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Today I learned several things about the Saint Paul, MN public school district that made me dismayed, but one that had me dumbfounded. I shouldn't have been surprised, but still, what I learned was so clearly an admission that what's best for students has NO PRIORITY in the district's calculus that I couldn't believe they admit it.
As background, let me state that every school in the SP district is run "independently" in terms of philosophy, including every neighborhood elementary school. Some are Core Knowledge schools. Some are Achievement Plus schools. Some are Montessori. At least one claims to be a Differentiated Learning school. This, combined SP's rules allowing parents to apply to any school in the district through neighborhood reassignment or the nearly 3 dozen various magnets sounds like there must be a school that's perfect for you somewhere, right?
So what did I learn?
School start and end times for all Saint Paul public schools are set by the SPPS's Department of Transportation.
That's right, their DoT determines when each school starts and ends based on their logistical plan for bus routes and available buses.
To be clear, let me elaborate: the DoT does not determine a uniform start time for the schools in the district. Each Saint Paul school may start at a *different* time, and start times are not guaranteed from year to year.
I heard this marginally defended today, as well. The argument was that this time issue allowed parents to choose the school "most convenient to their schedule."
Not to malign the complex issues that arise with multiple kids and juggling of careers, but to exercise school choice in order to make your commute more convenient seems the ultimate admission that you don't value academic excellence, or perhaps more likely, that even though you had all of the above choices, you know it *doesn't matter which school you attend*. But more the point, that's what the school district is telling the students, too, isn't it?
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16 comments:
I may have you beat.
Last fall I sent C. into school early for Extra Help, which he desperately needed at the time, having gotten a D- on his first math test of the year.
(We are up to Bs & As now!)
The guard posted at the door wouldn't let him in because he didn't have a pass. It didn't matter anyway, the guard said, since the teacher was in a meeting. This was the Special Allotted Extra Help time period, mind you. This was the time parents and students had been told would be held open for Extra Help.
Naturally I took this up via email with the principal who told me that:
a) the guard wasn't a guard; she was "support staff"
and
b) the Westchester Bomb Squad told them to limit entrance to the building
The Westchester Bomb Squad - (the Westchester Bomb Squad?) is setting Extra Help policy in my $22,000 per pupil middle school.
I pointed out the fact that the Westchester Bomb Squad has no expertise in K-12 education but I didn't hear back.
I talked to a mom this week who said she's sent her son in repeatedly for Extra Help, which is pretty much the soul form of remediation available in the district short of hiring a tutor for $120/hr, in the last 3 weeks.
The teacher only showed up once.
Students don't compute.
You must read Joe Williams right away!
Niki Hayes says the same thing. The system is about the grownups. Not the kids.
I think the only way St Paul can offer busing to most of the schools from all over the city is to have staggered start times. I have heard that the number of buses would have to increase dramatically if all elementary schools started at the same time. Busing already eats up a large portion of the budget and it is a constant fight to retain school choice due to the large attendant transportation costs.
In an urban school district, school choice is meaningless without transportation.
What I've found in the St Paul public schools is that the differences are more a matter of principal and staff, rather than the programming focus. Lose a good principal, and you better start looking for a new school.
Also, there is not as much choice in curriculum as one is led to believe. For example, ALL elementary schools--even the Core Knowledge schools--are required to use Everyday Math. In the junior and senior highs, a standardization of curriculum is in progress, having been implemented for math last year. I believe science is scheduled for standardization this year.
So much for school choice...
re: staggered start times: other school districts, even with magnets, manage to standardize on start times. it's about their priorities for their budget. sure, busing is expensive. closing schools is a better solution.
how did you find out that all schools are REQUIRED to use Everyday Math? I've not been able to get anyone to tell me that.
I'd second VickiS' comment that district-wide school choice doesn't mean much unless the district provides transportation, at least if there are many children whose parents can't drive them to school (I think that's what VS was referring to when she said "urban"). Optimizing start times to minimize transportation costs seems preferable to either a) making parents responsible forgetting kids to school or b) paying whatever it costs to have enough buses to get every children to schools that all start at the same time. a) excludes the most disadvantaged children and b) has no intrinsic academic justification anyway.
It is reasonable -- well, defensible at least -- for a district with high transiency rates to standardize curriculum. The difficulty is that by the time you've scaled up to a district of any size, the common curriculum will be a bad one, such as Everyday Math.
It seems as if both Allison and VickiS are in St. Paul. Perhaps one of them could put up a reference post about the district's unusual demographics, since ktm readers come from all over and probably don't know about the large SE Asian population (and the fact that St. Paul sends out school information in six languages).
"Not to malign the complex issues that arise with multiple kids and juggling of careers, but to exercise school choice in order to make your commute more convenient seems the ultimate admission that you don't value academic excellence, or perhaps more likely, that even though you had all of the above choices, you know it *doesn't matter which school you attend*. But more the point, that's what the school district is telling the students, too, isn't it?"
No, I disagree with that. In addition to the practical matters that Linda and VickiS have raised, providing staggered start times really is a benefit to parents.
Not every parent has the same schedule, and not every parent can vary that schedule to meet a static start time. While I would prefer not to choose a school on the basis of start times, I can certainly imagine a case where I would.
At present, I pay for after-school care for my son, because of scheduling issues. In the past, I've also paid for before-school care. While our family can handle the cost of either, the difference is non-trivial, and for many families might be so significant as to be a deciding factor in school choice.
A major part of the paradigm of school choice is that each family will have a slightly (or radically) different value equation. I don't think it's appropriate to judge another family's value equation in this matter.
Sorry, but I don't see how this policy of Saint Paul supports your argument. In their world, every year you'd have to revisit this problem, and maybe multiple times, since you couldn't be assured that your eldest wasn't required to be at school while your youngest didn't starts school for over 90 minutes. That's not a solution; that's an ongoing problem.
It means you having to make changes every year because they can't figure out how to do what Fed Ex does.
By the wayt before-and-after-school care is also "provided" at most of these schools--though how that helps since there are no buses is beyond me. So it's yet another supposed factor "Supporting" choice, but not really, as it adds even more complexity to this system.
I'd be happy to put up demographic info, but what that has to do with transience is unclear to me. How you'd judge the supposed claim that kids are moving schools from the demo data is not something I understand. Fundamentally, I doubt there is that level of transience. The minority populations here are quite fixed in size and location.
Demographics:
http://www.spps.org/About_Us2.html
says:
Student Demographics: (2006-07)
Student Enrollment
Early Education 624
Kindergarten 2,911
Elementary (1-6) 17,788
Secondary (7-12 and Area Learning Centers) 18,866
Total enrollment reported to the state 40,543
Early Kindergarten (4-year-old kindergarten) 901
ENROLLMENT GRAND TOTAL 41,444
Saint Paul's students are:
o Asian American (29.8% or 12,239)
o African American (29.8% or 12,099)
o White American (26.1% or 10,576)
o Latino/Hispanic American (13% or 5,230)
o American Indian (1.8% or 747)
Limited English Speaking Pre-kindergarten-12 39.7% or 16,101
Home Language Other than English 43% or 17,434
(More than 103 languages & dialects)
Eligible for free & reduced price lunch 69.5% or 28,193
Mobility Index (2005-06)** 24%
Stability Index (2005-06)** 88%
Students Receiving Special Education Services 17.1% or 6,954
**The mobility index shows the disruption due to students who enter or leave traditional schools during the school year. The stability index shows the percent of students who were enrolled for the entire year.
-----------------
I don't know enough to know if that mobility index or stability index are high or low.
Since the mobility index includes people moving in and out of special programs, charter schools, etc. I also don't know if that's a standard measure. Re: the stability index, it doesn't seem to be saying that the measure someone in THAT SPECIFIC school; it might be staying in the district.
Last comments:
even if you support staggered start times, I find it ridiculous that you do it based on the DoT's purview. I mean, really, couldn't it be based on the preferences of the parents at that school? or even educators?
re: solving the expense of busing: well, gee, having almost 3 dozen magnet schools is the problem. They include the "museum magnet", an american indian magnet, a "technology and global studies" magnet, an environmental magnet, an "international peace magnet", as well as 2 montessoris, a spanish immersion, a german immersion, a french immersion,arts and music magnets, etc.
given that all schools use the same math and reading curriculum, you might ask what the value is of over 30 magnets and busing througout the district. you might again ask what this demonstrates about priorities.
Thanks for providing the data, Allison. I didn't mean to imply that transience is directly related to demographics, merely that it might be useful context for readers elsewhere, whose first thought when they read "urban" probably isn't "Hmong."
I'm not specifically responding to St. Paul's implementation of staggered start times; I agree that changing start times yearly is a poor choice. I am, however, saying that:
1) Staggered start times are not prima facie unreasonable, and may be quite valuable to some families.
2) Staggering start times on the basis of transportation needs is probably quite reasonable.
3) "Anything for the kids, regardless of the costs to the taxpayer" is prima facie unreasonable.
Are there other ways these needs could be met? Of course. One of the ways to do this is to only offer transportation to a subset of the available schools. If you care about school choice, though, that has significant costs to the children in the city, too.
Are there schools in your list whose focuses I find risible? Of course. (Though I find the idea of an "international peace magnet" pretty entertaining as well. Does it just sort of suck all the "peace" towards MSP?) But supporting choice means supporting choices for others that I wouldn't make for myself or my child.
If you'd care to present a logistical and financial solution that would work better (stipulating that year-to-year schedule stability would be better than the current starting point), I'd be interested to see it. This is a non-trivial problem.
Finally, I'll note that I do not live in St. Paul, so I'm interested in this more for its broader applicability than for this specific implementation.
The St. Paul school district has a long history of school choice and a very interesting implementation of the concept. In the elementary realm, there are magnet schools, with (costly) citywide busing, and there are neighborhood schools, with busing only in their attendance area and, I think, only if the child is more than a mile away. There is citywide busing for all junior and senior highs.
There is a constant tension between supporters of neighborhood schools and supporters of magnet schools/school choice. Some would say the magnet schools have been cannabilizing the neighborhood schools.
The demographics posted by Allison show that this is not your high income, lily white city by any means. In particular, we have a very large number of ELL students (southeast Asians, and more recently, Africans), and a large free-and-reduced-lunch population. For example, Mpls./St Paul has the largest number of Somalians outside Somalia.
There are families who choose long bus rides because they cannot afford before or after school care. I cannot blame them. After/before school care, which is not available at every school, was about $20/day when my kids were using it, and the cost is independent of how long the kid stays on site.
Kids as young as first grade are allowed under our city ordinance to be home alone in the afternoon unless there are extenuating circumstances. Why? Because parent have to work, there are a ton of single parent families, etc., and social services recognizes this.
There are indeed families who do choose schools based upon the start times. And although the district does not guarantee start times, I have not seen a start time change for a district school in all the years my kids have been schoolage (they are in 6th and 9th grade now).
Some charter schools make use of district buses (they pay for them). These are the schools that sometimes have start time changes; they are at the lowest spot on the transportation totem pole. They also have the least desirable start times. For example, one charter school I was interested in had a start time of 10am! Now it is 9am.
I'm with Doug--I see no intrinsic value in identical start times for all elementary schools. Often you'll have siblings in two different schools anyway due to their ages and they will necessarily have different start times. The districts *have* to use the buses for a couple of runs during the mornings and afternoons; it just does not make economic sense not to. (Aside: I just wish they'd switch thing so the high schools started at 8:30 instead of 7:30!).
That said, we do pay more for busing in St Paul than we need to, since the school board voted to require all bidding companies to show that they provide their part-time drivers with paid sick leave! Most of the working stiffs who pay property taxes don't have that luxury...
About curriculum: yes, it is district-directed, moreso now than ever before. The rationale advanced by the district is because there are so many interschool transfers. This is ironic, since the citywide busing to magnet schools was supposed to reduce the transiency but I guess it hasn't done that. I wouldn't mind a standardized curriculum and can see its benefits in this population, but of course they have to choose Everyday Math, Lucy Caulkin's Readers/Writers workshop, inquiry science, and the like. Blech.
Everyday Math is the adopted elementary curriculum for St Paul public schools (indeed, they just adopted EM 2007 without any public input at all). Curriculum is reviewed on 5 year intervals, staggered for the various subjects. When I complained, vigorously and with many others, about Everyday Math at an elementary school here, the principal told me the only way the school could use something else would be to pay for the other curriculum (books, training, etc.) out of its building budget (and of course this would never happen--there is just nothing extra in the building budget. You can't cut an AP or a social worker when 20% of the kids in your classrooms are behavior problems).
Finally, what does it mean to have school choice when the curriculum is becoming increasingly standardized? That is an excellent question--one I've been thinking about too, since the push toward standardization is undermining the concept. There seems to still be some leeway in implementing the various magnet concepts (arts, language immersion, IB, gifted/talented, etc.) but for me school choice still centers primarily on the principal and staff. I'm glad to be able to choose, for that reason.
...but for me school choice still centers primarily on the principal and staff
I'm referring to school choice *within* a district. There are lots of other manifestations of school choice in the form of charter schools and private schools (happily).
Saint Paul Public Schools is in the process of aligning all mathematics curricula from PreK to grade 12. PreK - grade 6 will use Everyday Math.
From the St Paul Superindendent's bulletin, March 2, 2007. (EM has been used for at least 5 years now, anyway). The middle school and high school book adoption (Holt) was reported in the April 20, 2007 bulletin.
I believe I saw the actual adoptions in the 2007 school board minutes.
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