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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > May > 29
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Editorial: Stanic’s legacy is the people he put in charge
Dayton school Superintendent Kurt Stanic was a lucky find.
Two years ago, the school board tapped the experienced school superintendent who had already retired twice from districts near Cleveland and asked him to do something about Dayton’s abysmal test scores.
Mr. Stanic, 59, resisted the board’s overtures to stay permanently. He preferred, he said, a short stint during which he’d focus especially on assessing principals and choosing talented people to put in leadership jobs.
In his two years here, due to expire at the end of next month, he lent an outsider’s eye to Dayton’s problems, made tough decisions with confidence and enhanced the district’s credibility using straight talk.
Mr. Stanic describes his time in Dayton as the most gratifying of his career. He says he likes the Dayton area enough that he is going to stick around for a while. It didn’t hurt that the Montgomery County Educational Service Center has given him a $24,000 contract ($400 a day for 60 days) to consult with area school districts.
In an interview with the Dayton Daily News editorial board, Mr. Stanic made some observations about his time here:
• Looking at the city’s high schools, Mr. Stanic said he was appalled by their poor performance. That compelled him to replace four of six high school principals.
Today he can’t stop bragging about the people leading those schools and the gains they are making, such as across-the-board test score gains at Dunbar High School and a big reduction in dropouts at Belmont High School.
• Mr. Stanic said he identified Lori Ward as his logical successor right away. He is insistent that the district has to constantly identify and groom future leaders, noting that Ms. Ward’s first big challenge is to replace herself with a quality deputy superintendent.
• He said principals have to really know what’s going on in classrooms. He overhauled their jobs by requiring them to get much better at identifying good instruction and mentoring teachers who needed to improve.
• The district’s financing is precarious. With the foreclosure crisis in the city, the district is collecting just 87 percent of the property taxes it is owed. At the same time, schools could face a huge cut in state funding in 2011, as Ohio also struggles with a decline in its tax revenue. Those two trends could converge to cause devastating cutbacks. The district is on track to cut 46 teachers next year.
• Charter schools may decide that being part of the district isn’t so bad. Mr. Stanic believes good charter schools may want partnerships that would place them firmly under the umbrella of Dayton schools. Both sides could benefit, Mr. Stanic said.
He points to the success of the former charter schools, World of Wonder and East End Community School (now Ruskin Elementary), both of which are now part of the district. He said he has had informal discussions at times with several quality charter schools that are struggling financially.
Mr. Stanic has been thoughtful, deliberate and persuasive. He is the first to say much work remains, but he left the district better than he found it.
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Scott Elliott: Ward must let parents have school choices
Soon-to-be Superintendent Lori Ward is working on a plan to convert Dayton to neighborhood-based elementary schools. On paper, assigning kids to a particular school, close to home, makes a lot of sense.
The problem is, people don’t live on paper. In the real world, she could be trapping kids in poor-performing schools or driving more kids out of the district. Unless the rules are flexible and allow parents to look outside their neighborhoods, the idea isn’t going to go over well.
When Ward talks about her vision, she sees as many students as possible attending a good-quality, nearby school, one that’s strongly supported in the neighborhood. There would be little need, she hopes, for parents to shop around, as the district’s goal is to eliminate inequities among schools.
That’s a nice vision, but it’s unrealistic, at least by 2011. There are huge disparities among the city’s elementary schools, which is partly why some parents look beyond the closest school in search of a better one.
On the whole, Dayton’s elementary schools are very low-scoring when measured by state achievement tests.
Consider this: The lowest-rated elementary school in Huber Heights — Monticello Elementary — has a “performance index score” of 91.9, or 3.5 points higher than the Charity Adams Earley Academy for Girls. It’s the best-scoring Dayton elementary school.
All Dayton elementary schools are in the bottom quarter of all schools rated by the state. (The performance index, with a maximum score of 120, represents total test performance across all grades.)
Twelve of 23 Dayton schools that serve elementary grades are in “academic emergency,” Ohio’s lowest rating. No schools rate higher than the third of six rating categories. The low end of Dayton’s scale is very low. Three elementary schools — Rosa Parks, E.J. Brown and Westwood — have index scores below 60, ranking them in the bottom 3 percent of Ohio’s 3,527 schools that received ratings.
There are many reasons. A big one is that most schools have students that come from extreme poverty. Charity Adams Earley, with two-thirds of its girls qualifying as poor, has the fewest poor kids of any elementary school in the city. Ten schools have at least 80 percent who are poor. (For a family of four, that means an annual income of less than $41,000.)
How can Ward tell parents who live near Westwood Elementary School that they must send their children to a school that is among the highest-poverty schools in the city and one of the worst-scoring schools in the state?
Ward will counter that those parents could apply to one of three districtwide elementary magnet schools — Charity Adams Earley, Dayton Boys Preparatory Academy or a new Montessori school that will open soon. All are solid options, but three decent choice schools simply isn’t enough.
Ward’s argument that neighborhood schools will, by their very existence, create more community cohesiveness and better support for children is weak. There certainly are benefits to the neighborhood school approach, but they all depend on the local school demonstrating at least a decent level of performance.
Until Dayton gets there, any attendance zone policy will have to offer flexibility. It’s perfectly logical for the district to make the local school each child’s default option. But when parents request something better, the district’s answer simply cannot be a blanket “no.”
If conscientious parents aren’t able to send their children to the school they want, they will look to a handful of decent charter schools or elsewhere. The district can have its attendance zones and head off an exodus with a liberal policy at the start. As the schools improve, the district will have a stronger argument for stricter boundaries.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Columns, Education, Scott Elliott
