The Times Union’s editorial board recently wrote a piece about what people want in the next superintendent and the editor was right we are all over the board. I thought however I would clear up a few things they did get wrong. First we are not a B district anymore. Last Thursday district grades came out and we dropped to a C, now admittedly nearly 30 districts dropped a letter grade.
I am not sure if the editor knows this but this is what did qualify for a B district in Florida.
For Duval it means we were the 50th ranked district out of 67. It’s a good thing Florida doesn’t grade on a curve right? It means we have eight of the bottom 25 high schools in the state including number 404 out of 404 and our middle schools are in a similar predicament. It means less than two thirds of our kids graduate on time and that is with grade recovery and teachers being “encouraged” to pass kids whether they have the skills or have done the work or not. For African American kids we come in at just over 54% graduating on time.
Less than half our kids arrive to high school reading on grade level and if we didn’t force so many level ones and twos into Advanced Placement classes, where they have no business being, then we would be in real trouble. By the way our kids only pass one in four A.P. tests and since we pay for all the tests that’s over a million dollars we spend on failed tests. Then once our kids graduate sixty percent have to take remedial classes in college and businesses report having a hard time finding qualified applicants.
We do have a lot of great things going on, things we can be really proud of but overall we are struggling and that is not going to change until we can have an honest conversation about education.
What would be the point of announcing the drop in the district's grade? What would the rest of the article be? Sure, we could get a blurb in the metro section, but what would I learn? Then I could rush to jacksonville.com and see 23 comments about how awful dcps is. No thanks. I'm all in favor of more coverage of education in jacksonville and the surrounding counties, and I would love some more investigation into what plans the district has for improvement, where we came up with these plans, who is responsible for following through with these plans, and who is accountable if these plans fail. I'd rather find out what the heck half of these cluster chiefs are supposed to do day-in and day-out and what management model dictates that a school principal be accountable to so many different people. I'd rather read about why it makes a difference to the students to have a superintendent visit their schools at all. I'd rather read a concise digest of the feedback from these community meetings about what people want in a superintendent. I'd rather read an editorial that states that since it's going to be next to impossible to find some charismatic visionary that teaches every kid in duval county to read by age 4 while visiting every school every week and calling tallahassee in his or her spare time to wrangle a few more dollars for the county then we should think about casting about for a true leader with enough political acumen to correctly identify some high-priority issues that can be dealt with quickly and some other long-term issues that have been bungled. I'd rather read about how apprehensive some of the district administrators are with regards to their futures and are hoping that they'll still be around in two years. I'd rather read that the school district is very concerned about teacher morale and is investing huge sums of time this summer to improve it next year. I'd rather read about all of the young students thar are excited about starting school next year and can't wait to see what amazing things their teachers have to offer. I'd rather see more stories about how despite the fact that the district has received an arbitrary letter to denote its effectiveness that the FCAT has yet to be a huge success in improving student achievement. You correctly point out that we have high school number 404 out of 404. How long has this school been on the intervene/turn-around/struggling/failing school list. Why have none of the state's prescriptions for success worked? Can they work? Where's the article on that? So, sure we can sit back and wait for the Times-Union to throw out a quick hand-wring about the drop in the grade and how other districts dropped and how it's because of increased rigor and link here if you want to see all of the grades and don't worry end of course exams will settle this once and for all, but why not question the narrative instead and call the state's bluff on how a handful of schools continue to fail even though they have changed principals, teachers, expectations, and curricula year after year? I think that would be a much more interesting read.
ReplyDeleteI feel like the people of Jacksonville know there is something wrong but they can't quite a finger on it and one of the reasons is we don't always get coverage of things so it's hard to have a debate about what we should do and then mobilize our resources to fix the issues. I would love to see articles about the things you mentioned above and I am no fan of the FCAT I have written many times about it but to be honest we need to have a conversation about a lot of different subjects.
ReplyDelete