The KCMO School District

[aknowledgeableperson]

Hey clean up the above quote, or editing if you want to call it.

That is not what I said but someone else

[swid]

Going back a bit to the charter school mention earlier, there's been two recent articles in Slate about how the largest operator of charter schools in Texas uses blatantly creationist textbooks in its schools.

The second article had an argument in the comments section about charter schools vs. "bad" public schools, and one commenter made a point about why those schools are bad in the first place (condensed version below):

---

"The reason your public schools are so bad is almost certainly because people like you pull your kids (and time) out of them. A school full of poor kids will never be a good school. Money is close to irrelevant when it comes to solving this problem.

It's a spiral. A few (richer, better-educated) parents pull their kids, lower the average of the pool, and cause more to pull their kids.

The reason you pay $25k for your private school (and will probably be paying through the ass once they get to college) is not because your private school or Harvard has some special sauce in the physics curriculum, but because those schools contain all the other good kids - kids who will become your kids' lifelong friends and contacts, and set higher bars for your kids to judge themselves against. The reverse happens for the kids left behind. At best it is zero-sum and it is most likely negative-sum."

[aknowledgeableperson]

There are quite a few success stories out there with ordinary public schools succeeding with those "left behind" students. Basically that commentator is full of it.

[KCMax]

There are quite a few success stories out there with ordinary public schools succeeding with those "left behind" students. Basically that commentator is full of it.

Exceptions do not make the rule.

[Volker Dad]

The reason you pay $25k for your private school (and will probably be paying through the ass once they get to college) is not because your private school or Harvard has some special sauce in the physics curriculum, but because those schools contain all the other good kids - kids who will become your kids' lifelong friends and contacts, and set higher bars for your kids to judge themselves against. The reverse happens for the kids left behind. At best it is zero-sum and it is most likely negative-sum.

I think that's basically right. Of course there are exceptions, but I think we as a society need to deal with the truth in this quote to solve the school problem.

If you can't force economic desegregation, what's the solution?

[Volker Dad]

The reason you pay $25k for your private school (and will probably be paying through the ass once they get to college) is not because your private school or Harvard has some special sauce in the physics curriculum, but because those schools contain all the other good kids - kids who will become your kids' lifelong friends and contacts, and set higher bars for your kids to judge themselves against. The reverse happens for the kids left behind. At best it is zero-sum and it is most likely negative-sum.

I think that's basically right. Of course there are exceptions, but I think we as a society need to deal with the truth in this quote to solve the school problem.

If you can't force economic desegregation, what's the solution?

Also, as a dad with lots of friends who send there kids to expensive private schools, this has always been there reasoning --- they want there kids to be friends with other smart kids.

[aknowledgeableperson]

There are quite a few success stories out there with ordinary public schools succeeding with those "left behind" students. Basically that commentator is full of it.

Exceptions do not make the rule.

True, but in this case it does weaken the point being made. You don't need a bunch of "rich kids" in order for those "left behind" students to succeed. That point the commentator made takes you down a solution path that really isn't a solution to the problem.

Those success stories do give examples of how to solve the problem.

[Gretz]

There are quite a few success stories out there with ordinary public schools succeeding with those "left behind" students. Basically that commentator is full of it.

Sure, there are some examples of schools doing ok with poor populations, but they are definitely in the extreme minority. The article Swid cites is spot on and is overwhelmingly the problem with urban school districts everywhere. It's hardly controversial that demographics and school outcomes are highly correlated and almost certainly intricately causally linked. The socializing power of peer groups is one of, if not the, most powerful force that shapes children of primary and secondary school age, paticularly in adolescence. Where a culture of achievement prevails, students tend to succeed, where it does not, they do not. In situations where less than about 70% or better of students are "good," i.e. are equipped with the basic life skills and motivation necessary to succeed and not trouble-makers, underachievers, etc. there is a pretty good chance of a culture of achievement prevailing on its own, regardless of what the curriculum and teachers are like. The more poorly equipped, academically and behaviourally, "bad" students that you put into these situations will get better as their peer-group pushes them in the right direction. Once the "bad" student element reaches a certain critical mass, however, the effect goes into reverse and kids that might generally do well otherwise tend to get dragged down by a culture of failure. This effect isn't limited to schools; it seems to happen in other social situations as well, like in public housing. It's very, very difficult to inorganically turn around the entire culture of schools that are failing which is why it's extremely rare for a school with a very high poverty rate. Good teachers and curriculum aren't enough; you basically have to teach kids from scratch not only about the usual reading, science, math etc. but basic life stuff like what success looks like, what habits are necessary to achieve it, make being smart cool, treating/filling in the gaps of terrible home-lives, etc. "Good" teachers in these contexts have to not only teach their subjects but become deeply involved in kids' lives, serving as role-models, counselors, disciplinarians, and pseudo-parents even in many cases. Even with teachers that are willing and able to take on these roles, turning around an entrenched culture where smart kids are derided, beat-up etc. and those that are socially dominant are often very rough, criminal characters can prove too much to turn around. There are a few examples of this happening with extreme high poverty populations, sure, but it is exceedingly rare. Common themes amongst success stories seem to be starting very early, zero-tolerance discipline and long hours, like starting pre-K at age 2 or 3 and having 12 hour days year round. In these cases the school is basically displacing much of the broken home-lives of kids. I'm all for charters that can pull off this kind of amazing turn around but it just doesn't happen much. If you look at the graph I posted earlier, it seems like there are a few that seem to be punching above their weight in terms of poverty level but several that are doing worse than their public school counterparts as well. Suddenly making all public schools charter doesn't look like it will really change anything or if it does it's likely to be inconsistent and incremental. The only way to reliably improve outcomes for poor kids is to dilute the poverty level. I would think disbanding the district altogether and making surrounding districts take on the kids would be the optimal solution for them but of course parents in the surrounding burbs will make it very difficult politically to do that.

[Gretz]

The reason you pay $25k for your private school (and will probably be paying through the ass once they get to college) is not because your private school or Harvard has some special sauce in the physics curriculum, but because those schools contain all the other good kids - kids who will become your kids' lifelong friends and contacts, and set higher bars for your kids to judge themselves against. The reverse happens for the kids left behind. At best it is zero-sum and it is most likely negative-sum.

I think that's basically right. Of course there are exceptions, but I think we as a society need to deal with the truth in this quote to solve the school problem.

If you can't force economic desegregation, what's the solution?

Missed a couple of posts while writing that last one but it seems to me that the two possible solutions are a) force economic desegregation as you mention, which is politically very difficult to do, or b) have schools basically raise kids that aren't getting what they need from their home-lives. a) makes a lot more sense to me but given the political power of white suburbia I'm sure it will never happen. b) sounds really creepy and racist. I predict that people will choose c) keep shuffling the deck-chairs with re-orgs and other two-bit schemes like mass-charterization that will really change nothing.

[KCMax]

There are quite a few success stories out there with ordinary public schools succeeding with those "left behind" students. Basically that commentator is full of it.

Exceptions do not make the rule.

True, but in this case it does weaken the point being made. You don't need a bunch of "rich kids" in order for those "left behind" students to succeed. That point the commentator made takes you down a solution path that really isn't a solution to the problem.

Those success stories do give examples of how to solve the problem.

Such as?

[aknowledgeableperson]

Just do a search and you can find them on your own like I have.

[chaglang]

Just do a search and you can find them on your own like I have.

We need a sourcing rule around here.

[grovester]

One should always assume the source is "poster's ass".

[Gretz]

AKP is right that there are exceptional charters that do really well despite high poverty rates. There are also regular public schools that do so. The point is that on average charter schools don't do any better than public schools when you adjust their results for the poverty level of their students.

[KCMax]

School transfer bills get their first hearing in Missouri

The bills heard Wednesday allow districts receiving transfers to establish class size policies and teacher-student ratios that would allow them to turn students away for space reasons. Additionally, when a district becomes unaccredited, a new rating system would grade school buildings individually, allowing a student in a failing district to first have the option of transferring to a school within that district.
Unaccredited districts also could lengthen the school day, increase the hours of instruction and extend the school year. And high-performing districts would be permitted to open charter schools in a failing district.

[herrfrank]

Those schools are still full of legacies. I also wouldn't be extolling these institutions for assigning mostly As and Bs. Grade inflation is a serious problem at Ivy League schools.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/1 ... story.html
If over 60% of the students have an A average at some of these schools, it seems like you have to try pretty hard to get all the way down to a C average.

Correct -- grade inflation is what I was alluding to. But the bigger change is not from "C"s to "A"s and "B"s, it's to the makeup of the student body. The important part of "Gentleman's Cs" is not the "C" grade. It's the gentleman part.

The dominance of legacies (or incense-swinging, high Episcopalian WASPs, if you prefer) is simply no longer the reality on the ground at the elite colleges. Of course they are still there -- if you are in the top quarter at St. Paul's or Exeter or Andover, you are going to get into one of the Ivies or Amherst/ Williams/ Wesleyan. But the majority of the incoming college crowd (not the plurality, rather the majority) is from the competitive public schools and national private preps -- Catholics, Jews, minorities, international students, southern and western Protestants.

That change happened in the 1970s. Please take a look at this book, The Guardians as reference.

[herrfrank]

Here is a brief excerpt in review of that book by Alan Brinkley in the New Republic a few years ago:

The commitment of America's great universities to admitting students on the basis of merit rather than lineage--whether or not that commitment is wholly observed in practice--is today virtually uncontested. Similarly, the belief in the value of diversity, while under assault in courts and legislatures, is a core conviction of almost all educators. Among its many other achievements, Geoffrey Kabaservice's account of the career of Kingman Brewster, who served as president of Yale from 1963 to 1977, makes clear how recently and with what difficulty the world of higher education embraced these and other now-common values.

Consider the experience of R. Inslee Clark, who became director of admissions at Yale in 1965. Clark had the typical profile of a senior Ivy League administrator of his time. He was a Yale College graduate, an alumnus of Skull and Bones (the college's most elite secret society), and a former teacher at the Lawrenceville School. But he was hardly typical in other ways. When Brewster asked him whether he aspired to be an "engineer" or an "architect" of Yale's admissions policy, Clark (who was then thirty) said unhesitatingly: "an architect . . . I'd like to design a different student body from the one we have now." The extraordinary education that Yale offered, he argued, should serve "the most able, the most motivated, those with the most potential," not just those with the appropriate social background. Brewster supported this vision, and together--perhaps unaware of the furor that it would create- -he and Clark set out to realize it.

[swid]

The KCMO school district is discussed in the final third of this Slate article on how (and why) busing failed to integrate schools.

[KCMax]

Kansas City school board balks at sale of Westport High

When it comes to selling historic Westport High School, it turns out too many Kansas City school board members don’t want to let it go.

Foutch Brothers Real Estate teamed up with Academie Lafayette charter school to create an International Baccalaureate high school, which it hoped to open at the former Westport High School....

"I’m confused and extremely disappointed,” said Southmoreland Neighborhood Association President Greg Corwin. “The community has always been crystal clear that the best re-use is a well-managed school … and now that got all blown up.”

[loftguy]

Kansas City school board balks at sale of Westport High

When it comes to selling historic Westport High School, it turns out too many Kansas City school board members don’t want to let it go.

Foutch Brothers Real Estate teamed up with Academie Lafayette charter school to create an International Baccalaureate high school, which it hoped to open at the former Westport High School....

"I’m confused and extremely disappointed,” said Southmoreland Neighborhood Association President Greg Corwin. “The community has always been crystal clear that the best re-use is a well-managed school … and now that got all blown up.”

The KC Star is missing the greater story here.

The process by which the KCMOSD is disposing of properties is chaotic, bizarre, unpredictable, and damaging to communities within the district.

Are reporters (editors/publishers) afraid to tell this story? Because they surely are not unaware.