New HS in South Austin (Crockett, Bowie: for sale, theatre, calculated)

[sojourner77]

Honestly, I see the problem solving itself in time with minor boundary changes and no magnet.

1. The Bowie pop will stagnate, then fall in about 5 years.

2. Akins will grow, but the far NE edge will be parceled off to Crockett.

3. All new growth SE will be split between Crockett and Travis. Parents that don't like this will be told to go pound sand.

4. Every student at Akins/Bowie will have to accept portables as a reality.

[scm53]

Every student at Akins/Bowie will have to accept portables as a reality.

No more portables at Bowie due to SOS impervious cover restrictions.

[Aquitaine]

What is your solution?

When we talk about these things, the solutions that come to mind are essentially conclusions based on several assumptions, and we tend to differ over what the assumptions should be. Here are mine.

- AISD (along with much of Texas) has relaxed graduation requirements so grossly over the last several years that they've jumped from the bottom to the top of states' graduation rates at the expense of any meaning to having graduated high school in Texas
- AISD has been run by career-climbing bureaucrats with little to investment in Austin (Carstarphen) - this is not unique to AISD but rather the ecosystem in which many mid- and large city school districts operate
- AISD is unwilling and/or unable to react to a changing market even over the long term, as evidenced by everything in this thread, start/stop plans to build new high schools, and can-kicking (in other words, even a solution folks in SW Austin don't like would still be better than no solution at all)
- The administration of schools like Crockett is eye-poppingly bad, to the extent that the principal touted 'all seniors apply to college' by adding a passing requirement in a core class that they fill out an application to ACC while his high school math classes were struggling to get their kids to understand fractions (6th/7th grade math).

To distill many of these down to a single summary statement: What we have is a system that rewards political gestures and the appearance of something being done while minimizing or even punishing actual innovation and accountability. This is absolutely typical of urban and semi-urban school districts around the country and why smaller and more nimble districts like LTISD and DSISD have such an easy time running rings around AISD - not because their kids or parents are any better, but because their connection to actual educators doing their jobs is not (yet) stifled by a self-serving bureaucracy.

My solution would be to scrap the entire district (including Bowie) and lift the state cap on charters. Not because charters are some kind of magic bullet, but because the only mechanism I know of capable of responding with even some degree of fairness to changing conditions is competition while maintaining public accessibility to free education (as charters are public schools). You'd see some campuses shrink and some grow, and new schools get built where demand exists and re-purposed when it goes away.

I am somewhat connected to the charter movement in NYC and I have seen firsthand what can be done whether you are looking at East Harlem or the Upper West Side. I suggest that the challenges in Austin, Texas are considerably fewer, given that we are not restricted by 1960s-era union contracts dictating every aspect of how our schools are run.

This of course will not happen anytime soon. But while you are concentrating on satisfying populism on this neighborhood versus that neighborhood and pretending that the solution to super-popular schools is to re-educate the foolish subjects of the Austin Independent School District on where they should be sending their child, I'll be supporting and assisting to design the disruption and hopefully the death of the traditional public school district that is the single worst public policy debacle from the 1960s.

May AISD go the way of the taxi cartel. Since you asked.

[Novacek]

Originally Posted by scm53

No more portables at Bowie due to SOS impervious cover restrictions.

There's plenty of impervious paved parking lots to put them on.

[scm53]

Originally Posted by Aquitaine

This is absolutely typical of urban and semi-urban school districts around the country and why smaller and more nimble districts like LTISD and DSISD have such an easy time running rings around AISD - not because their kids or parents are any better, but because their connection to actual educators doing their jobs is not (yet) stifled by a self-serving bureaucracy.

If you throw EISD in there as well, what all of them have in common is a unity of purpose, across the district. A lack of competing factions. One can point to multiple issues in AISD that are seen as "you win - I lose", which is impossible to adjudicate. From the NW Austin parents that don't want a LASA South because some teachers will leave, to District 6 Trustee Paul Saldaña who is dead set against a SW HS, for reasons unknown, but certainly rooted in "you win - I lose". I think AISD is pretty much ungovernable, unlike single HS ISDs, or private schools, for that matter.

in other words, even a solution folks in SW Austin don't like would still be better than no solution at all

I'm not sure the AISD powers see it that way. I think they are petrified of telling SW Austin voters that there will NEVER be a new SW HS -- for multiple reasons. So kick the can is less harmful than telling the truth.

[austin-steve]

Originally Posted by Aquitaine

...
- AISD has been run by career-climbing bureaucrats with little to investment in Austin (Carstarphen) - this is not unique to AISD but rather the ecosystem in which many mid- and large city school districts operate
...

This is the core of the problem. Public Education in the US serves the teachers and administrators, not the students. The entire system is designed to benefit everyone but the students. The students are just cogs in the wheel, numbers.

I know and have talked with several ex-teachers who quit to do something else because it was no longer a fulfilling career and they were unwilling to play the game. They just wanted to teach but couldn't. Too much red tape and incompetence from above.

Steve

[Aquitaine]

From the NW Austin parents that don't want a LASA South because some teachers will leave, to District 6 Trustee Paul Saldaña who is dead set against a SW HS, for reasons unknown, but certainly rooted in "you win - I lose".

These seems a natural and inevitable consequence of putting all of the money in a single pot and then electing bureaucrats to distribute it.

Charters don't do away with that entirely, but it's not hard to come up with a system that incentivizes private construction funds (charters with good track records would have no problem getting bonds and private support), and before anybody flips their lid about that resulting only in new schools where rich people live, I'd point to the overwhelming majority of charters in NYC being anywhere but those neighborhoods - Bensonhurst, Bed-Stuy, and Crown Heights come to mind - and even here in Austin, KIPP is primarily way East and sure as heck wasn't built by AISD.

Fundamentally, you're right, of course. As somebody without kids in SW Austin I don't have a pony in the race about where a new HS gets built but it's obvious to see that 'the race' is a political construct whose only purpose is competing for slices of a pie of fixed size. That size and the ability of the pie to reconfigure how big each slice is are limited by the inflexibility of the district to act rather than re-act.

Smash the district, reward charters for doing a better job where it isn't as easy to do a good job, and whatever problems you end up with, they will be more solvable than the immovable kernel at the core of this thread: talking about thinking about re-drawing lines to exchange the problem of overcrowding for the problem of being stuck with an awful school.

[Raskolnikov]

I'm wondering if anyone has a new update about a new South/ Southwest Austin high school. Bowie's population doesn't exactly seem to be decreasing. And with the new construction within Bowie's school zone, it's only going to grow.

[sojourner77]

Originally Posted by Raskolnikov

I'm wondering if anyone has a new update about a new South/ Southwest Austin high school. Bowie's population doesn't exactly seem to be decreasing. And with the new construction within Bowie's school zone, it's only going to grow.

The new South / Southwest / SouthEAST high school is still up in the air. I'm curious that your still concerned considering that the are renting / trying to rent in central Austin. Still own the house down south, wondering if you should sell, or wait for a SW high school to boost your property values? This has always been a property value issue for the SW folks, and everybody knows it.

[AMJ27]

Originally Posted by sojourner77

The new South / Southwest / SouthEAST high school is still up in the air. I'm curious that your still concerned considering that the are renting / trying to rent in central Austin. Still own the house down south, wondering if you should sell, or wait for a SW high school to boost your property values? This has always been a property value issue for the SW folks, and everybody knows it.

I'm a SW Austin resident and a new high school has nothing to do with property value to me. It has to do with not having a gigantic, overcrowded public high school that is falling apart.