Back to School

Youngstown State Universitys faculty union called off a strike scheduled for Friday, allowing classes to begin next week.

State teachers union president Julia Gergits says the action benefits students and ensures theyll be able to begin the semester on time and receive financial aid that had been frozen.

Faculty union members have rejected a contract offer from the university. They say the universitys offer would cost the average faculty member more than $5,000 a year.

The university says it would mean an average overall reduction of less than $1,000 a year in base take-home compensation.

The union says it wants to return to the bargaining table.

The university says the federal government ordered it to withhold financial aid until the threat of a strike was removed. Students protested this week with a sit-in at the schools administration building.

The Banks School District will again pursue a school construction bond. Banks School District leaders may lack money, but they’re certainly not short on persistence.

Banks Superintendent Jim Foster announced Tuesday the district’s intent to pursue a school construction bond in November — the district’s fourth such attempt since 2008.

Foster said district officials will host a community meeting July 30 to recruit supporters and hopefully get voters’ opinions on what made them reject three straight bond attempts.

“We want to pursue a bond, and we want their input on how to get it passed,” Foster said.

The meeting, titled “Community Summit: What’s Next for our School?” will be at 8:30 a.m. in the Banks Junior High School gymnasium.

The district’s last bond attempt, a $10.5 million ask in May, failed by a narrow margin.

Two previous efforts to secure much larger bonds failed in 2008 and again in November.

Foster said district officials have no choice but to continue appealing to voters for financial help. The junior high school is in severe disrepair, and the district has no money to fix the problems, he said.

The Banks School Board must vote upon how much money they’ll seek this time, but Foster said the board will likely pursue a near-identical amount to the May bond proposal.

Last week I was lucky enough to participate in a gathering called America’s Imagination Summit convened by the Lincoln Center Institute (the education arm of the Performing Arts Center), and held at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.  The Summit was the culmination of a series of Imagination Conversations that had been conducted around the country to bring local leaders together to consider the role that imagination and creativity can and should play in improving the education experience for all our children in a variety of settings.  With a few notable exceptions, the Summit avoided the now popular activity of bashing public schools and the professionals who work in them. Instead it concentrated on the role that imagination, i.e.” the capacity to see what is not,” plays in problem solving and how that approach can support our working together to ensure that a rich educational experience is offered to all our students, regardless of their social or economic station in life.

What follows are a few of the inspirational and thought-provoking moments from the speakers and panels:

• Sir Ken Robinson affirmed that imagination is the fundamental capacity of humans that sets us apart from other life forms; that is we can conceive of a past and imagine a future.  The gift of foresight is the height of the human condition. The challenge is to put imagination to work to solve problems.  Imagination is what we use in the face of facts; the ability to see alternatives and act on them.  Sadly, our education system is still locked into the past and sees creativity as on the margins.  The challenge is to ensure that we develop a culture (he defines as communities of meaning) that puts imagination to use across the system and curriculum to improve practice and student learning.
• Admiral Mike Miller, superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy, stated that the nation’s future leadership is predicated on imagination…the ability to see what our nation can be.  He sees the Naval Academy as a leadership laboratory that encourages students to consider a mixture of desperate elements to produce something novel.  In this quest, failure is more important than success; failure can lead to perseverance, resilience, and motivation to learn from those mistakes.  The Naval Academy strives to instill a sense of life-long learning and creativity in its aspiring officer leaders.
• Judith Kaye, former chief judge of the State of New York, said her focus after leaving her post as chief judge was to “keep kids out of court and in school.”  She stated that we know the problem and are drowning in data; now we need to work on solutions to keep kids in school and make sure those schools contribute to their success.  During her tenure as chief judge, drug courts were established to keep offenders out of prison, where they were successfully transformed into hardened criminals, and instead in an interdisciplinary program that brought a variety of services and professionals into the offenders’ lives to return them to being productive citizens.  Developing this program as an alternative to incarceration took creative thinking and a collaborative approach.
• John Deasy, new superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, asserted that without imagination we can’t have empathy, which is crucial if we’re going to make sure that school districts, particularly large, urban ones like LA Unified (second largest school district in the US) are to be successful in reaching the students they serve.  The biggest challenge to moving a school or district forward is getting a school team to “look up” and see the possibilities for all students and not “down” at what has been in a student’s past or family situation.  He also asserted that we as a society tend to see race and poverty as “deficit issues” instead of assets to be built on, and that we need to involve students in the discussion of those assets.  He also said that educators should be held in an iconic position and those who stand in front of our youth should be the most dedicated professionals in whom we invest a supportive and continuous learning environment.

This is just a taste of the richness of the conversation at the Imagination Summit, but it was a reminder that the conversation around providing powerful education experiences for our students and the professionals who work with them too often centers around acrimony and finger pointing….blaming the evil “other” for the failure of all of our children to thrive and grow and learn.  Participating in this summit was a reminder for me that this dynamic has to end…now.  As Eric Liu stated in his closing remarks, “Talent is the new oil.”  We need to nurture it and make the economic case for educating all our students as well as the social case.  All of us need to think deeply about what are the things we can do to change moments of inspiration into action and work across fields and areas of expertise to ensure rich opportunities for young people that will ultimately serve us all.

THE KING’S ACADEMY

Sophomore Jordan Gableman recently returned from the Georgetown University Junior Statesman Summer School. The three-week program brought students together from around the world. Participants were chosen based on academic achievement, leadership ability, maturity and interest in politics, history and government. Jordan chose to take the U.S. government and politics track, which enabled her to complete one semester of advanced placement U.S. government and politics, a college level course and a congressional workshop practicum.

BRIEFLY

The Spirit of Giving Network, a coalition of individuals, organizations and businesses, is collecting new, used and outgrown uniforms for both public and private schools to donate to needy families. Solid- colored polo-style shirts and pants, shorts, skirts and jeans of all sizes for grades elementary through high school are needed. Used clothing is washed, mended and folded before distribution. Items can be dropped off at the Wellington Community Center, 12150 Forest Hill Blvd. and at Village Park, 11700 Pierson Road, Wellington. Donations will be accepted through Aug. 4. The uniforms will be distributed to eligible students residing in the county at the Community School Bash, Aug. 13 at the Naoma Donnelley Haggin Boys Girls Club of Delray Beach. For more information about volunteering or donating supplies, contact Karen Krumholtz at

givingnetwork.com.

School news should be e-mailed to neighborhood

A few weeks back I stumbled on an unusual proposal by the Wisconsin teachers’ union (WEAC) to deconsolidate, or break up, Milwaukee’s public schools.

It appears that deconsolidation’s coming back in vogue as a “when-all-else-fails” strategy for district reform.

After a cursory scan I found a handful of instances of proposed legislation to deconsolidate large urban school districts in the past two decades including:

• Florida, through a statewide initiative (1998),
• Charlotte-Mecklenburg (2005),
• Las Vegas (2005),
• Albuquerque (2005), and
• Milwaukee (2011).

What caught my attention with Milwaukee was that this time it was the statewide teacher’s union that was fed up with the litany of reforms and turned to deconsolidation as a opportunity for change.

My first reaction to the article was, “I wonder if deconsolidation would work in Philadelphia?”

As someone who’s lived here just shy of a dozen years, I didn’t realize that we’ve already tried it. But even after pouring over the handful of articles in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Education Week archive about Philadelphia’s history of deconsolidation and decentralization, I’m still torn over whether it has any promise for Philadelphia, or if it might offer any lessons for our current style of school reform.

The main arguments in favor of deconsolidation focus on:

• parent and community members having more access to district leaders,
• increased responsiveness to concerns, and
• savings from less central office staff.

Arguments against deconsolidation include concerns about:

• potential intensification of inequality across most cities,
• the loss of the economies of scale provided by a large unified district,
• new fiefdoms and opportunities for patronage with elected officials,
• the fracturing of teachers unions, and
• a smaller tax base to support comprehensive services.

In a perfect world, where politicians aren’t so determined to put their hands in the cookie jar, deconsolidation might be an idea worth considering. But the more likely reality, at least in Philadelphia, is that deconsolidation would merely allow for people further down the ladder to get to the cookies.

Philadelphia has a history of both administrative decentralization as well as a few unsuccessful attempts of the more radical deconsolidation.

One of the city’s most ambitious efforts at district decentralization occurred in 1995 when David Hornbeck instituted Children Achieving—an ambitious plan that organized the District into 22 clusters each made up of a comprehensive high school with a feeder elementary and middle schools. Each cluster, comprised of about 8 to 15 schools, was administered by a cluster leader and a full-time staff. Local school councils of parents and community members were created to provide feedback and oversight.

Early district deconsolidation efforts in Philadelphia began during the same time period, when in 1997 then state Sen. Vincent Fumo proposed a plan to break up the District into an undetermined number of smaller districts, each with its own elected school board and taxing authority. That same year state Rep. Dwight Evans introduced a similar proposal to create local school councils for each school, arming them with hiring power over principals and authority to approve the budget.

Nearly a year later, a statewide panel, the Legislative Commission on Restructuring Pennsylvania’s Urban Schools, incorporated Fumo’s ideas into its proposal to deconsolidate the District’s 22 clusters into 22 legally independent school districts, each with its own elected school board. Of course, the proposal was never accepted and today we have a single unified district.

What does all of this mean for Philadelphia today?

From where I stand there are a number of philosophical, moral, and logistical challenges that arise when thinking about deconsolidation in our context:

• Would there be enough interest to change the city’s charter to break up the school district? Not everyone in the city has school-aged children or sees the connection between the quality of our schools and the vitality of the city.
• In the absence of a citywide central office, could the new districts work together to share transportation, purchasing, and other services?
• It would be a stretch to get the governor to support deconsolidation because it would necessitate the dissolution of the SRC. On the other hand a deconsolidated district might be more in line with Republican ideals of a smaller decentralized government.
• How would you fairly draw the lines and equitably distribute Philadelphia’s nearly 250 schools? Along city council district lines or Hornbeck’s 22 clusters?
• Would wealthier areas like Mt. Airy, Chestnut Hill, University City, or Center City attempt to have their own districts, further stratifying the city?
• How would the city’s high student mobility rate impact deconsolidation, and what would be the impact of losing a citywide curriculum and pacing model?

School district deconsolidation is by no means a silver bullet for the complex problems confronting urban communities, nor is it always feasible. While state and local leaders’ willingness to put everything on the table doesn’t guarantee success, reexamining the idea of “one city, one district” might be a step toward a more equitable future.