Duval County Public Schools received some devastating news when Florida’s school rankings came out. Eight of our neighborhood high schools are in the bottom 25 including the lowest ranked at 404 in the state.
Our superintendent as usual put a positive spin on it and talked about two of our schools being in the top 12, rigor and our college ready curriculum. Sadly however his spin doesn’t hold up.
The two high schools in the top 12 are Paxon and Stanton, magnet schools for our top kids and remember when Stanton and Paxon were number five and twelve in the nation? Now they are that way in just the state.
There is also a difference between rigorous and advanced classes. Rigor has been destroyed by grade recovery and the districts gentlemen’s C policy, where we pass kids along whether they have the skills they need or not. Half of our kids don’t get to high school and not be able to read or do math by accident.
Finally ask Florida State College at Jacksonville where 70% of our graduates have to take remedial classes how well our college prep curriculum is doing.
I don’t think it is fair to compare Duval to St. Johns or Cay or other neighboring districts. Quite frankly our district is both a lot bigger and a lot poorer.
But what about comparing our district to Miami Dade? They have three times as many kids as us and have an even higher percentage of students receiving fee and reduced lunch. In last weeks rankings of districts they were 37th and we were 50th! We have eight high schools in the bottom 25 and they have five while having nearly three times as many high schools. Furthermore we may have two in the top twelve but they have four in the top nine.
I am sure Miami Dade has issues, but many of them are the same as ours and they are doing a much better job handling them.
The problem here is our leadership. Since Pratt-Dannals became superintendent, rigor has been gutted, discipline has been gutter and he has greatly contributed to teacher morale being gutted. His constant all is well message is both wrong and does the city a disservice by giving it a false sense of security.
It’s time we thanked him for his service and moved in a different direction, one with rigor, discipline and teacher buy in.
Chris Guerrieri
Stake Holder
Stanton is number 4 in the nation by the way. These rankings are complete garbage, the reasons why Stanton and Paxon are not the best are because 1. No one at the schools cares about the FCAT. 2. The FCAT is a terrible way to measure schools and these rankings reflect the uselessness of the test
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