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I guess he ruffled too many feathers by supporting accountability for teachers who were under performing.
One thing to make clear: Some teachers can try their best and still have a woefully underperforming class due to reasons out of their control. They shouldn't be punished if their classes are lazy and/or don't do homework.
Why? ISD boundaries are arbitrary; they don't tie to city limits so why not break it up? It would make each community feel more involved with/ in control of their local schools and eliminate a lot of the "north vs south", "affluent vs lower income" arguments you hear in DISD. To be fair property-tax wise, zone downtown to the South District and Design District/Love Field commercial zone to the West district as both of those have generally lower property values than north and east Dallas. East Dallas has less commercial but more expensive homes.
The best way to improve schools is to have involved parents and a community invested in the future and success of the neighborhood schools. I would care a lot more about my neighborhood DISD schools of my property taxes went to the ones in my neighborhood and the school board actually answered to the residents, not their own personal agendas/egos. Making it smaller can keep everyone accountable more easily.
Agree 100%. It will never happen of course, but there is no other single government driven change that would have as large of an impact on the city.
Not all of the problems would go away as the bureaucracy and waste within DISD are only a portion of the issues that plague the schools, but the other ills (lack of parental support, poverty, etc.) are beyond the scope of what can be expected from a school district.
It's time to bust up the district into 3-4 regional districts. Too many conflicting goals amongst the school board + a powerful school board = no hope for ANY superintendent to be successful.
If the parents and school board members in south and west Dallas don't want teachers or students held to any kind of respectable standard, at least let the east and north Dallas neighborhoods do their own thing. Those are the areas where all but one of the high-performing elementary schools are and the three "top" (comparatively....) neighborhood high schools are, too.
Do you know which representatives vote against reform and which ones vote for reform? It would be good to see a record so names can be named. There may be ways of influencing the vote in the districts of the anti-reform candidates,
If the parents and school board members in south and west Dallas don't want teachers or students held to any kind of respectable standard, at least let the east and north Dallas neighborhoods do their own thing.
Segregation is not a solution. Any district can produce good results by denying enrollment to underperforming demographics. DISD needs to find a way to provide better opportunities to all.
Segregation is not a solution. Any district can produce good results by denying enrollment to underperforming demographics. DISD needs to find a way to provide better opportunities to all.
You are not familiar with Dallas AT ALL if you think a N-S-E-W plan is segregation. For starters, over 80% of the district is Hispanic and 90% is low income. How do you segregate that? Even in my fictitious "north" district, there are huge swaths of low income/Hispanic neighborboods (around the Dallas Galleria, apartments just west of 75 between Walnut Hill & Forrest, neighborhoods west of Webb Chapel between 635 & Northwest Hwy). The Five Points neighborhood is also north, which has a huge African (not AA, but African immigrant/refugee) population, as well as many Hispanics.
BUT- you'd also have a fighting chance of attracting more Preston Hollow and N/NW Dallas families to the neighborhood schools who are middle/upper income and also have more education. Then maybe more schools start to look like Lakewood or Stonewall Jackson where only 50% of each school's population is low income and 50% come from homes with college educated professional parents....everyone says the appeal of Lakewood schools is the mix of student backgrounds so this could spread that across the district! It also keeps more students in schools closer to home. Pershing Elementary's zone stretches from NW Highway to Spring Valley between Inwood and Preston because that's the land mass you have to cover to fill the school. Kids who live at Spring Valley actually drive by/near 2 other DISD elementary schoolls on the way to their assigned school. That is crazy! Smaller districts could increase DISD enrollment and keep all kids closer to home which again builds neighborhood involvement. Win-win for all
Last edited by TurtleCreek80; 06-24-2015 at 07:14 AM..
Frankly I don't think it matters much who is in charge. Unless the new person has a magic wand that can change DISDs demographics, the results will remain the same, crappy.
My dad was an educator for over 30 years (at the college level but he was heavily involved in post high school training for young adults in both traditional and vocational/technical education). He said that any time he had to write a grant application for more funding, he had to go into detail on how the funds would achieve the end result, a well educated child. He would reel off all these new/innovative teaching methods, but he said it was basically a bunch of crap. The one factor that really matters in academic achievement is the involvement of the parents. You could have all the razzle dazzle in the world but if child is in a poor home environment, the chances of said child doing well are very low.
This is why you really can't fault DISD for poor SAT scores. Contrary to popular belief, the district is very capable of producing top graduates. How do we know this? The magnets. These schools are allowed to select the best students who are all highly motivated, prepared, etc and they all boast SAT scores and NMSF numbers that rival the best in DFW. If those magnet kids were duplicated across DISD then we would all be here singing the districts praises. But these are the cards the district had been dealt
Boy howdy do I disagree with that.
Asking DISD to equal Plano West or Southlake wouldn't be reasonable. Asking that say the top 25% of DISD high schools be within 100 points of Plano East might be. That cadre average isn't even remotely close to East ( (that gap is quite a bit more than 300pts currently). In fact not a single DISD school is remotely close to East.
What is unassailably reasonable is to ask DISD to equal Houston ISD. HISD has both a significantly higher participation rate and significantly higher SAT scores. A quick looks shows HISD SAT (m+cr) scores of 840. DISD 787.
It's not possible to have a reasoned discussion on this board about the melange of income, race and expectations vis a vis DISD or any district for that matter. However, within the link below at least the folks at Harvard see the achievement gap as much more than just a proxy for incomes. For example on any of 4th, 8th and 12th grade NAEP tests poor whites perform better than higher income blacks.
I proof-read a friend's dissertation a couple of weeks ago.........within that he turned me on to the Harvard Achievement Gap Initiative..........talk about some seriously uncomfortable reading and listening.
DH and I were talking about this at lunch. Few thoughts. Keep the district and split it up into 4 sub-districts with 4 sub-superintendents (or 6). Try as hard as possible to equalize the number of schools within each (all levels) and student population. DISD tax dollars would be split equally among the 4 sub-districts either a four-way split, or by student population. School board members continue to serve the whole district (novel concept for them) and set strategic plan for student achievement that is the same across the district.
Additionally, DH had an idea to set up a teacher rotation, so that no teacher is at a school for more than say 3 years. You work for the district, not a school. This would be easier in a sub-district situation. That way no school continues to get stuck with underperforming students, or can benefit from favoritism from a principal. And each school will benefit from having strong teachers move in. It also eliminates the need to essentially bribe good teachers to poor performing schools because everyone will rotate in and out at some point. Definitely some drawbacks.
Although I don't think anything will ever change. There's near complete apathy when it comes to DISD. Not only are seats taken with no opposition, in 2011 they cancelled the election because only 3 people bothered to run. So any conversation about change in Dallas ISD is just theoretical.
Apathy is part of it. Much of the gap between DISD and many other mega districts in the US is due to the intransagence of teachers, administrators and a decades long failed board. Any super. who asks for even a minimum level of teacher accountability will be met with a firestorm of pushback from teachers and that's just the first problem. Obviously, disengaged parents are key players is this nightmare as well.
...Dallas Co. tax payers like me who've allowed the district to become an educational equivalent of the Hindenburg.
Slight correction; living in Dallas County doesn't automatically put you on the hook for DISD taxes. I live in Dallas County and pay RISD taxes. Some Dallas residents also pay RISD taxes.
Just wanted to clarify that for people who may be new to the area and who are confused about city vs county vs ISD.
The idea of breaking up the district sounds great, but would it seriously ever happen? Look how that recent charter effort was shot down, plus the effort to separate out a "White Rock" district was DOA. The southern sector would (rightly or wrongly) see this as an effort by the northern sector to separate itself from poverty, corruption and dysfunction.
My Occam's Razor view: Getting the test scores up requires attracting a significant number of students to DISD who are currently in the suburbs or privates. Attracting these students requires providing classrooms for them where they won't be swamped by low-achieving classmates. Evidence for this view: that the few DISD schools that provide this (Lakewood, Dealey, TAG) are hugely oversubscribed. The circle that has to be squared is: accomplishing this without arousing the ire of DISD board members from the southern sector who fear that attention is being devoted to a "few privileged kids" instead of the poor majority. Alternative interpretation: the future of DISD depends on whether the quite small number of schools that attract both rich and poor (Rosemont, Withers, DeGolyer, Walnut Hill, Preston Hollow, Kramer) can keep increasing the number of college-educated parents to something like 50/50 rich vs. poor, instead of the 10/90 or 20/80 as it frequently is at present.
Here is an interesting story of how a much worse district (New Orleans) has apparently made progress through serious reforms.
But just to be pessimistic, it's easy for me to think of reasons why this couldn't happen here:
1. Katrina created a "never let a crisis go to waste" situation where the status quo could be toppled. No equivalent here.
2. The New Orleans district was apparently so bad that it had few powerful supporters. By contrast, DISD can point to a small number of important successes. Plus it still has powerful elected supporters strong enough to have seen off Miles's comparatively much more mild reforms. So, no similar coalition for radical change here.
3. The reforms in New Orleans required political cooperation between city and state authorities. It's hard for me to see how deep-blue Dallas and the deep-red TX legislature could ever work cooperatively in such a manner.
For much of 2003 and 2004 I worked in NO 3 or 4 days per week. Many NOLA schools were so bad there was serious talk about the state taking over the district even then.
Public school teachers here in Dallas as in most cities hate the notion of charter schools because charters can offer a viable alternative thus creating a bit of competition which teacher's unions and groups simply can't tolerate.
However, we now have a few examples of charters working out very well NOLA included. Nevada just passed legislation that will allow parents to spend public money at charter and some private schools ignoring school district lines. Of course Nevada schools, Las Vegas school in particular, are a disaster so something had to give. It'll be interesting to see how Nevada's plan works out over the next several years.
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