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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2008 > April
April 2008
Here’s one plan for saving urban kids
Jawanza Kunjufu
The problems of urban education are complicated. There have been a lot of “magic bullet” ideas proposed as solutions. But it’s never been that easy. We know it will take more than one change to really make a difference. But what are the right changes?
This week, I spent some time over at Central State University where 100 teachers and principals from around Ohio were trained in “cultural competency.” This is a hot idea now. The fact is most urban schoolchildren are minorities and the majority of their teachers are white. The hope is to train the teachers to better understand the cultural backgrounds of their students.
To kick off the training, CSU brought in Jawanza Kunjufu as a keynote speaker. Kunjufu offered up a list of 10 changes he says would make a big impact on the learning of urban students.
Here’s his list:
1) Only employ principals who are instructional leaders, not CEOs
Kunjufu said most principals see themselves as CEOs. They love their offices, where they can spend their time managing the budget and the facility. Urban schools, he said, need principals who are experts in instruction and can help teachers in the classroom.
2) Hire master teachers and coaches
Kunjufu said he believes there are five teacher types:
— Custodians. These are teachers who have not changed lesson plan in 30 years. They are caretakers of the status quo.
— Referral agents. These teachers quickly refer kids to others — the nurse, the principal, the discipline dean, etc. Only 20 percent of teachers make 80 pct of referrals, he said.
— Instructors. These teachers love their subject matter and teach their subjects, whether the children get it or not.
— Master teachers. These are teachers who are experts in pedagogy and learning styles.
— Coaches. These teachers get subject matter and learning styles, but also find ways of bonding with students on a personal level.
Kunjufu said urban schools need to focus on expanding the pool of master teachers and coaches in their systems because the other three teacher types are often counterproductive for urban students.
3) Institute Looping
Kunjufu favors “looping,” or keeping the same teacher with the same group of students. The teacher will teach freshman English, then sophomore English, then junior English and senior English. Then she starts over with a new freshman class.
The advantage, he said, is students form relationships with teachers. He cautioned that this will only work with high quality teachers (master teachers and coaches, in his terminology). This is a way, he said, of making large urban schools feel smaller.
4) Raise expectations
Kunjufu said some research has shown teachers lower expectations for poor children, boys, minority children and kids who appear unkempt.
Schools, he said, must enforce high expectations for kids without exception. If you expect kids to perform poorly, they will. If you expect them to excel, they will too.
5) Retain students who fail
Kunjufu said no student should be advanced to fifth grade if he or she cannot read competently. But students cannot just be held back with the same teacher and curriculum. He said the student must be moved into a different classroom, one with a master teacher, a single gender classroom, an Afrocentric curriculum, etc.
6) Reading must be treated as the most important subject
Whether you look at kids in special education or prison, you’ll find a large percentage with major reading problems, he said.
In majority black schools, Kunjufu said too often the reading materials are not targeted to the kids’ interests. He urged teachers to consider the reading materials they have and ask if they would interest their students, especially black boys.
7) Recognize gender differences
Schools should be training their teachers to recognize gender differences when it comes to learning styles and to adapt their teaching methods to meet the needs of those kids.
8) Delay entrance of boys going to kindergarten until age 6
Girls should start kindergarten at age 5 and boys at age 6, Kunjufu argued. He said girls tend to mature faster than boys and that young ages there may be large gaps between their skill levels. This change, he said, would help even the playing field and keep boys from falling behind early.
9) Offer single gender classrooms and single gender schools
Referencing the need for teachers to recognize gender differences (No. 8), Kunjufu said some kids simply do better in a single gender environment and school districts should make that an option for those kids.
10) Teach kids capitalism
Urban kids tend to focus on unrealistic career paths, such as playing pro basketball or becoming a famous rapper. Schools should teach them tools for more realistic careers where they can gain similar fortunes.
Schools, he said, should be teaching kids about the stock market, entrepreneurship and real estate. These careers can give the kids the financial success they desire.
He suggested making a senior project in which three student-designed business plans would get $50,000 in seed money to start the businesses. That sort of realistic incentive would motivate kids to learn financial skills.
What do you think of Kunjufu’s list?
Permalink | Comments (16) | Post your comment | Categories: Urban School Issues
Math: Put away the blocks and balls?
(A math manipulables kit that sells for $100)
Math is boring. Or at least that’s what the kids say.
That’s why teaching math using “hands-on” instruction is so popular. The idea is to put blocks and balls and M&Ms in the kids hands to help them conceptualize counting, adding and subtracting in a way that is useful and meaningful to them. Besides, figuring out the ratio of green M&Ms in a typical bag is just a lot more fun.
But what if the concepts don’t stick with the kids when they are taught that way, as opposed when they learn the same concepts written out in a formula on paper, the old fashioned way?
That’s what Ohio State University researchers found in an experiment on college students and after the The New York Times picked up on the story the implications for math instruction are the subject of a lot of buzz.
More study is needed before it can be determined if math teachers neeed to change their instruction. But such a change would send shockwaves through primary education, where districts have moved rapidly toward more “manipulables,” or hands-on teaching tools. Selling math kids of this type is big business, too.
Math teachers — what do you make of this study?
(Image credit: etacuisenaire.com)
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Fireworks over gender and education
Leonard Sax and Lise Eliot
Leonard Sax is an evangelist for single gender schools. Citing a slew of scientific studies he references in two books he has written on the subject of gender and learning, he began an association to push for more all-boys and all-girls schools and travels the country promoting the cause.
He’s even been to Dayton to provide technicial assistance and teacher training in the development of the school district’s two gender-specific schools.
But lately, he’s been under fire. And he’s gotten a little hot under the collar.
Last month, the New York Times wrote a long magazine piece challenging the science Sax cites in his books to justify instructional changes based on gender differences. Sax, to put it mildly, did not like the article. His rebuttal can be found here.
On Friday, the Education Writers Association paired Sax with neuroscientist Lise Eliot to debate the science of gender differences. From the start both were testy. The exchanges between the two got heated. And more than once I thought one or the other might storm out of the room.
But the discussion was very interesting.
Sax argues that there are many developmental differences between boys and girls that lead to wide gaps in skill proficiency at young ages. The differences almost completely disappear by early adulthood, he says, but teachers should be trained to recognize the differences and adapt their instruction to account for them.
For a good example of Sax’s argument, read this story I wrote when he visited Dayton in 2005.
But Eliot argued the differences that Sax describes are very small. So small, she said, that it is doubtful that changes to instruction will have much impact on learning. Eliot said she fears that the single gender movement could reinforce old stereotypes about truck-loving boys vs. doll-playing girls.
Some examples of her argument:
—It is well known that girls tend to learn to speak earlier than boys. But Eliot said studies show that, on average, a girl will begin speaking only a month before a boy and once they begin speaking both grow vocabulary at a very fast rate with only minor differences between them.
—The biggest difference between males and females is physical size. Men on average are six inches taller then women. Much has been made of the fact that men had larger brains than women, she said. But, in fact, men also have bigger hearts and other organs. The differences overall are explained by the overall size difference between men and women.
—There are differences between boys and girls in many areas, she said. Some popularly cited ones include the types of toys they prefer, aggression, verbal fluency, math proficiency, social cognition and moral reasoning. But again, Eliot said the cumulative studies show a huge overlap in skill proficiency in those areas. The statistical difference between boys and girls on those fronts, she said, are very small.
—Consider math. Another popularly cited statistic comes from a 1981 study that showed seventh grade boys scored above 700 when given the SAT outpaced seventh grade girls with the same high scores by 14 to 1. But Eliot said the study continued over time and today the ratio is only 2.8 to 1 in favor of boys.
Eliot’s bottom line argument is that men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus, as the popular book title claims. A better analogy, she said, was “Men are from North Dakota, women are from South Dakota.” In other words, they are more alike than different.
But then she went on to argue, among other things, that single sex education can at best be a band-aid solution, that education impacts really cannot be scientifically studied and that test score gains in single gender schools are likely the result of a “placebo” effect resulting from excitement around a new educational program.
Sax said Eliot apparently has not read studies on the impact of single gender education and didn’t know what she was talking about. He also blasted the Times article, saying it was inaccurate and unfairly tried to portray the debate over gender-based instruction as a political fight between liberals and conservatives.
I’d love to hear from readers that either work at Dayton’s two single-gender schools or have kids attending those schools. If that’s you, give us your reaction in the comments.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Teaching and Learning
What’s that mushroom cloud over Dayton?
The best line of the day at the Hechinger Institute’s seminar for education reporters on covering teacher contract negotiations today came from Sue Taylor, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers.
When the issue of urban enrollment declines came up, Taylor cautioned the group that Ohio’s numbers reflect more than just out-migration from people moving out of the Midwest. City school districts are also getting smaller becuase charter schools have grabbed a chunk of their students.
In Taylor’s view, this is not a good thing.
“You have to remember that Ohio is the Chernobyl of charter schools,” she said, referencing the Russian nuclear power plant explosion and its destructive fallout in 1986.
Taylor said she describes Ohio charters that way because “the vast majority are miserable failures” when it comes to academic performance.
Of course, Dayton is not just the biggest charter school city in Ohio, it’s tops in the nation after New Orleans (which has largely been remade as primarily a charter school district following Hurricane Katrina.)
So I guess, following Taylor’s analogy, we’ve been educationally vaporized. Something tells me there are a few people in Dayton that would disagree.
Permalink | Comments (5) | Post your comment | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice
More perspective on sick days
I’m in Chicago today at a seminar run by the Hechinger Institute for Education and the Media, a fabulous non-profit housed at Columbia University that helps reporters better understand issues in education. Tomorrow I will be at the annual conference of the Education Writers Association, an national organization of journalists who cover education.
Since the Hechinger seminar is focused on teacher union contract negotiations, I took the opportunity today to ask about sick days.
As you may know, we’ve had a little discussion here about teacher sick days and whether Dayton Public Schools’ average over the past few years of 6.5 to 7.9 sick days per person is typical or above average.
In the comments, several teachers have made the case that those averages are to be expected. The arguments have ranged from “sick kids make sick teachers” to “teachers are over worked” to “teacher sick time can’t be compared to non-teachers.”
In the course of discussion, Cincinnati teachers union President Tim Kraus vouched for the third point.
Kraus gave an example. He said his union is often attacked for being greedy because of a contract provision that allows teachers to be paid out a full day’s pay for every two unused sick days. So veteran teachers who retire often get a big cash payout if they stockpiled a lot of unused sick days.
But Kraus pointed out that the provision allowing that ended up in the union’s contract as a swap. Teachers got the sick leave payout in exchange for taking small raises for several years. So Kraus argues it is not a matter of greed. It was a tradeoff that worked for both sides.
His point was this — depending on what was negotiated and why, sick time can mean different things in different contracts. And what is routine in district might seem extreme in others.
So back to Dayton, how good is its sick time provision? It looks pretty good on paper.
Dayton allows teachers to accumulate or take up to 15 sick days a year. Using this tool I found only seven of the 50 biggest districts in the country allow as many as 15 sick days a year. Most give nine or 10. Some give as few as five or six sick days a year.
Meanwhile, looking at Dayton’s contract (you can find it here), the sick provision otherwise appears pretty routine. I did note that the language does not list “mental health” days off as a permitted use for sick time, as some teachers argued in the comments.
I’ve got some more poking around to do on this issue and then I’ll report back.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Shook: Prevailing wage might increase bidders
Dayton schools’ new construction manager has rejected an argument against paying union wages on school projects and responded that higher wages might increase the number of bidders in a letter to contractors.
And school board President Yvonne Isaacs said that argument could persuade the board to take a second look at the idea of requiring union wages on its projects.
The letter was written by Vincent Corrado, the chief executive officer of Shook Construction, one of two companies now leading Dayton’s 10-year, $627 million school construction program. His letter was in response to a March 24 letter from Kathleen Somers, President of Associated Builders and Contractors, Inc., of the Ohio Valley, a non-union contractors group.
In November, that group launched a radio campaign on six stations to focus public attention on the board, which it said was considering requiring that contractors pay “prevailing wage” pay rates offered by unions. The group wanted the board to leave in place current bidding criteri allowing contractors to set their own wages. At the time, Isaacs said the district had no plans to change course.
Sommers and Corrado met in March and afterward Somers’ letter argued that the district risked a big hike in construction costs if it required union wages and that such a move would discourage bidders who could potentially save the district money.
In his answer, Corrado argued that wages are only a small part of construction costs for a project and that requiring better wages could make the district’s projects more attractive to union-affiliated local companies, who might still make a low bid.
Corrado said he was not advocating for the board to make a change. “It’s not our decision,” he said. “We’re trying to give them as much information as possible.”
Isaacs said the board has not had any formal discussions about prevailing wage, but that it was open to considering it.
“We are very diligent about staying on budget,” she said. “But we are interested in finding ways to utilize more local workforce, including minorities and disadvantaged businesses and people. If there is a way we can increase that, we’re all about doing it.”
Isaacs said the board would consider proposals from unions that don’t raise construction costs but increase local participation.
“The board is concerned about the fact that outside companies are taking these dollars and leaving the city,” she said.
There is no timeline for discussing a change in policy, she said. Somers could not be reached for comment.
Permalink | Comments (22) | Post your comment | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, School Construction
Marc Dann’s in a tough spot on charter suit
Marc Dann
In today’s paper, I wrote about how a lawsuit against the state could bring Dayton as much as $16 million in much needed cash. Cincinnati sued the state and has won twice on behalf of urban schools, who believe they were cheated out of a combined $50 million by the Ohio Department of Education’s decision to change it charter school enrollment count for funding purposes.
The state potentially has one last chance — an appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court. That’s what the Ohio Board of Education unanimously wants to do — appeal it one more time. That would delay a decision and any possible payments to the school districts for at least another year.
Here’s where things get interesting, though.
Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann serves as the state board’s lawyer. But unlike every other client-attorney relationship, state law gives the lawyer the final call on whether to appeal cases like this to the Supreme Court.
But the politics here are real tricky.
Dann is viewed as anti-charter school because of lawsuits he filed to try to force low perfoming charters to close. He has lots of support from labor unions and has worked closely with teachers unions in the past. Plus, he is allied with Gov. Ted Strickland, a fellow pro-labor Democrat who is not a fan of charter schools.
The big teachers unions will back the urban districts on this. They want those public school systems to get the millions they believe belongs to them. So they may be asking Dann not to move the case forward for another appeal.
But it’s not that easy.
If Dann does not appeal, he’ll have to explain why he is overriding the will of a unanimous state board of education, whom he theoretically works for. His office already is under pressure from an internal sexual harassment scandal. So he probably doesn’t need any other political headaches.
And there is the practical problem for the education department. State board member Carl Wick from Centerville is right that the department does not have $50 million laying around. To pay out now would required deep cuts after the department just cut $100 million from its budget at Strickland’s request.
Dann’s got until May 12 to decide. This should be interesting.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, Dayton Public Schools
DPS teachers: Getting sicker every year
I finally got all the data from Dayton Public Schools regarding teacher illness over the last three years. You might remember this was issue prompted some discussion last month. Here’s what the data shows:
More teachers are getting sick with long-term illnesses.
I defined a long-term illness as 20 consecutive days out sick. It’s important to seperate out these incidents because the district counts a person who is out for an extended period for a serious illness as sick every day that they miss. Here are the number of long-term illness incidents for the past three years:
2005-06: 62
2006-07: 50
2007-07 year to date: 67
So you can see this has been a particularly bad year for long-term illness in the district. It’s hard to know what this means. To some extent, this number may be a result of bad luck. Some years, for whatever reason, more people get seriously ill. It may demonstrate the fact that Dayton has a somewhat older teaching force, especially after laying off hundreds of less experience (and mostly younger) teachers last summer. Or it could show teachers breaking down under the stress of tougher working conditions, as the teachers’ union argues.
The average teacher has been sick more often.
To get a sense of what the typical teacher’s experience with illness is, I asked the district to take out the long-term illness incidents and then divide the number of total sick days that remain by the total number of teachers, counselors and others represented by the teachers’ union. Here’s what those numbers showed:
2005-06: Average number of sick days per person was 6.4
2006-07: Average number of sick days per person was 7.0
2007-08 (projected): If the current trend holds, the average number of sick days per person at the end of the school year will be 7.9
So it seems teachers’ union president Pat Lynch was right when she argued to the school board that teachers are getting sick more often. There has been a 12.9 percent gain in sick days used by her members this year over last, according to the district’s human resources office.
Lynch believes it is because the district has rearranged the school day and eliminated down time and planning periods for many teachers. She also says with so many cuts teachers are breaking down under the stress of doing their own jobs and picking up tasks that others used to do.
This also struck me while looking at the numbers — even 6.4 sick days per year seems like an awful lot for an average. I think I was out sick twice last year and I can’t remember a year I was out more than four times for non-extended illnesses. The data sugggests for every person who missed no days for illness there was someone who might have missed 10 or more.
I’d like to know what you (especially Dayton teachers who read GOTB) think of these numbers. Share your thoughts in the comments.
(Image credit: Dazoo)
Permalink | Comments (31) | Post your comment | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Are American schools getting a bad rap?
Jay Mathews
That’s what Jay Mathews of the Washington Post says. Mathews looks at the often-cited international comparisons and finds lots of apples-to-oranges problems and other issues. In some cases, popular knocks on American education, he says, are flat out wrong.
Yes, China and India put out a lot of engineers, Mathews writes. But not as many as the U.S. and the best of theirs were largely educated here. Meanwhile, the millions of poor kids in those countries would envy the quality of education offered to everyone here.
And Mathews argues that the bad American schools make up only a small portion of the nation’s public schools, most of which are doing very well. It’s the fact that the bad schools do very badly that drags the overall numbers down.
Give Mathews essay a read and let us know what you think. Are you buying his argument that the problems in American education are overblown?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Post your comment | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Va. Tech aftermath: The other victims
On Sept. 11, 2001, I was supposed to work a late shift. Somewhere between 8:15 and 8:30 a.m. I departed my back porch for a five-mile run.
I have said many times I walked down those steps in one world and back up them into a completely different world.
In those pre-iPod days, I was actually listening to the radio in my headphones as I finished and heard tell of the attacks just as I was walking back up those steps to my house. I walked in, flipped on the television and stood there stunned for several minutes before I called my brother in New York City and my parents in Los Angeles.
I grew up in New Jersey, just 45 minutes from New York City. As a kid, I rooted for New York sports teams, watched New York television news each night, read New York newspapers and made occassional trips into the city. As the story of that day unfolded, the attack felt strangely personal. Even though I hadn’t lived in the New York area in a decade.
I’ve thought from time to time since about this phenomenon — collateral damage that more “removed” victims of these sorts of tragedies feel, even if they are not among the frontline victims and their friends and families.
In the Journal News, a suburban New York newspaper, columnist Sam Borden revists the Virginia Tech tragedy through the eyes of some of its athletes. It’s a gripping narrative, and really gives a glimpse of what the aftermath of something like this is like for regular kids who were not directly affected.
Because they feel it too.
Permalink | Comments (11) | Post your comment | Categories: Colleges and Universities
Charter funding lawsuit headed to Supreme Court
Last year I wrote about how state lawmakers stepped in to stop a settlement deal that would have brought $14 million to Dayton to correct what urban districts insist was an improper revision of the way their money is re-routed to charter schools.
On behalf of urban districts, Cincinnati schools sued and won but the state appealed. The appeals court has now reaffirmed the lower court decision that the state owes urban school districts somewhere in the neighborhood of $50 million.
But the Ohio Board of Education last week decided to appeal again, this time to the Ohio Supreme Court.
So the case lives on. I wonder what it would mean for Dayton if it suddenly received $14 million. How would they use it? Would it affect the plan for a fall levy? I guess there’s no reason to worry about that now.
Permalink | Comments (7) | Post your comment | Categories: Charter Schools and School Choice, Dayton Public Schools
School tear down update
(Demolition at Cleveland Elementary School in 2005)
The Roosevelt High School demolition had been scheduled to begin Tuesday, but it has now been put off to May 1. I did not get an explanation for the delay.
Meanwhile, in today’s paper I wrote about a compromise plan to save part of Wilbur Wright Middle School that seems to have gained some traction both within the district and with the neighborhood and alumni groups trying to save the school.
Julienne High School supporters also have seen Lacey’s approach, which involves keeping some exterior walls and other elements of the original schools and building new structures behind them, and are at least open to discussing using it at Julienne.
But whatever is going to happen needs to happen fast. School board President Yvonne Isaacs made it clear she does not want this debate to roll on much past May 1. Stay tuned.
(Image credit: Chris Stewart, DDN)
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Dayton Public Schools, School Construction
Parents: Volunteer … or else
(Parent volunteer Charmaine Trayvick with fourth-grader Kevin Russell at the Richard Allen charter school’s Edgemont campus in 2006.)
Sandra Williams, a Cleveland Democrat, wants to help schools with a bill she proposed last week in the Ohio legislature. She wants parents spending more time in their kids’ schools.
So why is the ex-head of the a suburban Cleveland Parent Teacher Organization calling the bill a “stupid idea?”
Here’s what Williams proposed — a $100 fine for any parent who doesn’t log at least 13 volunteer hours each year at their child’s school.
“This is just one of those stupid ideas that surface every now and then,” Elizabeth Papp Taylor, former council president of the Shaker Heights Parent Teacher Organization told the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “It will get crushed.”
Williams’ bill says parents who don’t put in the hours and don’t pay the fine will have $100 reduced from any income tax refund they are due to receive.
Taylor and other advocates of volunteering say that it simply is not something that can be mandated. People either feel the call to volunteer or they don’t. To force those who don’t to spend 13 hours in school is a formula for disaster, they say. Some of those folks probably shouldn’t be there if they don’t want to be. They may be more of a burden than a help to the school.
And then there are those who simply cannot be there because of their work schedules. This bill, critics say, is unfair to them.
I am fortunate to have a pretty flexible schedule so I regularly volunteer about an hour a week in my daughter’s first grade class. But my wife works in a school herself and simply is never available during school hours as much as she’d like to volunteer. Now imagine she were a single parent or perhaps had to have a second job to make ends meet. That would seem to make volunteering impossible for her.
Just about everyone would agree that parents spending time in their kids’ schools usually will benefit everyone — the student, the parent and the school. But is this well-meaning bill simply impractical? And if so, is there a substitute approach that might work? Tell us what you think.
(Image credit: Chris Stewart, DDN)
Permalink | Comments (20) | Post your comment | Categories: The Parent-Teacher Divide
Survey results: What do they mean?
I dug a little deeper today into the school questions on the survey announced yesterday that was conducted by Wright State University.
For those who want to see the actual questions, you can read them by following the “continued” link. I also included cross tabs showing how key demographic groups — divided by neighborhood, income, race, homeownership and education level — responded to the question of how they would rate the quality of Dayton schools.
There are some interesting additional insights:
—The education questions could be more specific. They do not even mention charter schools or list charters as an option when asking people what kinds of non-DPS schools their kids attend. Some people actually don’t understand that charter schools are public schools but not part of the school district. Some think they either are district schools or private schools.
—It is interesting that the district’s quality rating has made a statistically significant jump from 2001 to the present. That is the very time period during which charter schools exploded. It is hard to know if the two are correlated in any way or if this is just a coincidence. That time period also coincides with the reign of Gail Littlejohn and Kids First. But again, it’s hard to know whether it is fair to draw the conclusion that this means city residents felt Kids First made things better.
Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce President Phil Parker pointed out to me that the district did have some big changes that could be viewed as successes from 2001 to 2007: Voters swept out the pre-Kids First school board, Percy Mack and Stan Lucas were hired, the bond levy passed, the district emerged from academic emergency with test score gains, new schools were built and new school options (DECA, boys and girls schools, etc.) were launched.
—It’s also hard to know what to make of the survey’s results showing people cited the construction of new schools as a reason for why they are rating the district’s quality better. Have people visited the schools and judged them better equipped to educate kids? Or do people just feel better about the district when crumbling old buildings are replaced by shiny new ones? We cannot tell from the survey results, but I’d sure like to know.
—The racial divide is again evident in the cross tabs. First, black survey respondents were far more likely to rate the district high compared to white repondents. Then neighborhoods with more black residents rated the quality of schools much higher than neighborhoods with more white residents.
—One other interesting tidbit: The more money and education respondents had, the less likely they were to consider the district high quality. So it was lower income and less educated respondents who thought the district was good or excellent.
Take a look at the questions and cross tabs and let us know what you think:
School-related survey questions:
1) How many children live in your household who are old enough to go to school, K-12?
Zero 77.5 pct
One 10.8 pct
Two 6.6 pct
Three 3.1 pct
Four 0.9 pct
Five 0.7 pct
Six 0.2 pct
2) How many of these children attend Dayton Public Schools?
Zero 8.9 pct
One 7.1 pct
Two 3.3 pct
Three 1.8 pct
Four 0.6 pct
Five 0.3 pct
Six 0.1 pct
3) Why don’t all your children attend Dayton Public Schools?
Private school 3.6 pct
Parochial School 1.1 pct
Does not live in the city of Dayton limits 0.7 pct
Does not like the city of Dayton school system 3.2 pct
Other 1.5 pct
4) Would you rate the quality of Dayton Public Schools as:
Excellent 5.7 pct
Good 21.8 pct
Fair 26.2 pct
Poor 38.8 pct
Don’t know/refused 12.8 pct
5) Why do you rate them this way (Excellent or Good)?
Positive personal experience 13 pct
They are trying to make improvements 6.3 pct
Good teachers 2 pct
Other 3.6 pct
Don’t know/refused 2.6 pct
6) Why do you rate them this way (Fair or Poor)?
Media/Word of mouth 10.1 pct
Low proficiency test scores 12.7 pct
Poor budget management 4 pct
Lack of training for teachers 3.3 pct
Not enough teachers 1.4 pct
Lack of discipline 6 pct
Other 20.4 pct
Don’t know/refused 2.5 pct
7) Who do you believe sets policy and operates Dayton Public Schools? Would you say:
The Dayton mayor and commission 14.6 pct
Someone else 70.5 pct
Don’t know/Refused 14.8 pct
Cross tabs by key demographics
Neighorhoods: Percent who said Dayton Public Schools was excellent or good
Northwest 43.5 pct
Innerwest 47.6 pct
Southwest 45 pct
FROC 27.9 pct
Northeast 19.7 pct
Southest - North 25 pct
Southest - South 23.3 pct
Race: Percent who said Dayton Public Schools was excellent or good
Black 45 pct
White 22.2 pct
Other 26.6 pct
Income: Percent who said Dayton Public Schools was excellent or good
Household income less than $15,000 43.7 pct
Household income between $15,001 and $25,000 39.9 pct
Household income between $25,001 and $35,000 33.1 pct
Household income between $35,001 and $45,000 30 pct
Household income between $45,001 and $55,000 21 pct
Household income between $55,001 and $75,000 23 pct
Household income between $75,001 and $85,000 16.7 pct
Household income over $85,000 13.1 pct
Home ownership: Percent who said Dayton Public Schools was excellent or good
Homeowners 29.7 pct
Renters 35.8 pct
Education level: Percent who said Dayton Public Schools was excellent or good
Less than a high school education 38.8 pct
High school graduate or GED 38 pct
Some college or technical school 29 pct
College graduate 23.8 pct
Post graduate work or degree 20.3 pct
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Satisfaction with DPS at nine-year high
(Then-third grader Sierra Downey holds a brick at a ceremony in 2005 marking a construction milestone at Kiser Elementary School)
The opening of seven new schools the past two years across the city has helped lift public perception of the school district’s quality to a nine-year high in a new survey. The survey, conducted by Wright State University’s Center for Urban and Public Affairs in six of the past nine years, mostly examines residents’ perceptions of the city but includes a few questions about schools.
When respondents were asked to rate the quality of the district, 31.3 percent said it was “excellent” or “good.” That’s the highest rating since the survey began, when 29.6 percent rated the district that high in 1997. Confidence fell, however, to a low of 24.1 percent in 2001 following a major financial crisis.
The study’s authors said the seven-point gain was statistically significant and reported many respondents cited the construction of new schools when asked why they felt the schools were doing well. Seven new schools have opened in the past three years and eight more will open by the end of next school year under the district’s construction program.
“It is indeed an improvement over the most recent surveys we’ve had over the past 10 years,” Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce President Phil Parker said. “It’s good that there is a perception out there that we are finally moving to neighborhood schools. That’s what people tell us they want.”
Superintendent Percy Mack said the district clearly has work to do to raise the number even higher — 68.7 percent rated the district “fair” or “poor” — but he said a three-survey trend showing more confidence in the district is an unmistakable signal that the public believes Dayton schools are doing better.
“Our whole team — staff and students and everybody — has been working very hard to turn around the perception of the district,” he said. “I am excited for everybody. That’s a trend you want to have. Hopefully it will continue to grow for us.”
In 2002, city voters overwhelmingly approved a bond issue to raise $245 million for the local share of a $627 million state and locally funded program to rebuild Dayton’s schools. Mack said the feedback on the new schools had been positive.
“We’ve had record numbers of people at our open houses to see the schools their taxes are paying for and they’ve had very good reviews,” he said.
The survey was conducted in late 2007, after last year’s defeat of a 15.17-mill operating levy and $30 million in program cuts that followed. A new levy try is expected this fall.
Parker said a smaller levy might have done better last year and that the survey shows the public sees improvement in the schools. And that is a good sign for the city.
“You can’t have a great city and not have good to great schools,” he said. “It just doesn’t happen.”
(Image credit: Ty Greenlees, DDN)
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Ever wonder what the kids think?
Sometimes on a job like this you get insights from the most unexpected places.
Even when you visit a lot of schools, as I do, you’re always seeing them as a visitor. So often you are seeing the school in the equivalent of it’s Sunday best. A keen observer will pick up on clues as to what things are really like in a school and no dog-and-pony show can completely disguise reality. You have to trust your instincts.
But what if, instead, you could get an independent, unbiased insider’s report on a particular school? What if someone you knew could tell you what it was really like on the inside, but didn’t have any axe to grind?
I sort of stumbled onto such a source a couple months ago.
That’s when I met a young man who is a graduate of Dayton Public Schools. He works at a local business I frequent and we’ve struck up a friendship. This young man is in his 20s and now working his way through college.
One day he told me the story of his DPS school experience. Growing up in the city, he attended church-run schools until high school. That’s when he made a big mistake and was asked to leave, prompting a transfer to a city high school.
It was his first public school, he told me. Overall, he said, it wasn’t as bad as some had told him it would be. He was able to finish high school and he did just fine. But there were a few things that jumped out at him, he said. The students were less close-knit and there were more conflicts. There was more bad language and some unruliness that would never have been tolerated at the private school he attended. There was racial tension.
But here was the big thing that shocked him about his new school — the difference in leadership. The principal of his new school has a reputation for being able to relate to the kids on their level. The first time he saw this, my friend said the principal was mixing it up with a couple students who had been goofing off in the hallway. The principal was not shouting at them, but chewing them out somewhat. The principal was not using bad language but was talking in a slang the kids use.
To my friend, the approach was improper. He’s the big thing I remember him saying — “The principal should not talk the way the students talk. The principal should set an example.”
Now, the ability to speak to the students in their language is a useful talent and it has its place. And discipline sometimes requires creative strategies. But I see my young friend’s point. Above all, a principal should set an example and model appropriate, adult behavior.
Have you seen teachers or principals who talk like the students? When does it work and not work?
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Charter schools: Benefit or bane?
Jon Husted and Clayton Luckie
Two local legislators, two points of view about charter schools.
On Monday, Ohio House Speaker, R-Kettering, visited Pathway School of Discovery, along the city’s border with Huber Heights off State Route 202, to accept an achievement award from a charter school organization whose president called Husted the group’s “best friend.”
A couple hours earlier, state Rep. Clayton Luckie, D-Dayton, held press conference at the Kleinger Road site of a new charter school arguing that the school does not deserve to open next fall and complaining that it will hurt the city school district.
Virginia-based Imagine Schools wants to open a 300-student charter school for grades K-3 in the former Northwood Nursing Home next fall. Luckie said two of Imagine’s six Ohio charter schools are rated in “academic watch” and “academic emergency” for poor test performance.
Luckie, a former Dayton school board member, said he intends to introduce a bill in the legislature that would block charter school companies from opening more schools if they have any schools in those bottom rating categories.
“Here we go bringing another non-performing charter school into Dayton,” Luckie said.
Dayton, with more than 6,500 kids attending 35 charter schools, has the highest percentage of students attending charters in the state and the second highest percentage in the nation.
At Pathway, Husted was given the “Putting Kids First” award from the Ohio Coalition for Quality Education, an association of more than 100 Ohio charter schools. He said he would oppose the bill Luckie suggested because it could block good charter school companies from coming to the state.
“It would keep quality schools out of Ohio,” he said. “We have standards — tougher standards for charter schools than for traditional public schools. If a charter school doesn’t perform it gets closed down.”
Luckie said that has not happened — low scoring charters have remained open except where Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, has sued them to force their closure.
“The only person closing schools in Ohio is Marc Dann,” Luckie said. “The Department of Education has not done it.”
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PACE leaders built bridges
Bonnie Smith and Daria Dillard Stone
I remember when Bonnie Smith became the first city school district principal to take a job at a charter school back in 1999. To be frank, people thought she was nuts.
Why would anyone throw away a good career with a public school district to take a chance with some fly-by-night charter school outfit? That’s what her former friends said to each other. This was a time when charter schools, by their mere existence and because of who was backing them, were seen as an assault on public schools and the people that believed in them. Some of Smith’s former colleagues stopped speaking to her.
In Saturday’s paper I wrote about PACE, a group Smith helps run that led Dayton into the school choice era. And the city has come a long way from those early days of extreme distrust.
Why did Smith leave the relative comfort of Dayton Public for the chaos of the early charter school movement? For a couple reasons. Growing up in Dayton, Smith said, the limits of the school system always bothered her. You went to school where they told you to go. No questions asked. Working within the system, Smith found the bureacracy similarly limiting professionally.
At the Dayton Academy, Smith ran one of Dayton’s biggest schools with more than 1,000 students in grades K-8 at the time. But running a charter had its peaks and valleys, too, she found.
Then in 2000, she came to PACE, a job that perfectly matched to her experience, knowledge and passion. The goal was to rebuild trust and build bridges between public schools and choice schools. The war between the two, the PACE folks felt, was only making it harder for parents trying to sort through their options.
At PACE, Smith paired up with Daria Dillard Stone. There is no other way to describe Stone than simply an evangelist for PACE and its goals. Stone disarms people with hugs and prayers and a deep personal belief that informed parents will match kids with the right schools and make for a better educated city.
But what they needed first was credibility. Remember how hostile public and choice schools were toward each other at first? Smith and Stone responded by refusing to play favorites even while promoting choice. They knew the public schools as well as the private and charter sectors and when kids were better served in the school district that’s what Smith and Stone told their parents.
Today, you see public schools showing up with booths at PACE’s annual school expo. At PACE’s downtown office, you’ll find Smith tapping her district contacts to solve problems for city schools parents. At times Smith and Stone have even taken big problems directly to the top. And Superintendent Percy Mack answers their calls.
Besides the Expo and private school scholarships, PACE today hosts Parents Network events and training sessions, links families with social services and distributes school chooser information.
Smith and Stone, along with finance chief George Loney, are perhaps more responsible than anyone for bringing Dayton’s now wide-ranging education marketplace together.
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10 years ago, PACE sparked change in Dayton
(The PACE staff in its downtown office)
Michael and Marsha Russell had two children at Holy Angels School and were stretched thin to make tuition payments in 1999 when they heard talk about a group called PACE.
“We were both working parents at the time just trying to make it,” Michael Russell said. “We were looking for ways to help out with tuition.”
Their timing could not have been better. Parents Advancing Choice in Education, a fledgling group with financial backing from school choice advocates, was just getting off the ground with a plan to offer partial scholarships for needy families that wanted their kids to go to private schools.
Today the Russell kids — Michael II and Miesha — still use PACE scholarships at Chaminade Julienne High School. Both hope to go to college. Michael II, a freshman, wants to study computer engineering and Miesha, a sophomore, is interested in law.
“Probably I don’t have the problems the parents of most 15 and 16 year olds are going through,” Michael Russell said. “I think that it’s the help from Holy Angeles and C-J and the Christian lifestyle we are raising them with.”
When it launched in 1998, privately-funded PACE was a rare example of a program designed to help parents overcome the cost obstacles to giving their kids the type of education the family desired. Pre-dating charter schools, PACE was also Dayton’s first foray into a school choice program.
A decade later, PACE has helped 6,000 kids attend private schools with about $9 million in scholarships. And the city’s now vast array of school choice options include more than 30 charter schools along with both publicly-funded vouchers and the PACE scholarships available for parents who want private schools.
The new options have completely re-made Dayton into nationally-recognized school choice Mecca. And PACE was an early catalyst for change.
Daria Dillard Stone, PACE’s program manager since 2000, said the group’s mission from the start was ambitious — to change the city’s culture and empower parents.
“Our goal has always been to educate parents so they can better educate kids,” she said. “We’ve got to stop blaming everyone for how the children are turning out.”
Bernadette O’Connor has five children and none of them has used a PACE scholarship to attend a private school.
But O’Connor credits PACE with helping her kids get quality school experiences, even if they took different paths.
“They have been a tremendous resource for me,” she said. “The biggest thing is to have somebody I can go to and get the support I need.”
PACE began as a political movement. It was the brainchild of Checker Finn, the Dayton native and national advocate for school choice with the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.
Frustrated with the poor performance of Dayton Public Schools in the mid-1990s, Finn joined business and community leaders to press for new options to give parents choices, and privately-funded scholarships was their first effort.
Funders included Fordham, the Mathile Family Foundation, the Berry Foundation and the Louise Kramer Foundation. An infusion of $1.5 million from the Childrens’ Scholarship Fund, financed primarily from the Walton Family’s Wal-Mart fortune, helped the program grow from 542 scholarships in 1999 to a peak of 901 in 2002.
But PACE recognized a need for more than just scholarships.
“We realized we’ve got to help parents navigate school choice and understand their options,” said program manager Daria Dillard Stone.
Freshly recruited from the Urban League in 2000, Stone set out to build relationships and trust. PACE began the Parents’ Network, a program designed to offer parents services and guide their choices. Today all families with scholarships are required to attend network meetings, but they attract many more. And with an expanded staff of eight, PACE now works to connect families with services and even prepare kids for college.
Even-handed advice about all schools — public, private and charter — was a key to building credibility, both with families and with the schools themselves, Stone said.
“The public school system was not the best it could be,” she said. “They needed competition. We were never after public schools, but we did help make them better in the long run.”
For O’Connor, PACE’s advice helped her find the right schools for her kids. Early on, they attended Christian schools and for a time she home schooled before a stint in public schools that didn’t work out.
But it was PACE that counseled O’Connor to consider Stivers School for the Arts, a top rated district middle and high school.
“I didn’t realize what Stivers was all about,” she said. “That worked out real well for my kids.”
Her oldest, 21-year-old William, has just graduated Sinclair Community College. Rita, 19, is headed to Wright State. Jesse, 17, and Shannon, 13, still attend Stivers. But then there was Jubilee, 8, who may yet go to Stivers but found a good fit starting out at Pathway School of Discovery, a charter school.
“They’ve been a tremendous resource for me,” O’Connor said of PACE.
Families like O’Connors bolster PACE. The group has only just begun to try to track outcomes for the students it helps. In 2003, PACE began following up with former scholarship students who go on to college to see if they demonstrate with data that the program helps kids make it though school and graduate.
“If it weren’t working, we wouldn’t be in business,” said Bonnie Smith, PACE’s program director. “We don’t advertise. There are no billboards, no media, no radio. But people keep coming in the door every day.”
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Flunking at school? Get banned from fun
The New York Times has an interesting story today about a trend in some suburban districts to ban kids from all activities and sports when their grades slip.
This is a controversial idea. Some believe it is activities — whether a sport, an instrument or a club — that helps engage some kids in school. I know many coaches who swear that they know kids who would have flunked out except that they wanted so badly to play football or basketball. Staying eligible for sports motivated them to do enough to graduate.
But others see the low bar many districts set to earn participation in activities — some area districts will let you play a sport with a grade point average below 2.0 — as a warped sort of reward and believe kids with low grades are better motivated by denying them extracurriculars.
Way back in 1999, I visited Taft High School in Cincinnati for a story about proficiency testing. The school tried this sort of approach. Freshman who did not pass the state test were banned from taking anything but the core subjects until they passed. So rather than get music, art or gym they got a second section of math or other extra study.
I never met a more miserable group of kids in my life. And at least in that case, it didn’t work. The school’s scores remained low and dropout rate high until a new principal came in and began trying innovative programs, such as internships with local businesses, that went in the opposite direction and tried to give kids a reason to come to school.
That’s just one example. The folks at the school featured in the Times story feel like the strict approach is working. Which way would you go?
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It’s been a good ride for GOTB
Just a quick note to pass on some more good news about the blog. Last night, GOTB was named Best Blog for 2007 by Cox Newspapers, the company that owns the Dayton Daily News.
This is another very nice honor for this blog. Cox owns about 40 newspapers, big and small, across the country. The company has been a leader in Internet journalism and boasts several hundred blogs, and among them are many very, very good ones. Our flagship paper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, has more than 60 blogs, for instance, including several excellent ones. And our own DDN website has at least a dozen outstanding blogs among its online offerings.
This is GOTB’s second journalism award this year and fourth overall. I have always said the key ingredient that makes this blog interesting is the particular community of intelligent readers and thoughtful commenters that are regulars here. It was particularly gratifying this time to see the judges specifically cite quality reader comments as a reason for making the award.
So once again, congratulations to YOU. Here are the judges’ gracious comments about GOTB:
“Scott Elliott’s “Get on the Bus” blog puts local education in the broader context with fearless posts that address kidnapping, sex education, race and other issues that face Dayton and the rest of the nation.
Elliott brings focus to these issues with a unique blend of facts and observation. His post on kidnapping included statistics that put the chances of kidnapping in context to being struck by lightning and other singular events. His post on racial division included a history of “white flight” and a post about challenges to Dayton schools revealed the emotional story of “Ciara” a child unable to speak at a public school. Each post is as compelling as it is unique.
In short, Elliott sees larger stories in the commonplace events of our lives. Equally as important, the audience responded with insightful and thought-provoking comments far beyond any other entrant in this category. Some of the posts ran about as long as Elliott’s original, building upon points he had made.”
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Superintendents are the new rock stars
You know what happens when a job gets more and more demanding to the point where a lot of potential candidates say “forget it” but there are still several big employers who need to fill the position?
It’s basic supply and demand — the good people willing to do the work are going cost more.
According to this story that’s what has happened to school superintendents. And the most sought after candidates have become “rock stars” of sorts in the profession, making big money and demanding increasingly exorbident working conditions.
Dayton’s superintendent Percy Mack does not qualify as a rock star. At least not yet.
Here in Dayton Mack is well compensated compared to you and I, but his salary fits in where you would expect when compared to the other large urban superintendents in the state. And he has some perks but nothing like the luxuries cited in the story from others around the country.
Since his flirtation with Mobile, Ala., last fall, Mack has insisted he is not job hunting. But you have to think he remains a potentially attractive candidate for a large district.
His resume boasts a lot of improvements in Dayton in his time here in terms of measures like test scores and graduation rate. And a lot of people would credit him for at least some internal reforms that made things better. And he has big district experience from DeKalb, Ga.
But in Mobile Mack was hurt by last May’s levy defeat. And he is now managing a district in continuing financial crisis. Another levy defeat in November could be damaging to the district’s long term health.
Make has consistently said he is not seeking the rock star treatment. He might like to be closer to his Georgia roots, which is why he said he consider Mobile, but he says he is not shopping for a better gig. Still, I figure he has got to get occassional calls from some of the big guns.
What do you think of the phenomenon of rock star superintendents?
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