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Group offers bold plan for improving city schools
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Jones
Ross
By Denise Dick
youngstowN
A draft improvement plan for the city schools is a start, but representatives of a Cincinnati-based education-reform organization advocate an even bolder approach.
KnowledgeWorks representatives met with Vindicator news and editorial staff Wednesday to talk about their recommendations. They’ll make a presentation at today’s city schools Academic Distress Commission meeting.
“We know from significant on-the-ground experience in Youngstown and other districts just like it, that it’s not enough to improve the existing system,” the organization’s presentation materials read. “The existing low-performing system has a life, an inertia, all its own. Turning the system around takes a remedy with an equally strong pull.”
Retired federal Judge Nathaniel R. Jones, a city native, is a KnowledgeWorks board member.
Chad Wick, the organization’s founder and director, said KnowledgeWorks has a lot of experience working in cities such as Detroit, Cleveland and Baltimore.
To make the city schools a successful system takes involvement of parents and the community, and a belief that all students can succeed, among other factors.
“There is no silver bullet,” said Brian Ross, president and CEO.
KnowledgeWorks worked with the city schools and Youngstown State University to start Youngstown Early College. That school is the only one in the district to be designated excellent on the last few state report cards.
The organization also funded an initiative to transform the district’s high schools into small schools within school and alter instruction. That plan didn’t work as well. Harold Brown, president of EdWorks, a KnowledgeWorks subsidiary, said that plan wasn’t implemented as designed.
“The other work was very frustrating,” he said. “There was a lot of turnover, a lot of restructuring of our plan.”
One of the reasons Youngstown’s schools struggle is a lack of resources within the community from which to draw, said Andrew Benson, the organization’s vice president.
But the district has an opportunity for full-scale change, the representatives said.
If that happens, there are corporations and organizations across the country that likely will be willing to provide funding. Ross said that KnowledgeWorks would commit to securing some of that funding if the district commits to a bold plan for change.
That may include Knowledge is Power Program, or KIPP, schools, college-preparatory schools geared at underserved students, or Rocketship schools, aimed at low-income elementary students.
The group believes a whole new system is needed in the district “that puts the right people and supports in place to achieve your vision. Consider hitting the restart button,” the presentation material says.
The 2012-13 school year should be used to complete the engagement process, identify when the new system is ready and shut down the existing organization.
“Reopen Youngstown City Schools in fall 2013 as an entirely new system — a system with the power and focus to ensure that in the next five-year window, every Youngstown student will be successful in school and graduate with the ability to pursue, without remediation, his/her chosen path in college or career,” it says.
Comments
The main problem with all attempts to improve student performance in city schools is that they are based on assumptions that the current methods or current teachers are somehow wrong, that the school staff wants to give a bad education to city children, perhaps out of racial prejudice. However, the methods of instruction in city schools are substantially the same as those used in all the so-far successful suburban schools. The teachers come from the same places, have the same instructors, are educated in the same manner, and have the same dreams of being successful and inspiring teachers as those in suburban schools. When they are in teacher training, they usually do not know where they will be hired. They have no desire to enter the classroom and fail, regardless of the race of the children. The difference is in the community served. Many students in the city schools arrive much less prepared behaviorally, linguistically, and socially than those in suburban schools. Many of these have untreated hyperactivity or have suffered emotional trauma. The percentage of disadvantaged students is enough to seriously disrupt the whole classroom process and to require the teacher to spend excessive amounts of time in discipline and remediation. The reasons they are disadvantaged are many and usually involve such situations as single parent homes with several children and low income, living with aunts, cousins, etc, living with a series of unpredictable and unreliable mother's boyfriends, moving frequently, living around antisocial individuals and many other contributing factors. A group of ministers who are well known to the children cannot do a walk-through and expect to see the typical classroom problems that interfere with the education of the children who are ready to learn. To see the constant disruptive behavior and resistance by the smaller group of children who are not ready to learn, one would have to be in the school for a while, for example, as a volunteer classroom helper. Getting tougher is not the answer. Remember, teachers cannot use the same discipline that works for parents. If the parents use mostly physical discipline, time-out or other mild interventions don't work well. Most Youngstown school administrators spend the whole day dealing with students sent to the office for behaviors that are much less common in suburban schools. Problems start on the school bus in the morning and continue to dismissal. Some children commit suspension offenses before reaching school in the morning. Parents of such children are often contentious and uncooperative. Star-spangled, new-fangled programs do not make traumatized or immature children ready to learn. They do not cut down on discipline referrals. They confuse everybody with ever-changing methods and curricula that were imagined by a university professor and implemented by a politician, neither of which has to face a classroom of needy children every day.
"To make the city schools a successful system takes involvement of parents and the community..."
WRONG AGAIN!
The problems are the children having children, the non-involvement of parents and boths choice to be failures.
The peers are failures. The peers instruct failure. Rapp music instructs a failure mentality.
The schools & the teachers are not the problem.
Remove the disruptors from the system. Force the disruptor's out of a life of urban occupation.
Stop all section 8 housing. Take away their cable, free heat, free electricity.
Ridding our community of these urban occupiers is the ONLY method to improve the city & city schools.
Do you wish to cure the cancer or waste more money?
Quote:
"Chad Wick, the organization’s founder and director, said KnowledgeWorks has a lot of experience working in cities such as Detroit, Cleveland and Baltimore."
Uh huh. And these places are what? Our models?
As the article says, as bad as these places are, bigger cities have more resources to pitch in, like museums and corporations. In Cincinnati, corporations like GE and P&G release technical employees to work in the schools teaching skills. So KnowledgeWorks says if we destroy our system, they will ASK such corporations to contribute here. Why would a company in a faraway city do that? Why?
These KnowledgeWorks advisors structured Youngstown's high schools. The plan failed. So now the same organization that created the failure gets to come in to suggest the system be privatized because of that failure? Huh? Was that end always their goal?