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Never having been in DPS but having lived in and taught in Milwaukee, I have to chime in.
If you have never been in a school that is 97% low income and minority, you just can't begin to understand.
As teachers, most of us worked our tails off to reach these kids that were slipping through the cracks. I had years where 90% came in below grade level when I was a 2nd and 3rd grade teacher. They'd come to kindergarten not knowing their names (really-usually after being called a nickname like Punkin), not knowing letters, colors, abcs, up from down of a book,etc.So, kindergarten teachers taught preschool skills trying to catch them up when they were supposed to be teaching reading, writing, etc. so they'd try to cram in extra instruction and do whatever they could.
They'd get to me and I'd work with them in small groups, during recess (allowed in WI), send home supplemental work for practice,e tc.
The thing is, teachers are still required to teach the curriculum. The trouble comes when the low performing kids just dont get it. ALmost like they can't retain what is being taught. You have to see it to understand. And this is with me taking extra courses in differentiation and modifying instruction to meet all learning types, not just teaching one way and giving up.
Then you have the behavior issues with some kids. When the "average" or above average kids are getting it, they are sometimes not getting all they could because of these other issues. It's not really the school, the teachers, just everything that makes up these classrooms that mounts into a huge pile of instructional roadblocks. I did have students thrive, but I honestly wouldnt even have wanted my own kids in my own classroom. There is just too much getting in the way.
So, to change a school system like DPS, the WHOLE picture needs to be looked at. It is a lot more difficult that one can imagine if you have never been in that setting.
Socioeconomic integration can be beneficial, except then too you have the higher class parents balking or fleeing the area.
Don't get me wrong, I loved my job (most years) but it is a challenging task and to transform a school system takes the work of people that have experienced it and know the challenges, not those on top just calling the shots when they have never "lived it"
Never having been in DPS but having lived in and taught in Milwaukee, I have to chime in.
If you have never been in a school that is 97% low income and minority, you just can't begin to understand.
As teachers, most of us worked our tails off to reach these kids that were slipping through the cracks. I had years where 90% came in below grade level when I was a 2nd and 3rd grade teacher. They'd come to kindergarten not knowing their names (really-usually after being called a nickname like Punkin), not knowing letters, colors, abcs, up from down of a book,etc.So, kindergarten teachers taught preschool skills trying to catch them up when they were supposed to be teaching reading, writing, etc. so they'd try to cram in extra instruction and do whatever they could.
They'd get to me and I'd work with them in small groups, during recess (allowed in WI), send home supplemental work for practice,e tc.
The thing is, teachers are still required to teach the curriculum. The trouble comes when the low performing kids just dont get it. ALmost like they can't retain what is being taught. You have to see it to understand. And this is with me taking extra courses in differentiation and modifying instruction to meet all learning types, not just teaching one way and giving up.
Then you have the behavior issues with some kids. When the "average" or above average kids are getting it, they are sometimes not getting all they could because of these other issues. It's not really the school, the teachers, just everything that makes up these classrooms that mounts into a huge pile of instructional roadblocks. I did have students thrive, but I honestly wouldnt even have wanted my own kids in my own classroom. There is just too much getting in the way.
So, to change a school system like DPS, the WHOLE picture needs to be looked at. It is a lot more difficult that one can imagine if you have never been in that setting.
Socioeconomic integration can be beneficial, except then too you have the higher class parents balking or fleeing the area.
Don't get me wrong, I loved my job (most years) but it is a challenging task and to transform a school system takes the work of people that have experienced it and know the challenges, not those on top just calling the shots when they have never "lived it"
I know this is not a popular opinion, but I think capping the charter schools will help strengthen the DPS system. I totally understand why some people opt for charters and realize that their reasons for doing so vary wildly. There are schools in DPS that I would not send my own children to because they are so underperforming, and if I saw a charter as the only viable option out there, I would put my child's needs first and hypocritically enroll, despite my issues with them.
But I know many people who are strong advocates for their children's education, who volunteer their time and money to their children's schools, who have the energy and power to make change - and their kids are in charter schools. I think about that population of parents and kids, and how different DPS might look if you put them all back into regular DPS schools. I understand that Matt Sears is involved with a movement to strengthen neighborhood schools, and I think that's what it will take to get these families back into the DPS system. School by school and neighborhood by neighborhood.
There's no magic bullet in the charter schools for parent involvement. You get the same thing in the Durham magnet schools. Watts, Morehead, Pearsontown, Lakewood and DSA all have extremely active parent groups. And all have a much more diverse mix of kids than most of the Durham charters.
Never having been in DPS but having lived in and taught in Milwaukee, I have to chime in.
If you have never been in a school that is 97% low income and minority, you just can't begin to understand.
As teachers, most of us worked our tails off to reach these kids that were slipping through the cracks. I had years where 90% came in below grade level when I was a 2nd and 3rd grade teacher. They'd come to kindergarten not knowing their names (really-usually after being called a nickname like Punkin), not knowing letters, colors, abcs, up from down of a book,etc.So, kindergarten teachers taught preschool skills trying to catch them up when they were supposed to be teaching reading, writing, etc. so they'd try to cram in extra instruction and do whatever they could.
They'd get to me and I'd work with them in small groups, during recess (allowed in WI), send home supplemental work for practice,e tc.
The thing is, teachers are still required to teach the curriculum. The trouble comes when the low performing kids just dont get it. ALmost like they can't retain what is being taught. You have to see it to understand. And this is with me taking extra courses in differentiation and modifying instruction to meet all learning types, not just teaching one way and giving up.
Then you have the behavior issues with some kids. When the "average" or above average kids are getting it, they are sometimes not getting all they could because of these other issues. It's not really the school, the teachers, just everything that makes up these classrooms that mounts into a huge pile of instructional roadblocks. I did have students thrive, but I honestly wouldnt even have wanted my own kids in my own classroom. There is just too much getting in the way.
So, to change a school system like DPS, the WHOLE picture needs to be looked at. It is a lot more difficult that one can imagine if you have never been in that setting.
Socioeconomic integration can be beneficial, except then too you have the higher class parents balking or fleeing the area.
Don't get me wrong, I loved my job (most years) but it is a challenging task and to transform a school system takes the work of people that have experienced it and know the challenges, not those on top just calling the shots when they have never "lived it"
There's a fair amount of research that says if you disaggregate the "97% low income and minority" into two independent variables, you would find that it is income, not race, that controls most of the variation in the dependent variable.
I would recommend the book "Hope and Despair in the American City" by Gerald Grant, a review of Wake County schools published by Harvard University Press a few years back. Pg. 166 ff. cover the role that race and income do, and don't, play in school performance. Great book and a must read.
Chris75: sadly, there are schools with that level of poverty. Glenn, Merrick-Moore, Smith, probably Eastway still are all examples of it. Would be shocked if Southern and Neal weren't close.
Below is a write-up I did on this for my (still... but maybe not much longer) on-hiatus blog, several years back. As Arthur C. Clarke said, if you can't plagiarize yourself, who can you plagiarize?
Quote:
From that perspective, it's not hard to see why Creekside parents would want their kids to stay there. Note: Durham's districtwide end-of-grade average scores are 48% for 4th grade writing, 60.5% for 5th grade math, 85.8% for 5th grade reading.
Creekside: 57.4% 4th writing, 65.6% 5th math, 89.5% 5th reading; state ABC rating 75% (School of Progress)
Parkwood: 42.7% 4th writing, 46.7% 5th math, 88.5% 5th reading; state ABC rating 62% (no recognition)
Southwest: 53.6% 4th writing, 61.9% 5th math, 91.7% 5th reading; state ABC rating 67% (no recognition)
Forest View: 51% 4th writing, 79.2% 5th math, 93% 5th reading; state ABC rating 72% (School of Progress)
Hope Valley: 59.3% 4th writing, 67.2% 5th math, 87.6% 5th reading; state ABC rating 72% (no recognition)
Bethesda: 36.6% 4th writing, 56.6% 5th math, 76% 5th reading; state ABC rating 56% (Priority School)
Fayetteville St.: 34% 4th writing, 54.8% 5th math, 95.1% 5th reading; state ABC rating 58% (Priority School)
The data are stark. Bethesda and Fayetteville St. Lab elementaries are tagged "priority schools" -- meaning they're considered at risk of failing by the state. Most of the schools neighboring Creekside did not earn recognition in this year's ABC tests; in fact, as these schools have had to expand testing and to face the ever-rising N.C. standards, some are performing worse, by this scale, than they were a few years back.
What differences could explain why Creekside is succeeding in a way that other district schools aren't? I suspect it has quite a bit to do with socioeconomics:
At the end of the day, after all, the correlation between socioeconomics and school performance is tremendously high. And we see here that the schools with the lowest percentage of students living at or near the poverty line seem to have the best quantitative performance on standardized testing.
This is by no means a phenomenon isolated to Durham. The situation is even more numbingly stark on the individual school level. Take Cary, where Davis Drive Elementary has been at the center of a firestorm over school reassignment. Is it a "high performing school?" The stats say yes -- its N.C. ABC rating last year was a whopping 96.3%. Similarly, Wake County has Brier Creek Elementary -- 90% ABC, 6.4% F&R lunch. Morrisville Elementary -- 90.6% ABC, 15.9% F&R lunch. Cedar Fork Elementary -- 92.6% ABC, 14.8% F&R lunch.
On the other hand, Wake has Wilburn Elementary, with 64.8% on the ABC tests, and 60.9% F&R lunch, and Barwell Rd. Elementary, with a 65.0% ABC score and 59.3% F&R lunch rates.
At the end of the day, Wake County's better school performance and better reputation ultimately seems to reflect the fact that, per capita, it's a richer county. In fact, the average free and reduced lunch rate across the entire Wake County school district is just 28.2%... or about half Durham's elementary school F&R rate of 47.2%.
Location: Chapel Hill, NC, formerly NoVA and Phila
9,779 posts, read 15,793,171 times
Reputation: 10888
Quote:
Originally Posted by goodbyesnow
If you have never been in a school that is 97% low income and minority, you just can't begin to understand.
As teachers, most of us worked our tails off to reach these kids that were slipping through the cracks. I had years where 90% came in below grade level when I was a 2nd and 3rd grade teacher. They'd come to kindergarten not knowing their names (really-usually after being called a nickname like Punkin), not knowing letters, colors, abcs, up from down of a book,etc.So, kindergarten teachers taught preschool skills trying to catch them up when they were supposed to be teaching reading, writing, etc. so they'd try to cram in extra instruction and do whatever they could.
What you said here is EXACTLY what my mother told me happened when my brother was in Kindergarten in NYC in the mid-1960s. They had just started busing in NYC, and the kids they bused in to my brother's school were VERY low-income (my parents themselves were fairly low-income). My mom said the kids came to school and didn't know their names because they were always called Buddy, Honey, or something similar. Weird that you said the same exact thing. Mom said at that point they saw the writing on the wall for NYC schools and got the he** out of Dodge (or NYC in their case).
Location: Chapel Hill, NC, formerly NoVA and Phila
9,779 posts, read 15,793,171 times
Reputation: 10888
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bull City Rising
There's a fair amount of research that says if you disaggregate the "97% low income and minority" into two independent variables, you would find that it is income, not race, that controls most of the variation in the dependent variable.
I would recommend the book "Hope and Despair in the American City" by Gerald Grant, a review of Wake County schools published by Harvard University Press a few years back. Pg. 166 ff. cover the role that race and income do, and don't, play in school performance. Great book and a must read.
Chris75: sadly, there are schools with that level of poverty. Glenn, Merrick-Moore, Smith, probably Eastway still are all examples of it. Would be shocked if Southern and Neal weren't close.
Below is a write-up I did on this for my (still... but maybe not much longer) on-hiatus blog, several years back. As Arthur C. Clarke said, if you can't plagiarize yourself, who can you plagiarize?
I agree that test scores and knowledge are closely related to poverty levels. And isn't usually the fault of the schools if there are bad test scores. I always say if you take all of the kids from Rich School A and put them in Poor School B and vice versa, then Poor School B would suddenly have good test scores and Rich School A would suddenly have poor ones. Any bad teachers at Poor School B would be pushed out, more challenging classes would be offered and there'd be more extracurriculars making Poor School B even better as time goes on. Rich School A would lose some of its talented teachers, its curriculum would become more basic and extracurriculars would suffer. In no time at all the reputations of the two schools would be completely reversed.
I don't believe, in most cases, that it's the fault of the schools that it's a "bad school." Unless a school is exceptional and can overcome all kinds of obstacles, a school is only as good as the students who attend there. Unfortunately for Durham, many schools have a high percentage of students from below the poverty level, and until that changes, the county will have a reputation for having "bad schools."
I'm a parent with kids in DPS. Two problems I see:
1. A lof of our friends have pulled their kids from DPS and placed them in private schools. It seems like as the years go one, more and more of them do. This has had the net effect of draining some of the higher performing students from the schools. This only seems to further skew the general school population. There really ought to be a concerted effort in the neighborhood schools to retain these students.
2. For similar reasons, the magnet schools are negatively impacting the neighborhood schools. I have one child in a magnet school and another in a neighborhood school. I'm surprised at the difference between the two. This ought not be the case. Perents should not need to feel that they have to send their kids to a magnet school over the neighborhood schools.
I look at DSA as a good example. DSA is a very highly regarded school and it clearly seems to be the public school to go to here in Durham. There should not be such a wide gap. Instead, I'd rather see a smaller DSA focused on arts. Let's take some of that energy, focus, and funding and put it into the neighborhood schools instead.
I think it would be cheaper just to move to wake or orange county if it got to that point
If you have the means you have the means but I don't have much personal desire to finance my public schools through taxes then turn around and pay private tuition. When I could just move to a desirable public school district
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