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And yet you consistently condemn the OP school system for having lower standardized test scores than many (so-called) comparable school systems. As you well know, the easiest and most successful way to have uniformly high test scores is to eliminate or minimize students of low socio-economic background.
I think what I do is more like "reproachment" for those that toot the horn of "diversity for its own sake" a little too vigorously. As recent threads about other suburbs show, there are some that are willing to ignore data or think their own children are immune from the tendencies shown by statistics. It is precisely those "soft" emotionally based decisions that I rail against.
The fact is the persistent gaps in achievement between majority and minority students at OPRF are not encouraging. There are examples of approaches to success from all kinds of places --
In none of those reports will one find the suggestion that exclusion is the best course of action. To do so would indeed condemn such children to a life far more constrained than they would otherwise experience. I would hope that the efforts of Oak Parkers to make their town attractive to a wide range of people would also include efforts to raise the expectations that performance gaps can be closed instead of merely tolerated...
Heck look at the success of the low income and minority students in the top performing CPS magnet high schools --
To get that many schools on the Academic Honor Roll the feeder elementary and middle schools must have a pretty good handle on successfully preparing kids for a demanding curriculum. Don't have to look far for schools that are doing something right with large percentage of minority / low income students...
I think one of the attractions to Oak Park is that it has a variety of "districts" that have different feels and personalities. Some people would rather live right in the center with all the hustle and bustle, some around the arts district, some around Oak Park and 290, some in different parts of the north side etc... Despite the efforts of the few who try to push the notion that the "nicer areas" only exist on the most expensive streets with the largest houses, I, and plenty others, have found that "desirability" here is not measured by the size of your home, or even how north west you can move, but by the type and quality of life you seek. Oak Park has a detractor or 2 on here (always people that don't live in the village that have one dimensional conservative notions of what "desirable means) that typically downplay its positives and over exaggerate perceived negatives, but I've found the actual residents on here to be pretty on point with their analysis of the pros and cons of the village.
In none of those reports will one find the suggestion that exclusion is the best course of action. To do so would indeed condemn such children to a life far more constrained than they would otherwise experience. I would hope that the efforts of Oak Parkers to make their town attractive to a wide range of people would also include efforts to raise the expectations that performance gaps can be closed instead of merely tolerated...
Heck look at the success of the low income and minority students in the top performing CPS magnet high schools --
To get that many schools on the Academic Honor Roll the feeder elementary and middle schools must have a pretty good handle on successfully preparing kids for a demanding curriculum. Don't have to look far for schools that are doing something right with large percentage of minority / low income students...
As always, the "data" that some people put out there requires extensive analysis to be meaningful. Students have to test into all of these high achieving schools, meaning the students that are accepted are already high achieving students... So the school merely has to maintain the level of achievement and build upon, as oppose to schools that have the challenge of changing the culture of learning within students that have not done well (either because they moved from other areas or have uninvolved parents etc...). This is hardly a measure of the quality of education Oak Park has to offer, which is very good. A better measure maybe having large amounts of minority students that have low test scores move to schools where there are few minorities yet high test score such as Hinsdale Central etc... And see what happens. My guess (since I don't believe it will happen in my life time) is that their good educational system would also struggle to close the gap. There are plenty of very educated and successful people, including college academics and professionals, that move their families to Oak Park, people that would not move here if they felt the educational and academic experience was not excellent.
Perhaps, but there is a troubling alternative too...
Quote:
Originally Posted by chitownperson
... There are plenty of very educated and successful people, including college academics and professionals, that move , people that would not move here if they felt the educational and academic experience was not excellent.
Meet another poster -- Is Olympia Fields a good neighborhood to raise a family?
Despite multiple folks all suggesting that not just aggregated data but personal experience ought to give one pause, the strong suggestion is this family is going to move from Hyde Park to an area with a school that has issues. Perhaps lots of folks like gregbuck could buck the trend and get the schools to improve, but perhaps the attractiveness of the town is enough to get them to overlook trends. Four years of high school fly by awfully fast -- too fast for any one parent to really turn things around. Given the extreme demands that modern life puts on one's time perhaps it is too much to expect for folks to really dig into these tough problems. The very real possibility is that the cycle of "four years and its not my problem because my kid is in good shape" may very well be why the performance gap persists...
Last edited by chet everett; 06-20-2013 at 03:29 PM..
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In none of those reports will one find the suggestion that exclusion is the best course of action. To do so would indeed condemn such children to a life far more constrained than they would otherwise experience. I would hope that the efforts of Oak Parkers to make their town attractive to a wide range of people would also include efforts to raise the expectations that performance gaps can be closed instead of merely tolerated...
.
This is probably a subject for another thread but, unfortunately, exclusion is deemed to be the best course of action by an unfortunate number of middle and upper middle class parents. They don't want their kids to be around low income kids so they either move away from them or put them in a private school. The achievement gap in our country will continue to grow (to our serious long-term detriment I predict) until this is addressed properly.
OPRF does have quite the achievement gap. Alarmingly so. But don't those magnet schools you cite have achievement gaps too? According to PSAE data from the heralded Payton College Prep HS, the vast majority of the kids "meet or exceed" State standards. 97% in 2012. Excellent! But if you look closely, their black and Hispanic students have a much lower "exceeds" attainment level than white students do.
To illustrate, 69% of Payton's white 11th graders exceeded State standards in math in 2012, while only 20% of the black students and 17% of the Hispanic students exceeded. The black and Hispanic 11th graders at OPRF did far worse -- 69% of the black students and 38% of the Hispanic students failed to even meet in math. But even still, the achievement gap hasn't been completely solved even by the best magnet school in Chicago.
Not that they want to but I'd love to see some of these exburban schools try to deal with it. They'd fail miserably.
I'm a detractor, Chitownperson, and I live in the village. I get that a town can be desirable for reasons that might not be obvious (e.g., the fabulous record store one happens upon, the interesting, thoughtful people one meets in OP, the lack of conspicuous consumption here-- really, that IS desirable), but I think the OP -- whether or not she intended --was on to something when she was sort of baffled as to what the deal is with the arts district in a place that's supposedly so artsy, vibrant, happening, and "Evanston-esque" in some folks' minds. To me, there are many parts of Oak Park -- in fact all retail areas save for maybe the bricked street portion of the Marion St. shops (not saying that bricking that area was worth it -- just pointing out a nicer, to me, area) --that need a serious facelift. (And to me, it's really pushing it to call the area around Marion St. and Chicago Ave. a shopping district unto itself.) When I went to Geneva, IL a few years ago, I was struck by how nice everything looked, and yet I noticed that in many cases, the signage above merchants' places of business was often cheaper signage (e.g., not some big, substantial wood engraved thing) yet still bright and attractive signage that seemed like a deliberate addition to each place of business so that the area -- or at least each merchant's own portion of it -- looked nice. I'm not here to start a comparison between Geneva, IL and Oak Park, by the way. But I gotta say that given the very high real estate taxes assessed by the village, one does have to ask why things don't look a little spiffier. Sorry.
I'm by no means an expert in the field of education, and I'll try to spend time reading up on the subject, but (believe it or not), I actually do have a job and family that need my attention, so I doubt I'll give it the attention it deserves. That being said, my layman's understanding is that there are precious few examples of success in equalizing educational outcomes when socioeconomic backgrounds are very unequal. The few examples that do exist tend to be pilot programs that by their very nature are not amenable to scaling up for wide-spread adoptation.
The way this problem gets solved is by tackling the underlying basis, and that requires nationwide and federal interventions. Perhaps fewer trillions spend blowing up countries overseas, a rethinking of the "war on drugs", corporate tax policy that encourages investment in the US rather than overseas, and cultural changes that encourage fathers to marry might go a long way.
Sure, OPRF could increase its already significant tax levy and dedicate all the funds towards fixing "the gap", but this would be slapping a bandaid on a festering wound, not to mention place a crushing burden on the locals. Perhaps the good folks of Hinsdale could increase their levy and donate the proceeds to OPRF (or Proviso) earmarked for erasing "the gap"?
Maybe less time patting one's self on the back and more time with one's sleeves rolled up would be a good thing for both getting real business development and better school performance. I am not the only one to call out mainstream liberals for being self-satisfied:
Maybe less time patting one's self on the back and more time with one's sleeves rolled up would be a good thing for both getting real business development and better school performance. I am not the only one to call out mainstream liberals for being self-satisfied:
Maybe it is less about "spending more money" and more about questioning some assumptions. Fresh air is good thing...
Don't quite understand what you're implying here Chet. And while simply throwing money at the problem isn't going to fix it, fixing "the gap" is not going to be done on the cheap.
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Perhaps, but there is a troubling alternative too...
