their parents in how to support a learning environment. The latter is key — no more dissing a lack of parental involvement, provide some training in what that looks like and how to do it. What other support services does that child and child’s family need? Dealing with these issues is about helping to close the opportunity gap, which is crucial for these students. The state’s DHSS is ground zero for many of these services (or could be) and I’m at a loss as to why better supports for these kids aren’t on offer, since that is a resource the state controls and can direct to this population. It would be more productive than trying to take over these schools.