Buckle Up As We’re In For a Bumpy Ride
Fissures between the teacher unions (or “associations”) and Delaware school districts are beginning has show up in Christina over the Race to the Top plans for the Glasgow High School and Stubbs Elementary. Plans (Glasgow pdf, Stubbs pdf) are to be submitted today by the Christina School District to the state, but the Christina Education Association refused to sign on stating that “the district has involved us in a process that, while cordial, was not a true partnership.” The district disagrees. I’m guessing here, but it all comes down to the wording on a chart the union finds the wording “offensive and inflammatory”.
-Diversity and cultural competency among staff is lacking
-Belief that all students can succeed is inconsistent or sometimes absent altogether
-Prior student histories impact placement and student expectations
Are more disagreements like this in the cards for the future? Do you know what plans your school district has in regards to Race to the Top?
Tags: Christina School District, Delaware, Education, Race To The Top
“-Prior student histories impact placement and student expectations”
I assume that this deals with not pidgin holing kids, which is admirable. But it shows the type of impossible situation that teachers find themselves in.
Frickin’ part of it is NCLB’s punative model – blame the teacher for student performance as solely measured by testing –no matter what. DSEA freely admits that teachers try to get the hell out of high-povery and low-performing schools ASAP. They lose their jobs if their students fail to show improvement measured by tests relative to the performance of all students across the state and beyond…
Stubbs got rid of 75% of their teachers last year and rehired going into this reform model. Are all of these new teachers supposed to sign onto a document that is basically saying they are intolerant bigots?
The same for Glasgow HS. Their reform model offers high hopes for improvement. I witnessed GHS teachers and students flooding a Christina School Board meeting in support of their school. Do they need these insults that try to blame low performance on poor attitudes of the teachers alone?
Off topic if I may – Christina Board member [elizabethscheinberg.blogspot.com] blogs about whether the district should pay the utilities for a school-based health center in the old Sarah Pyle School building that also houses the distict HQ. I say – Yes, it is a good idea for CSD to help support this health care access site on the eastside.
This was discussed, studied and formally recommended to the State over a decade ago when the Neighborhood Schools Act was determined to likely concentrate poverty in Wilmington’s elementary schools, severely weaken the education environment and exacerbate the ethnic achievement gap without some remedy and intervention. You should read the report commissioned by city government in 2000. The State ignored it to the peril of a generation of city children and their now-failing schools.
Models for expanded community services like a health center were cited in the report of the Wilmington Neighborhood Schools Committee published in January 2001 as Wilmington’s response to House Bill 300, the Neighborhood Schools Act.
(Final Report page 14): “Full Compliment of Services – Many states, cities and communities have developed and implemented models to link schools with a wide range of health, early childhood, extended day, violence prevention and family and community education services. Variously referred to as community schools, full-service schools and family resource centers, these models differ in the scope and variety of services they offer, the ways in which the services are delivered and the arrangements by which they are funded. What they have in common is a belief that schools occupy a position of central importance in communities and, as such, are a logical focal point of bringing together access to the kinds of services, supports, and enrichment activities that both schoolchildren and their families need in order to survive and flourish.
This is particularly true in areas with high concentrations of poverty such as Wilmington. The State has already demonstrated its commitment to school-linked services through the establishment of school-based health centers in high schools.
…common sense and a great deal of anecdotal evidence tell us that students who do not have access to health services, appropriate counseling, and enrichment activities do not enjoy the same opportunities to learn as students who have such access.
…Joy Dryfoos concludes that enough is known about these models to warrant replication.”
[A Look At Community Schools In 1998 – NY: National Center for Schools and Communities, 1998. p.13]
Way too much explaination and excuses for an extremely poor-performing school district. The numbers bear this out. Btw, union teachers rarely, if ever, get ‘fired’ for performance. NCLB was a joke. It basically took real teaching, lesson planning and creativity out of the classroom and replaced it with ‘teaching to the test.’
Forget learning about mathematical problem-solving, organizing a narrative or putting into context the social, political and econimical history of our past; instead, teach the answers to a standardized test that dumbs-down our children at the expense of some equal-outcome ideal.
I’ve talked with many teachers over the last few years and have found that schools that are ‘magnet’ schools attract the parents and students who WANT to go there. More importantly, those same parents basically sign a contract stating they will do x, y and z to ensure their children’s success at said school. This has occurred nationwide, more times than not in poor neighborhoods and cities where crime and poverty is high.
The ‘other’ parents in these ‘magnet’ school areas that don’t push their kids or the school administration/school boards, simply allow their kids to go to school down the block and continue to fail miserably.
It’s not unlike an exterminator ridding a house on the block of rodents. The exterminated house is now rodent-free; however, the rodents are now ‘down the block.’ Likewise with police and crimefighting. Police clean up a nasty street corner or block, but the crime and illegal activity merely moves to another location.
Ultimately, the problem resides in the combination of parent involvement, better school leadership (principals and administrators) and teachers who want to teach without being held back by teachers’ unions. It’s not a money problem. Set the bar high.
How many of us has had a teacher or two who pushed us extemely hard? We resented them for most, if not all of the semester or period, but in the end, we ended up being better educated.
I attended one of the Governor’s road-trip RTTT meetings (Conversations for Stronger Schools). I had some issues to discuss as a parent, which I did, but the meeting was basically packed with teachers who were scared to death about new accountability measures that they didn’t feel they had control over. The series of meetings seems designed for the Governor to explain and clarify RTTT and smooth over relations with educators. They had some very well-articulated concerns, and the Governor, Sec Ed, and several elected officials got quite an earful.
Maybe one day we can talk about the real problem: parent accountability.
Parental Accountability is the problem? No, it is the lack of sound teaching principles. Schools have the children more waking hours than most parents. Schools need to be accountable to parents not the other way around. When schools become accountable to parents and stop pushing them away, results improve.
If you are telling me the schools are completely unable to teach effectively because no matter what we do it comes down to parents, then just abolish them and pay parents 11k a kid to home school or get a private school. I don’t believe that and neither do you.
Successful schools have a strong curriculum, ensure students are tracking the objectives, celebrate effective teachers, have good princples for front line leadership, effective mentorship of new or struggling teachers, have a disciplined and safe learning environment, and yes encourage parents to be involved with learning and keep them informed on progress.
Nemski, indeed I agree. Parent accountability is a huge problem. My spouse is a teacher and I was trained as a teacher (although I’ve always worked in the private sector outside the field of education). It is nearly a full-time job monitoring a child’s education (I wouldn’t want to have it any other way). Sadly, other parents don’t see it that way. They treat school as a means to ‘babysit’ their kids during the day. And they rarely follow-up on their kids’ progress, grades, behavior and attendance. Monitoring a child’s education should be the No. 1 priority for parents.
Another point that gets bantered about is the search for new superintendents in the Christina School District that are not from Delaware. To be sure, one would want a wide search with the best qualified applicants; however, the last two or more superintendents hired by Christina seem to not like Delaware and are only looking to pad their respective resumes and/or looking for better compensation as soon as possible. Thus, why not hire a well-qualified Delawarean who has close ties to the district and community in place of an outsider with weak ties?
Christina still hasn’t recovered from the debacle of that one superintendent in the early 2000s who transferred to a Florida district(and made thousands of more money there) while leaving the CSD in shambles. He has since created more scandal in his new assignment.
Read article HERE regarding former Christina Superintendent. Btw, as important as parent accountability is, teacher accountability (not being able to get rid of ‘bad’ teachers) is the No. 1 problem in education.