School Technical Ideas

A change made by the legislature to a school-choice program could lead to many more children transfering from neighborhood schools considered to be poor performers by the state.

And Palm Beach County School District officials said they will have to foot the bill to transport them to other schools.

The legislature this year expanded the eligibility criteria for schools to qualify for the Opportunity Scholarships choice program, which has existed since 1999. The state program allows students at a school that has been given a poor grade to transfer to another school in the district, or even in another county that has a better grade, similar to the school-choice option provided by the federal No Child Left Behind program.

Barbara Terembes, the district’s choice and career options director, said for years schools were only eligible for students to transfer out if the school got two F grades within the past four years. Students could transfer to a school that had an A, B or C grade.

Under that criteria, no schools in the county qualified in the 2009-2010 school year. Only one school, the Leadership Academy West charter school in West Palm Beach, qualified in 2010-2011 and only one student at that school used it to transfer last year, Terembes said.

But according to state Department of Education spokeswoman Deborah Higgins, students can now transfer to a higher-graded school if their school has received a D or F grade and is considered by the state to be a low performaning school based on criteria such as test scores and student improvement in reading and math. For high schools the determination of eligbility for next year made using their Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test scores since school grades for high school have not yet been released, Higgins said.

Under the new criteria, eight schools will have to offer students the chance to transfer next year, said Nicole Smith, the district’s No Child Left Behind grants compliance specialist. These schools are: Galaxy Elementary School and Boynton Beach High School in Boynton Beach, West Riviera Elementary School in Riviera Beach, Palm Beach Lakes High School in West Palm Beach, K.E. Cunningham/ Canal Point Elementary School in Canal Point, Belle Glade Elementary School and Glades Central High School in Belle Glade and Pahokee Middle-Senior High School in Pahokee.

The number of eligible schools statewide went up from 24 in 2010-2011 to 159 next year, according to a state report.

Terembes said the district is still sending out letters to parents of children at those schools notifying them of the closest schools with A, B and C grades for them to choose from if they want their kids to transfer. Parents have until Aug. 10 to notify the district if they want to move, Terembes said, so the district does not know how many children will use the program to transfer next year.

Much like No Child Left Behind, the school district is required to provide transportation to take students to their new school. But Terembes said No Child Left Behind also comes with federal Title I money that can be used to pay the costs of transporting students longer distances. The Opportunity Scholarship program does not come with any such money at a time when the district is seeking to trim its transportation costs and its overall budget.

Transportation comes out of the district’s budget, Terembes said.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, left, and President Barack Obama greet students at Kalamazoo Central High School’s commencement ceremony in June 2010.

The Sunday New York Times Magazine included a terrific essay on American education reform, and while Kalamazoo wasn’t mentioned, there’s direct application here in Kalamazoo as to the problems and potential solutions referenced in the essay.

The piece was written by Paul Tough, the author of a well-known book about Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone.

Titled “No, seriously: No excuses,” Tough’s essay points out that even in urban schools being held up as national models by President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan,  there remains a pattern of serious underachievement by low-income and minority students.

Tough also suggests that overstating the success of those schools undermines the goal of reformers — which is to have academic proficiency for all students, no excuses.

Tough writes:

So why are some reformers resorting to excuses? Most likely for the same reason that urban educators from an earlier generation made excuses: successfully educating large numbers of low-income kids is very, very hard. But it is not impossible, as reformers have repeatedly demonstrated on a small scale. To achieve systemwide success, though, we need a shift in strategy.

The reformers policy goals are, in most cases, quite worthy. Yes, contracts should be renegotiated so that the best teachers are given incentives to teach in the poorest schools, and yes, school systems should extend the school day and school year for low-income students, as many successful charter schools have done. But these changes are not nearly sufficient. As Paul Reville, the Massachusetts secretary of education, wrote recently in Education Week, traditional reform strategies will not, on average, enable us to overcome the barriers to student learning posed by the conditions of poverty. Reformers also need to take concrete steps to address the whole range of factors that hold poor students back. That doesnt mean sitting around hoping for utopian social change. It means supplementing classroom strategies with targeted, evidence-based interventions outside the classroom: working intensively with the most disadvantaged families to improve home environments for young children; providing high-quality early-childhood education to children from the neediest families; and, once school begins, providing low-income students with a robust system of emotional and psychological support, as well as academic support.

School reformers often portray these efforts as a distraction from their agenda something for someone else to take care of while they do the real work of wrestling with the teachers unions. But in fact, these strategies are essential to the success of the school-reform movement. Pretending they are not is just another kind of excuse.

Tough’s essay should have particular resonance for Kalamazoo-area residents for two reasons. One is that Kalamazoo Central High School is among those schools held up by Obama and Duncan as a national model and yet continues to struggle with poor achievement among poor and minority students.

At the same time, Kalamazoo also is a community attempting the “shift in strategy” that Tough is advocating. Evidence the creation of the Learning Network of Greater Kalamazoo, which is tackling exactly the agenda the column promotes. This summer, for instance, Kalamazoo Public Schools is starting parent-education workshops in three low-income neighborhoods, and project aimed at creating a high-quality universal preschool system in Kalamazoo County.

My column in Tuesday’s Kalamazoo Gazette was drawn from my July 1 post on whether it’s fair to compare test scores from public schools with scores from private schools.

Quick summary: The answer is no.

The biggest reason, I wrote, was the difference in student demographics. To prove the point I looked up the demographic profile of public-school students who took the Michigan Merit Exam in March compared to private school students. And to be honest, the results surprised even me.

OK, the profile of the public-school students was pretty predictable: Of the 107,995 public school juniors who took the MME, 36 percent qualify for the subsidized lunch program; 24 percent are minorities, predominately African-American and Hispanic; 9 percent are classified as disabled, 2.5 percent are not proficient in English and 1 percent are classified as “homeless.”

The shocker was the data on the private-school students.

Since the state didn’t do a collective demographic profile on the private schools, I added up the data for the 16 largest schools, which together enroll 2,388 students, roughly half of the 4,597 private-school test-takers.

Of that group, nine students were classified as “economically disadvantaged.” Not 9 percent. Nine, period. Of 2,399.

Seven students were classified as disabled. Seven.

I was discussing this with a private-school parent, among those who insist that private school routinely enroll low-income and disabled students.

I think the numbers I found gave him pause, and he offered an interesting and plausible explanation: Everything is relative. and private-school parents may well have a more elastic definition of “low income” and/or “disabled” than state officials.

For the state’s purposes, “low-income” is a student who qualifies for the subsidized lunch program. For a family of four, that’s a household income of below $41,348.

But private-school most likely are offering scholarships to students whose families have incomes above that level, and those scholarship students are seen by other families as “low income” — which, no doubt,  they are when compared to other families served by the school.

As for children with disabilities, I’m sure private schools get their share of children with ADD, but it seems clear they aren’t enrolling many children with, say, autism or Down’s Syndrome.  And, yes, in the public schools the autistic and Down’s Syndrome kids are expected to take the MME just like everybody else.

On a related note, the New York Times had an interesting story this week about how charter schools ease out of serving special-needs kids. Here’s a link to the article, which has the headline “Message from charter school: Thrive or transfer.”

An excerpt:

Matthews story raises perhaps the most critical question in the debate about charter schools: do they cherry-pick students, if not by gaming the admissions process, then by counseling out children who might be more expensive or difficult to educate and who could bring down their test scores, graduation rates and safety records?

Kim Sweet, director of Advocates for Children of New York, said she had heard many such stories. When we look at our cases where children are sent away from schools because of disabilities, she said, there are a disproportionate number of calls about charter schools.

BOYNTON BEACH — Whoever plans to make something of the historic 1927 Boynton Beach High School building should be prepared to lease or even buy it, says a staff report written for Monday’s city commission meeting.

The report concurs with one done in May by consultants.

They called renovating and using the building a “very viable” prospect, but said it would cost between $4.6 million and $5.4 million.

Commissioners had, at the time, told staff to start working up requests for proposals.

The consultant has recommended using the building as an education or banquet hall; a multi-tenant complex for office space, retail, food and services such as fitness centers; or an art and culture center with studios and meeting spots.

Consultants had recommended the city start planning to shore up the building; staffers priced design and prep work for that at about $250,000.

The staff also recommended the city be prepared to waive permits and fees up to $100,000 as an incentive to investors.

And the report suggested the city identify public money sources in its call for proposals.

Consultants said that, if green-lighted in time, the new center could open as early as December 2012.