There is a widespread misperception that, unless it’s a Catholic school or very expensive private school, to send your children to school in the city of St. Louis is to commit them to a fate of under-resourced classrooms, poorly behaved (even dangerous) classmates, incompetent teachers, and academic underachievement.  But that perception is not reality.  Or at least it’s not the entire reality of the educational options for parents in St. Louis City.

My husband and I both grew up in the county but have been city dwellers now for more than ten years.  Having three children hasn’t lessened our commitment to living here—we still love living close to beautiful parks and gardens and wonderful (free!) museums.  We enjoy our friendly neighbors, unique ethnic restaurants, and racially diverse neighborhood.  Having our children did not make us want to flee to Webster Groves (though census numbers do indicate that many young parents do just that), but it did bring us face to face with the realities of education in St. Louis City.

What we found was surprising.  One of the very best elementary schools in the entire state (outscoring every single other school in the St. Louis area, if test scores happen to be your yardstick for what constitutes a “good school”) was a five minute drive from our house.  It was Kennard Classical Junior Academy, part of St. Louis Public School System’s magnet school program.  It was socioeconomically and racially diverse, had a good curriculum, and (most importantly for us) had a community of parents and teachers who were fiercely committed to its success.  The waitlist is so impossibly long that SLPS, under Superintendent Kelvin Adams, is finally replicating Kennard’s academic program at a second site, Mallinckrodt School.

Charter school options have also grown.  Citygarden Montessori has a committed group of parents and community supporters and is expanding to a new building, Gateway Science Academy has had such a tremendous number of students trying to attend that they also now have a significant waitlist.  The Language Immersion Schools continue to add students (and languages).

Accessing these schools is not always easy.  Some (like Kennard and Mallinkrodt) require students to go through an arduous testing process before your child can “qualify” to go.  And then there’s the nightmare of the SLPS lottery and wait list.  The charter schools all have their own procedures to follow, their own deadlines and procedural intricacies.  But with a lot of persistence (and a little luck), St. Louis City residents may find their child in a school that is not just as good, but often better, than many of the schools in the surrounding public school districts.

This issue of accessibility should not be minimized though.  Investing the time to compare schooling options and figure out which best fit my child’s needs was only the beginning.  Getting my children into the school they now attend took a lot of time and energy—there’s an “inside ballgame” to be played.  You have to know who to call, how to phrase emails, who to complain to when the process starts slipping away.  My situation might not be entirely typical, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that this was the equivalent of a part-time job for me for a number of months.

And therein lies the problem.  The vast majority of parents in St. Louis City do not have the time or resources to spend investigating all these schools and then “working the system” to get their children into the one they prefer.  And they shouldn’t have to.  Maybe they’re working three part-time minimum wage jobs, maybe they are intimidated by cold-calling school bureaucrats, maybe they don’t have the writing skills to email school officials to ask about things like testing or deadlines.  Maybe their life is so chaotic from day to day that deadlines for admission fall through the cracks because they’re too worried about their electricity being shut off.  Or maybe they can even pull it together enough to fill in the application, but the energy it takes to follow-up, and follow-up, and then follow up again is just too much.

Where does the system leave those people?  It leaves them in a terrible lurch.  The sad fact is the amount of educational resources available for the children of the city of St. Louis is not getting any bigger.  In fact, with the advent of charter schools draining money away from the public schools, the economic pie is actually shrinking.  Parents in St. Louis City are chasing after those resources harder than ever.

We are fighting for the crumbs.  As a result, there is more inequality than ever within St. Louis City’s schools.  It may take a lot of time and effort, but your child could end up in an amazing, academically strong school surrounded by teachers who care.  A few of us enjoy this reality.  Or maybe you’ll land in a school where the students are woefully unprepared for academic success and the teachers are inadequate, ground down by the day to day demands of teaching in a place where they don’t feel valued or successful.  That is the reality for all too many St. Louis parents.

It shouldn’t be.  And although I can’t pretend to know exactly what it would take to solve these inequalities, I do have three humble suggestions.  First and most obviously, the pie needs to get bigger.  We need more revenue, more money poured into education in St. Louis City, not less.  Second, we need a more transparent bureaucracy.  Dealing with St. Louis Public School System is an incredibly frustrating experience where it is often difficult to get a straight answer or know what is going on.  Many of the charter schools operate under that same cloak of ambiguity.  It doesn’t seem like too much to ask all the schools that receive tax money, whether public or charter, to be more transparent in how they are run.  Finally, we need more parent advocacy.  Parents in St. Louis need to flex their political muscle, show up for meetings, and talk to each other (and the teachers) about how to make schools better.  And they need to make them better for ALL of St. Louis children, not just their own.

The post Best and worst of times for St. Louis City parents of school kids appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Through a great recent post at UrbanSTL that led me to an equally great older article in the Riverfront Times, I discovered a book called Stepping Over the Color Line: African American Students in White Suburban Schools, by Amy Stuart Wells and Robert L. Crain. This book, published by Yale University Press in 1997, offers deep background on the roots of school desegregation in St. Louis; a clear description of the voluntary interdistrict transfer program; an analysis of its execution and consequences; a sense of how St. Louisans, black, white, urban, and suburban, felt about the program; and an understanding of the political realities involved with the program.

Given the controversy over this program, I was startled to read, near the end of Stepping Over the Color Line, that in a representative year of the deseg program (1993), it consumed only 3 percent of the state’s total budget, compared to the separate 25 percent of the state budget that went to education. Though politicians may have used the program demagogically as a symbol of government waste and handouts to the undeserving black poor, in the end the amount of the budget devoted to it was relatively small. And many black students, victims of Missouri’s long and ongoing pattern of unequal housing, educational, and employment opportunity, did not benefit at all from the program.

On the other hand, as Wells and Crain demonstrate, many of those who did participate in the program did benefit significantly. Wells and Crain also show the falseness of the alternative that opponents of the program often proposed: to use the deseg money to fix up the city schools instead. Politically, that was never an option. The deseg money was there because the courts forced the state to provide it.

Or, more accurately, the suburban and city school districts that agreed on the out-of-court settlement, in combination with the courts, forced the state of Missouri (which refused to participate in the settlement talks) to provide the money.

These St. Louis-area school districts agreed to the settlement not because they acknowledged that they had helped to create a racially unjust system and wanted to atone for their sins. Instead they agreed to the settlement because (1) they didn’t want to risk losing local control of their district, and (2) they realized that the settlement would mean lots of money for them.

SLPS, though it may have lost some good students and committed parents to county districts, also saw significant gains from the settlement: for each student who left the district for one in the county, SLPS still received 50 percent of the funds they would normally have spent on that student. In addition, SLPS got additional funding for curriculum development, personnel, and capital improvements; and for the creation and maintenance of the magnet school program.

The biggest losers were county districts like Wellston, Jennings, Normandy, and others that were already predominantly black and therefore received none of the money that flowed to the city and the rest of the county during the desegregation project. They were basically in the same plight as the all-black schools and neighborhoods in the city, yet they received no help from the state in the desegregation agreement.

SLPS, Wells and Crain helped me see, were both victims and perpetrators of segregation and attempts to remedy it. They created a separate and unequal system before Brown v. Board of Education and were slow and ineffective in dismantling it after the 1954 decision. At the same time, they were also in a bind because of the racial politics of the time, with rapid white flight (often spurred by racial fear) from the city and intense racially motivated demands from the white families who remained. The city schools often did a mediocre job of actually using their desegregation-related resources to educate black students. This mediocrity is not surprising when one considers that in the late 1980s and early 1990s the school board included a powerful contingent of anti-desegregation members with ties to a local white supremacist group.

Despite the limitations of the St. Louis city-county voluntary transfer program, the book convinces me that it was something extraordinary—a real if small step in the direction of justice, one that gave black students a real chance, in fact, to achieve success in the way that conservatives always prescribe—to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

After all, don’t the images of black students standing on deserted corners by a despair-filled housing projects waiting at 5:30 a.m. for buses to take them on the long ride to school call to mind other famous bootstrap examples of black Americans—Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ralph Ellison—who endured discomfort and hardship in order to grasp the rare chance at an education?

For the most part, however, white St. Louisans didn’t see it that way. They just saw those students’ long journeys as a waste of money. Or they focused resentfully on the taxi cabs that took home the ones who had to stay late for some athletic contest or disciplinary consequence. Or they felt pity for the transfer students, pity born of aesthetic distaste for such a seemingly nonsensical arrangement—without understanding the much more disturbing nonsense of the historical and present color line in St. Louis.

It’s clear that ignoring the educational problems caused by segregation does not work. In recent years, a number of the virtually all-black suburban districts passed over by the desegregation settlement have lost their accreditation, and the Supreme Court has ruled that parents in those districts have a right to send their kids to schools elsewhere. It’s the same issue that led to the desegregation settlement that will end in three years. The underlying racial, economic, and political realities have not really changed. It’s just that now the conflict is even more pronounced within St. Louis County.

Looking at a district like Wellston or Riverview Gardens, one realizes that, were it not for all the desegregation money pouring in from the state, SLPS would be in much, much worse shape than it is today.

So what will happen in 2014 when the program ends?

The post School deseg: history, politics, impact, future? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The Francis Howell school district of St. Charles County [Missouri] voted to end a nearly 40-year tradition of year-round education (YRE) for their elementary schools last month, despite a growing trend around the country toward longer school years. Prior to the decision, elementary students attended in 9-week cycles, with 3-week breaks between cycles and a 6-week summer vacation. Starting in 2011, there will be three breaks throughout the year [lasting about two weeks each] and a 10-week summer vacation.

The new schedule would shave only 5 days off the previous 174-day schedule, but school officials say it will save the district about $1 million. Savings are primarily transportation costs associated with the conflict of schedules between elementary and secondary students, school officials say. Planners were able to make up for the 5-day decrease by adding 5 minutes to each school day.

Parents, teachers, and students were mostly divided on the issue; whether a year-round schedule actually benefits education and improves retention was a subject of debate. Those who approved of the decision primarily liked the idea of a slimmer budget and longer summer vacation. Those who opposed it feared it would harm the high quality of education area students have been enjoying for decades.

These feelings seem to mirror those around the country, though the number of students getting a YRE is growing. In 2008, the Department of Education put the number of students in year-round schools at nearly 2.5 million. That’s up from 1.5 million ten years ago, and the number of YRE students could hit 5 million in 2012.

Long summer breaks are more than just a matter of retained learning, they’re part of  a socioeconomic issue, sayK arl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Steffel Olson of Johns Hopkins University. The authors of Children, School, and Inequality (Social Inequality) have been studying Baltimore students in order to understand the “long-term educational consequences” of varying degrees of summer learning. What they found is hardly surprising, but could explain the growing year-round trend despite conflicted public opinion.

Students in low socioeconomic situations keep pace with their high-income counterparts during a year-round schedule, say the authors.  With longer summer breaks, however, low-income children lose traction and even grind to a halt, while children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds continue gaining ground. Access to summer enrichment programs, camps, and tutoring mean progress for children who have such advantages, while others are left behind.

President Obama has long advocated a combination of longer school days and shorter summer vacations, citing poor performance in American schools and competitive disadvantages. U.S. school years are typically 180 days. A number of countries including Japan, South Korea, and Israel have school years longer than 200 days. To avoid student and teacher burn-out, a year-round schedule with short, regular breaks seems to be the most logical conclusion. Will Francis Howell elementary schools fare better?

The schedule change at Francis Howell is set to begin for the 2011-2012 school year, so it’s difficult to predict how this change will affect students. Some parents and teachers argue that elementary students in the district scored better on Missouri achievement tests [MAP] than the other four districts in St. Charles County. Students in the Francis Howell school district did indeed score better; MAP scores were 12% higher than the state average in 2010 and a 5% increase over last year. These high scores, they say, are attributed to the year-round schedule. Francis Howell Board President Mike Sommer credits the Professional Learning Communities model for high MAP scores, pointing out that scores were down before its adoption a few years ago.

A two-year budget shortfall of $6 million is the reason behind the schedule change, and it raises the larger issue of a struggling U.S. economy. If Alexander, Entwisle, and Steffel are correct, student achievement is based not only on the quality and quantity of the education received but also the socioeconomic levels of students. Based on their findings and in a district facing shortfalls, it is logical to assume that the $1 million savings could come at the cost of educational progress for some students.

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