A Crisis in Public Education
Locally, we're having a pretty appalling time with the city school district. Despite perennial promises of reform and improvements, the four-year graduation rate has dropped to 46%. Not all of the other 54% will have been drop outs. According to the same state report, fully 20% of the most recent graduating cohort are still enrolled as students, and this same state reports the five and six year graduation rates are a bit better: 56% and 54% respectively.
No matter how you choose to slice that up, it's still an appalling failure of the goal of providing a minimum education for the students in this school district.
What makes it worse, in my mind, is that the Rochester numbers are so much worse than any of the other numbers in the same county, where four year graduation rates range from 71% to 97%. The highest graduation rate, unsurprisingly, comes from one of the wealthiest school districts.
However monetary expenditures I think provide only a portion of the story. I'm being lazy this morning, so I'm going to take the figures I found attributed in a local OpEd piece as being accurate. Whether the specific numbers are correct, or not, I think they'll work as an illustration: The school district with that 97% four year graduation rate spends $17,772 per student; while the city school district spends $18,184. It seems pretty clear to me, at least, that the problem isn't going to be dealt with as simply as saying that the city school district needs more money.
Currently the city schools are a big issue. For reasons I don't care to get into, beyond the obvious claim presented here that the city schools are FUBARed, the Mayor is trying to push to take control of the city schools away from the school board, and give him the power to actually control spending and school policies. Counter plans are coming out, including forcibly combining the city school districts with the suburban school districts to force a more equitable sharing of the education costs. (That last being a particular brain child of the local teacher's union.) Of course, that last plan is about as popular with the suburban taxpayers as voluntarily agreeing to contract hepatitis. And it seems based on some flawed thinking: Certainly if the claim is that the suburban schools simply outspend the city to achieve their higher graduation rates, the numbers don't support that conclusion.
Personally, I have zero faith in the current administration of the city schools, and their ability to enact any changes. This is the same school administration where, as a cost saving measure, they were refusing to allow students to take textbooks home at night! Not some students, not some textbooks. But all students in several of the schools, regardless of their history of having damaged texts in the past. Other, equally heartbreaking stories of waste or idiocy from the central office have become pretty common.
Then, too, this is the same school district that worked with the teacher's union to get a known pedophile teacher back into the classroom. So I have a pretty negative view of both those organizations.
Having said all that, I do not think that any change in the city school district is going to be effective at improving the graduation rates without recognizing that the problems are more than simply those within the school walls. So, the idea of mayoral control doesn't strike me as quite the panacea that some of its proponents are presenting it to be.
The elephant in the room that very few people are willing to address is that in addition to having the worst schools in the county (and among the worst schools in the state) Rochester is also one of the poorest municipalities, too.
Quote:
Originally posted by From Wikipedia
The median income for a city household was $27,123, and the median family income was $31,257. Males had a median income of $30,521, versus $25,139 for females. The per capita income for the city was $15,588. About 23.4% of families and 25.9% of the population were below the poverty line, including 37.5% of those under age 18 and 15.4% of those age 65 or over.
And with that kind of crushing poverty a lot of concurrent problems start to affect a child's ability to benefit from school. Trying to pretend that the hours a student spends in school are isolated from the rest of her/his life is not going to get anyone further ahead in trying to fix the problem.
But on the other hand, what can the schools do to combat that? Short of shifting back to a completely custodial model (aka boarding schools) the students will keep going back to their family situation. And the most the schools can do is provide for one or two allegedly healthy meals a day, and try to provide a safe place for learning. And often enough they fail at that.
One of the reasons I've gone into this is because while I think that Rochester's specific situation is unique, I also believe that it is common enough to provide something of a springboard for discussing problems with public education and to solicit Mellophanters' solutions. I don't care how crazy the idea might be - if you think it might help, I'd love to hear it.
