The Ugly Truth about Low Performing Schools....

Here is the ugly truth about low performing schools in parts of Escambia County….

We have a community problem and this is dragging down the performance of our local public schools.

I will say it again.  We have a community problem that is dragging down the performance of our local public schools.

Everybody knows it, nobody discusses it in depth, and we do not have the economic resources to extinguish this fire completely. We use half-measures and extreme political correctness to dance around touchy subjects.  This approach is getting us nowhere.

Think about this---What if someone made this comment to you straight-faced: “Doctors and Hospitals in Pensacola must be terrible, as we have the highest levels of obesity, smoking, early mortality, and disability claimants of just about any community in Florida. We need to fix these deficient Hospitals in Pensacola because Doctors and Hospitals in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Cambridge, Massachusetts are so much better!  Minneapolis and Cambridge have the healthiest populations in the country, year over year, so this illustrates the fact their Hospitals and Doctors are much more professional and better trained than our Doctors here!  Our doctors need to be more professional like those doctors up north so our community will be healthier!”

What about this one:

“These Cops around here are terrible!  Look at how high the crime rate is here compared to Beverly Hills.  I wish these cops around here had the same skill, training and professionalism as those cops in Beverly Hills, so we could have a peaceful, safe, low-crime community like Beverly Hills!”

Ridiculous, right?

Of course it is.

And it is just as ridiculous to hear rubes and simpletons claim we in Escambia County public education are abysmal failures, because we’re not as high-performing as Santa Rosa County or St. Johns County, or some other high performing district.

Judging all teachers and an entire school system by the outcomes and outputs of small dysfunctional populations they serve is no more ridiculous than the two previous examples about cops and doctors.  We need students and parents to buy-in!  Education requires participation.

Here are the real problems….

We have entire segments of the population that live in absolute, utter dysfunction.  In many areas it becomes multi-generational, the new normal.  We have poverty that is extreme-but that in and of itself is not the driver of the problems.  Poverty exacerbates the dysfunction.  We have people moving every six weeks to out-run landlords, gaming the entitlement system, having children out of wedlock to increase their welfare benefit checks, refusing to work, “shopping” with their EBT cards for “friends” taking $.50 cents on the dollar to buy liquor, cigarettes, or drugs,  Selling drugs for money, selling themselves for money, and mistreating their own children.  Crime rates soar in these communities, and entire neighborhoods fall into blight.  We have children being raised by relatives because BOTH parents are incarcerated; we had 6,000 child abuse reports last year in Escambia County, placing us in the top 5% of complaints state-wide.  We have children being raised in homes where violence is commonplace, caregivers are having intercourse in front of children, doing drugs in

Interesting Tid-Bits from Last Thursday's Workshop: GK Passage Problems and Yes--Incentive Pay Will Help Keep Teachers in Challenging Schools

One of the most interesting parts of the conversation at this month’s regular workshop was the discussion concerning Warrington Middle School.

I’ve mentored a student once weekly at Warrington, so I have developed a feel for the way things are going at that school this year.  It is challenging, but this school has changed DRAMATICALLY since the 2008-2009 school year when I mentored a different student at Warrington.

So after we discussed the merits of continuing a third year of the One Year Turnaround with Turnaround Solutions, at a cost of nearly $400K, the discussion took two interesting turns…

First, discussion of the silent yet real problem that exists at Warrington and several other schools in our district:  Getting teachers that want to teach at such locations to pass the General Knowledge (GK) exam so such teachers can be certified.  After numerous tries, if a teacher cannot pass this test, they cannot teach, they cannot be hired.  And district-wide there are several dozen teachers that are struggling to pass this exam---several at Warrington.  You can read about the GK exam here, and see sample test questions….

The other great and interesting conversation that happened concerned teacher pay.  The Principal of Warrington, when I asked about teacher retention there, expressed her frustrations.  “If we could just pay them more, we could keep more of them” she explained.

Of course I jumped in and attempted to engage a conversation about my STRONG SUPPORT for paying teachers in challenging assignments a higher wage---yet I was shut down from talking about this by the Chair---which was unfortunate.  I was simply glad to hear someone that gets it, Mrs. Lipnick, verbalize what I and many others in this district know:  Until we pay these teachers more

“Hostile Surrender”—Memphis Class Warfare with Kids in the Middle

I found this interesting story on MSNBC yesterday, about a large, failing inner-city school system forcing a merger with an equally funded yet very successful suburban school district.  Very interesting.  Luckily, this is taking place elsewhere, in Memphis Tennessee.  But is this the shape of things to come as budget pressures force more and more districts to the financial brink? Is this the shape of things to come when perceived disparities in quality erupt between equally funded yet vastly different school systems?   From MSNBC:

“Memphis district aims to disband to force wealthier suburban system to absorb its students

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At the heart of it, the turbulence is about dollars and cents and the quality of education. Fearing possible threats to its funding, the failing inner-city Memphis City Schools, with 209 schools and 108,000 students, decided to force a merger with its smaller, more affluent neighbor — Shelby County Schools. To accomplish that, the district's board surrendered its charter in November. That unprecedented move, essentially undoing the creation of the Memphis district in 1869, was subsequently approved by the City Council and by the city’s voters in a referendum in March. But while the move might make sense economically, it has triggered a heated debate about the fairness of merging two districts with different levels of academic achievement. It has even stirred the ghosts of the city’s legacy of busing students to alleviate racial inequities in the school system.  Residents of suburban Shelby County — in which the city is located — did not have a vote, and the county Board of Education sued to block the merger. Its chairman, David Pickler, refers to the unfolding events as part of a “hostile surrender”

Full Story here