A letter to Littlepage
Mr. Littlepage started his latest editorial on our low achieving intervene schools, I don’t pretend to be an expert on education. Right there he hit the nail on the head, one of the problems with our intervening schools and our school district in general is we have several people who are pretending to be education experts and they are in charge.
He is then both right and wrong. He is right that it is a good thing that we are finally getting mad and that we are finally noticing how things have been going, but when he writes, we should have been mad years ago, he is wrong about that because some of us have been mad for years.
For years I have been writing about the brain drain of magnet schools and
how since they get to pick and choose who they take and keep are unfair.
For years I have been writing about how pushing kids along without consequences, a work ethic or the skills they need to be successful, does them and the city a disservice. For years I have been writing about how forcing every kid into a one size fits all curriculum regardless of aptitude and desire sets them up for failure and for years I have written about who is at the epicenter of this problem; a school board made up of politicians on their way up or way down and people filled with hubris that have tenuous relationships at best to our local schools. Littlepage on the other hand, for years, in his writings have given them a pass.
I imagine it’s fairly easy to run schools where the parents are involved and the kids don’t have to worry about where their next meal is coming from or violence in the streets. It gets a little more challenging when those are concerns and they are very real concerns, for the students at many of our schools. I try not to question the school boards commitment to our children but it’s hard for me not to question their depth as in they are out of theirs and this should have been made incredibly obvious when you look at their solution to fix the intervening schools. They want to split them into two smaller theme based schools? Why don’t they instead try to address the real issues the schools are facing? The school boards brilliant (sic) solution inspired Mr. Littlepage to write, we finally have the school board and superintendant we need in place.
Mr. Littelpage they are probably just good enough for the Southside and beaches, for Mandarin and Bay Meadows but for the west and north sides of Jacksonville we need something different.
What Mr. Littelpage also fails to acknowledge is the problems our intervening schools are facing are the same problems we have in many of our other high schools and middle schools too. Lee, Forrest, Ed White, First Coast and many of our middle schools, which one colleague of mine compared to Lord of the Flies, aren’t doing that much better. They aren’t getting the same publicity but don’t sleep well at night thinking those schools are fine. We have a systemic problem in Jacksonville and we need real change to fix it.
It seems like the city is slowly starting to wake up; hopefully Mr. Littelpage is because he has a voice that can speak for our children, he more than me on my little blog can get the word out but until we do completely wake up, you should know that we will have more kids falling through the cracks, more kids doomed to a menial existence or at best have their development retarded and we will have more kids who we have let down too.
I have been mad about that for a while as well.
I don't want to come on here and defend our school board, but...I am pretty sure that from the Superintendent on down there would be pretty strong support for fixing the underlying issues in the students' lives that are creating sizable hurdles to their learning. With that said, I have also been critical of their "plan" for the intervene schools. However, maybe it's all they can hope to do given our current political and economic climate. What they really want to ask for and need are some serious funds that reach down into the pre-k level for the students, but, instead, they will be hit with another year of trying to close a serious funding gap. Of course, Jacksonville is going to fall all over itself trying to elect a mayor that will out-cut the competition. Combine this attitude with the same idea at the state level and it's no wonder that schools are facing down the impossible right now. Do more with less or else...That's not the motto I have memorized for my yoga sessions. So, dealing with problems that we have some control over right now, we need to make sure we have a variety of curricula that meet the needs of all of the kids. If we have that and we are secure in the belief that our sequencing is sound and based in good educational theory and we know we have good, trained teachers, then I feel like the School Board doesn't necessarily have to be on the defensive all of the time. What should make us mad is that the coverage of the schools only occurs at the critical hour. Why won't the paper cover what these FCAT and State Grades mean? Has anyone really looked at what Sandalwood's A is based on? Is that what you think an A school is? Let's get real.
ReplyDeleteI would like to play devil's advocate here for a minute...
ReplyDeletemaybe teachers did abdicate their responsibility for this problem long ago and now must live with the less than desirable consequences. If these intervene schools required outside resources or outside management, why didn't we demand it or make it happen? Too complacent, too willing to go along to get along, we let previous years of kids down and our behavior was reinforced by the public. We are still held in high regard, but we clearly have teachers who have not been trying that hard. Were we a tad more vigilant, couldn't we have taken out some of the more horrible teachers? Have we already squandered our social capital? Do we deserve to have well-intentioned, but ridiculous mandates sent down because we couldn't handle our own business? I don't know. We've put up with a lot so far, but maybe fewer people care in the classroom than Chris or I think.