Of SWNIDish importance is the ranking of Cincinnati Public Schools, which continues for a second year in the middle category of "continuous improvement," safely above the bottom categories where the district struggled for years.
What grand lessons do we confidently draw from these data?
- Lots of things ail public education, and some of them have to do with the fact that it's "public," which is to say a function of government with its inefficiency. But we are beginning to see that continuous attention to best practices and clear objectives can yield improvement. Public schools are not as doomed as some people allege. We do know a little about how to facilitate learning.
- There remains a pretty clear and obvious link between the quality measures of a school district and the prosperity of its students. Districts with a higher concentration of economically poor students have generally lower rankings than rich districts. And this has less to do with how much money is spent on the schools (some districts with poor students have lots of money to spend) than on the way that poverty generally impoverishes students' experiences outside of school and make it harder for them to learn. Regardless of the school, parents remain the most important factor in education.
- So urban districts that are making improvement deserve recognition for doing a very, very hard job better than they have before.
- District rankings don't mean much if a district is very big. Within large districts there are certainly good schools and bad, irrespective of the district's rank as a whole. Parents who make decisions about their children's education based solely on district rankings are exposing the weakness of their own education. And so we remind our gentle readers again: Cincinnati Public Schools has some awful schools and some great schools, and the good news is that just about anyone can go to one of the great ones. So don't move from the city just yet.
- We hope that Hamilton County's second biggest school district, Northwest, is not in a tailspin. It's one of the two area districts that went down a notch. The district is having a tough time holding onto superintendents, its most recent levy was voted down, and the last board meeting rivaled the Jerry Springer show for disorderliness. Our confidential sources fear the district is in a pattern of decline from which it may never recover. That would be bad. We hope that the district's many able and committed educators and parents prevail.
Finally, an unscientific, subjective, anecdotal and personal observation. We are entering our seventeenth consecutive year as a postsecondary educator. And it is our firm conviction that today's college students of traditional age are as a whole better prepared for college and more serious about learning than their counterparts a decade or two ago. We observe greater experience in serious reading and extended writing, not to mention such things as higher-level mathematics and foreign languages. Not all is well in our high schools; they are massively uneven. But as a whole, they've been a lot worse.
3 comments:
CNN is also reporting today that the class of 2006 posted the highest average ACT score since 1991. But then again, this might have more to do with the fact that the ACT is becoming better at assessing knowledge rather than students being better educated. I'll leave it to you to decide.
I wonder if it's fair to conclude that the participants in the Hamilton County School Board meeting who were unable to carry on a civilized discussion are members of that earlier, less-prepared generation of college students you described.
The article you linked mentions that NW schools were rated excellent or effective last year, something CPS has yet to achieve. How does this put the district in a decline? Excluding the apparent incompetence of the school board of course.
On a side note, I was a CPS student two decades ago. Not all of us turned out as badly as your comments suggest.
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