Analysis of possible school district mergers in Pittsburgh... (Reading, Mount Lebanon: neighborhoods, school districts)
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Very interesting. I think another factor to consider would be expenditures per student, and possible savings by converging on lower per student expenditure rates (although some of this might be lost in cases where students are attracted back from private schools).
Is Dormont part of PPS? I have to admit I dont know what schools they use.
Dormont is part of the Keystone Oaks SD.
This is an interesting analysis. One thing is for certain, there is a ton of inefficiency in having 500 school districts in the state. Virginia has 226 school districts and North Carolina has 212. Based on these ratios of districts to population, PA would have 277 to 355 school districts.
The ability of teachers to transfer from one school to another without losing seniority would alone improve education. Too many teachers work in the same school their entire career. People learn from working with different people.
The ability of teachers to transfer from one school to another without losing seniority would alone improve education. Too many teachers work in the same school their entire career. People learn from working with different people.
I agree - this is one of many ways that PA's system of public education belies its origins in intensely-local, essentially-private associations of civic-minded gentry, which rather late was brought under the Commonwealth's limited supervision. We have an Articles of Confederation school system - a confederation of sovereign school "republics" loosely united under a weak central government.
Blue: Win-Win - The most interesting municipalities. In all cases, taxes would fall, and the city would make out better as well.
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Basing the analysis solely on taxes is too simplistic. Personally, I think PPS is big enough and adding more students is only going to increase Bellefield bureaucracy and administrative load (especially if you greatly increase the number of IEP students in the district). It is also going to dilute opportunities for city residents by making the pool of students eligible for city magnet and charter schools larger.
I'd rather see the little districts merged with each other than to make PPS even bigger.
Basing the analysis solely on taxes is too simplistic. Personally, I think PPS is big enough and adding more students is only going to increase Bellefield bureaucracy and administrative load (especially if you greatly increase the number of IEP students in the district). It is also going to dilute opportunities for city residents by making the pool of students eligible for city magnet and charter schools larger.
I'd rather see the little districts merged with each other than to make PPS even bigger.
I tend to look at it this way:
Pittsburgh does two things pretty well when it comes to public education.
One is the lower-east end feeder area - which basically functions (in terms of schools) as a wealthy suburb in the city. This has limited applications outside of Pittsburgh, but I think it would have some applicability as a selling point if you wanted to extend PPS into Wilkinsburg (and put the near-Busway parts into Allderdice), or Edgewood.
The other are the magnet schools, which, when corrected for demographics, do as well as any of the top suburban districts. Magnet schools work not due to any specific pedagogy (they are all over the map), but because the application process ensures that only parents who care about their kids education bother applying, meaning the local culture is more studious than the city as a whole.
Bringing more first-ring schools here would result in higher demand. But it would also allow for new magnet programs to be opened. For example, if Woodland Hills was brought in part and parcel, PPS could open a magnet elementary out that way to service the region, and potentially have enough additional demand for middle and high school to allow for the opening of additional schools as well.
In the longer run, the ideal would be for most Pittsburgh schools to be merit-based partial magnets. Merit-based application would ensure that the smarter kids would get a shot into a program of their parents choice. At the same time, keeping a partial neighborhood component would not only ensure more diversity, but would be contagious - top-level partial magnets in NYC show test scores for the "neighborhood" side of the school which are almost as high as the magnet side.
Access to major magnets has been the impetus for certain exchange deals between central and suburban districts in other places. Right now CAPA is the only well-known school which might have such pull, but I wonder if SciTech and Obama could served that function as well.
One is the lower-east end feeder area - which basically functions (in terms of schools) as a wealthy suburb in the city. This has limited applications outside of Pittsburgh, but I think it would have some applicability as a selling point if you wanted to extend PPS into Wilkinsburg (and put the near-Busway parts into Allderdice), or Edgewood.
yes, this is my neck of the woods. i don't see any advantage for PPS in doing what you are suggesting, and those areas are likely to end up at troubled Westinghouse rather than Allderdice. Do you think that is going to help or fix PPS's Westinghouse problem?
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In the longer run, the ideal would be for most Pittsburgh schools to be merit-based partial magnets. Merit-based application would ensure that the smarter kids would get a shot into a program of their parents choice.
Too bad the PPS magnet lottery is mostly random than merit-based. PPS doesn't want a merit-based magnet system.
Access to major magnets has been the impetus for certain exchange deals between central and suburban districts in other places. Right now CAPA is the only well-known school which might have such pull, but I wonder if SciTech and Obama could served that function as well.
SciTech is full. The school was designed to take 50 students per grade at the middle level, and 100 students per grade at the high school level. That's 550 total. The SciTech admission lottery is pretty close to random (there is some slight weighting for PSAA scores, but the bar is way low). Based on what they said at the SciTech open house last spring, you've got about 1 in 3 chance of winning the lottery.
yes, this is my neck of the woods. i don't see any advantage for PPS in doing what you are suggesting, and those areas are likely to end up at troubled Westinghouse rather than Allderdice. Do you think that is going to help or fix PPS's Westinghouse problem?
It seems pretty clear to me how it could be done. Most of Wilkensburg would have to go to Westinghouse, but the portion on the near side of the busway could go to Allderdice, the same way adjacent portions of Point Breeze and Regent Square do. This is even more true for Edgewood.
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Originally Posted by scrapp
Too bad the PPS magnet lottery is mostly random than merit-based. PPS doesn't want a merit-based magnet system.
The historical reasons for this I think had to do with the desire to integrate the magnets. A strict merit-based admission would make the schools pretty overwhelmingly white, especially now that they cannot take race into account regarding weighting of the student body. The easy way to reconcile this, however, is to have magnets have a neighborhood component, and make sure the two sides of the school mix socially.
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