Christina Fights Back – Delay Granted, But The End Game Remains The Same

So… last night this happened:

The Christina School Board again delayed a final decision on its three Priority Schools on Tuesday night, saying they wanted to give the school communities time to study a new compromise proposal worked out between district and state officials.

[…]

Originally, the state had said the state and district needed to work out an agreement by last week or Gov. Jack Markell would shut the schools down or hand them over to charters or other outside operators. Some board members originally believed they had to vote Tuesday night or that takeover would occur.

But Sen. Bryan Townsend, whose district includes Christina, said he called Markell’s office during the board meeting and the governor’s staff said they were willing to further extend the deadline.

The strike through words are my doing, and it would be refreshing if someone asked how closing these schools would actually work. Until that question is asked and answered I’ll file “closure” under meaningless threat. Unless someone thinks redrawing attendance zones that bus these children out to suburban schools is actually on the table. No? Well, neither do I.

Evans voted against postponing a decision, saying the children in these schools need urgent help.

Others, though, said they would not vote on a plan worked out by a handful of officials after months of work with community groups.

The children in these schools need urgent help? You don’t say? Remind me whose job it’s been to help them, Mr. Evans. As much as I don’t like the Priority Schools plan, the idea that a school board member – the person whose job it is to urgently help these schools – can utter these words as a reason for signing a hastily written, not publicly reviewed or discussed MOU astounds me.

Perhaps Mr. Evans could explain how the MOU helps the children in urgent need and why it took a threatened state takeover of his schools to address these urgent needs.  Up until Priority Schools came into play, I didn’t see the urgency.

The MOU the board was voting on approved a “school leader” to run Bayard and “executive director” and “school leader” for Bancroft and Stubbs. The executive director would be the top boss of the school, while the school leader would spearhead the curriculum and instruction.

Polaski said the Department pushed for that structure.

A school leader and an executive director? I have no doubt the Department pushed for that structure – DDOE is full of administrators. Remember, the only clear detail in the original MOU was the excessive salary (160,000.00 minimum) of new school leaders (still hate that phrasing – every time it’s used I think of North Korea. Which doesn’t seem far off the mark. Sorry.)

Ed reformers love them some administration/CEO types – and it’s long past time to stop pretending the business community is the best and brightest among us. They aren’t – not by a long shot. Making money for themselves is their top priority – which is fine – but it’s no way to run public education, healthcare, the arts, social security, etc.. They have far more in common with owners of sports teams who focus on ticket and tee shirt sales than they do with truly intelligent people who tackle complex issues from every angle. I simply can’t wait for this phase to pass and we start tuning out the supposed “movers and shakers” whose only focus is the bottom line, shareholders (who, no matter what they say, aren’t the kids), and profits. Adding another layer of administration is the corporate way. If only they could figure out a way to fire/lay off the children…

But they have figured that out. Silly me. It’s called charter schools!  Schools that get to handpick their populations and even “counsel out” undesirables and then claim success! Which then gets repeated by “business leaders” only looking at the bottom line – never bothering to wonder what happened to children who were fired, laid off, down-sized…

Eastside Charter, a school constantly touted as a success by our Governor and Secretary of Education, had 57 Kindergartens in 2012-2013 and 56 Kindergarteners in 2013-2014. In 8th grade they had 22 students in 2012-2013 and 26 8th graders in 2013-2014.  Over half of their student body vanished. Is this really success, or just a numbers game that corporate CEOs excel at? Need to improve a bottom line? Get rid of people! Presto! Increased profits! Never mind that getting rid of employees, or children in this case, didn’t really “improve” anything. That isn’t success, and everybody knows it.

Another school being touted as a success is Red Clay’s Lewis Dual Language. Let’s look at their numbers.

Kindergarten 2012-2013 – 95 students
Kindergarten 2013-2014 – 104 students
5th grade 2012-2013 – 64 students
5th grade 2013-2014 – 56 students

31 children missing in 2012-2013 and 48 children missing in 2013-2014. What happened to those children? You want to rely on data in the form of test scores? Go find those children. Tell me exactly why they left those schools.  If you can’t answer that question, then your data is unreliable. Then again, the data (standardized test scores) being used has been deemed unreliable by the Governor, Secretary of Education and the DDOE… hence, the reason for the new test, Smarter Balanced. Remember, we needed this new, expensive test because the old test was unreliable. And yet… the old test is what we’ve based Priority Schools. Can someone explain that to me?

Back to Christina… We’ve now entered the phase where the state goes into PR mode. They want to appear reasonable; that they are bending over backward to “work with” Christina so when they charterize/privatize these schools (which is still the end game – that never wavers) the News Journal can write how reasonable they were. And the news Journal will write that. Which is sad, because there’s actually a big story here.