From the Times Union, Tonyaa Weathersbee's Blog
Before state Education Commissioner Eric Smith recently tried to explain to the local NAACP why four struggling, predominantly black schools may have to either be turned into charters or left to an outside management company to fix, School Board member Betty Burney unveiled a Power Point history to show what was behind the angst in the room.
It showed that after decades of fixes, many of the schools and their surrounding communities have wound up more broken.
Since 1969, and largely for the sake of school desegregation, 12 schools were either closed or converted into middle schools or special schools.
Two schools, Douglas Anderson and Stanton, became magnet schools.
Many of the top students in neighborhood schools were lured to the converted schools, as well as newer schools like First Coast and Mandarin.
So now, the only neighborhood high schools left in Northwest Jacksonville are Raines, Ribault and Jackson. Like many of their urban counterparts across the nation, they've grown poorer and more isolated.
The Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test was supposed to help fix schools like those by forcing them to raise achievement levels or risk losing students and money. Yet, it has only stigmatized them.
Now, more experimentation may be on the way.
Smith told the group that if those schools don't make enough progress this year, the School Board will have to either consider turning them into charter schools or over to a management company. Both options are dubious. Most research shows that charter schools don't outperform public schools and not much is known about the successes of private companies when it comes to turning around troubled high schools.
The uncertainty is what concerns many people, especially alumni, of those schools.
"There are so many people who have lived this," Burney said. "And they know what happens when a school leaves."
It would be a shame if any of those schools were to close, or their missions drastically altered, said Gary Orfield, a nationally renowned expert on school desegregation and co-director of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA.
"Test scores don't measure poverty in a school," Orfield told me. "If you just label schools F, you create an irreversible set of problems. It makes it hard to recruit high-quality teachers, and it makes it hard to recruit high-quality students. It's an unfair and irrational system."
Raines principal George Maxey knows this problem all too well.
Last year, he knocked on the doors of 200 high-achieving ninth-graders in Raines' attendance zone. He told them about his success in securing scholarships for most of the seniors, as well as other achievements.
Most of them couldn't get past the F label.
Finding ways to attract higher achieving students into a school - raising test scores and changing the academic culture - is difficult, but it can work, Orfield said.
Since 2000, for example, the Wake County School District in North Carolina (Raleigh) had been using a race-neutral assignment plan that encouraged academic and economic diversity. It saw its test scores improve, and the black-white achievement gap narrow in some measures.
So maybe it's time that principals like Maxey got some help besides knocking on doors.
Maybe it means getting some heavy hitters, like corporate sponsors armed with scholarships and a promotional campaign, to persuade parents and students who live near Raines and Ribault to give their neighborhood high school a chance.
Because the last thing that Northwest Jacksonville needs is for its remaining high schools to be subjected to more experimentation - and risk winding up on the losing end of it again.
tonyaa.weathersbee@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4251
http://jacksonville.com/opinion/blog/403605/tonyaa-weathersbee/2011-02-08/strugging-high-schools-need-help-entire-community
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