Last night's Cincinnati Public Schools board meeting was a replay of the drama seen about every two years in the district. The plot goes this way:
1. The district identifies cuts that need to be made to balance the budget and serve current enrollment.
2. Parents in CPS's highest-achieving schools object loudly to cuts at their schools.
3. The board accedes to the noisy parents, knowing that these middle-class and upper-middle-class families have the means of leaving the system.
4. Cuts are concentrated in schools with quiet parents, who are mostly themselves poorly educated and so economically poor.
So Walnut Hills and the Montessoris will not get any cuts, but more neighborhood schools will get the ax.
As we've noted for Walnut Hills, this leaves open the question as to whether the school, already enrolled below its capacity, can continue to enroll students who meet its entrance standards in numbers near its capacity while the overall CPS student population declines.
To say that all students will do better at a school like Walnut is like saying that anyone will play baseball better if he plays for the New York Yankees. The truth is, Walnut does a great job with bright, well-prepared, motivated students, but it has little capacity to help those who are less than that.
Now, here's the question for five years from now: what will the noisy parents of means do when their schools have excess capacity and the district wants to move poor kids into them because there isn't room elsewhere?
10 comments:
Jealousy, jealousy. Does the end justify the "means"?
"Noisy" parents or concerned parents?
Better to have overcapacity or undercapacity at a good school? Which will force more noisy parents and good students out of the district?
And who is to say that the good students will leave the district? It could be that the birth rate in Avondale is dropping among quiet parents of less means. Maybe the district will be gentrified as is bound to happen with the housing.
If the district wasn't wasting a billion dollars on new buildings, there wouldn't be so many complaints.
People get what they work for. The right to petition the government is enshrined in the first amendment. These parents are exercising their right. They want what's best for their kid's school (and also for their kids). Since that is virtually the same as the district's mandate / purpose.
Are the quiet parents quiet? Or are they passive? They are the problem in the district, not the ones demanding quality from the district.
Anonymous: I think SWNID's primary criticism is directed at members of the school board. They are failing in their responsibility to ensure that the community's scarce educational resources are being equitably distributed by cowering to the demands of a vocal (and politically powerful) minority. His criticisms of that minority are secondary, though closely related and, I would insist, equally warranted. The fact that the parents in question have a legal right to petition the government on this issue does not count as a moral (or, for that matter, even a prudential) justification for trying to get more than their fair share of the pie. We have many (legal) rights that are better left unexercised when they conflict with our (moral) duties to ensure the common good.
Anonymous, I doubt that SWNID is jealous, since he and Mrs. SWNID have one child who graduated from Walnut (one of the "magnificent seven" valedictorians of 2005, if I recall correctly) and another who's still there and doing quite well, from what I hear. If he's jealous, it's of his own kids who get to go to a cool school like WHHS.
I would argue that in the classroom, Walnut does not serve its lowest academic quartile very well. Inferior instructors generally teach non-AP classes, and these students do not receive much attention from guidance counselors compared to the students in the upper echelons.
While Walnut serves its very best students well through extracurricular activities, it does necessarily do the same in the classroom. The school offers an accelerated math sequence but does not offer a Senior math course for students in this program. I did not receive a helpful writing comment from an English teacher after ninth grade because I was judged to be competent. The district as a whole may better serve all its students by reducing enrollment at Walnut.
Jim shoes,
I don't believe that SWNID is jealous of anybody. Maybe Howard Marshall, but certainly not rich people.
But his words sound like John Edwards. And since he is revulsed by his evil twin brother, separated at birth, he ought not to mimic him, in word or thought.
CPS needs noisy and wealthy parents like no other school district in Ohio, save Cleveland.
These parents aren't always right. They may not be right even in this case. But the district needs them desperately.
Just as governments need journalists (even rich ones like Dan Rather), school boards need parents. It is precisely because parents have provided zero accountability of CPS governance and management that CPS has failed.
And to those who say that CPS is allocating scarce resources...I understand microeconomics and the common good. The CPS board understands neither. You would have to be a graduate of a non-Waltnut Hills High CPS school to believe that CPS has done anything other than enrich its crony employees and unaccountable unions for the last 20 years with its "scarce" resources.
Anonymous, the point is that the noisy parents of WHHS tend to use the rhetoric of high-minded public spiritedness to serve themselves. The words say that they care about providing the poor and powerless with the best education available, but what they really want is every possible goodie available for their own privileged offspring. And WHHS is not alone in this, of course.
Of course the district needs rich parents. We've said that before. But let's not fool ourselves about everyone's real motives or think that keeping rich parents in the district helps poor kids do better in school.
And if there's any similarity, it's John Edwards who sounds like us, not the other way around.
I'll assume that's I. Howard Marshall, not J. Howard Marshall.
"Privileged" or blessed?
Did they work for their middle class status as you did? Or did it fall from the liberal sky?
SWNID:
Exactly how will more relative resources for schools serving the under"privileged" do any good? You yourself have said the students and parents couldn't be more apathetic.
Maybe we should close some of those schools (end the system of guaranteed educations for all), and thereby artificially create value in public schools, and subsequently demand, interest, motivation, performance, etc.
Anon, we can't buy your social Darwinist view. Granting that the language of "privilege" can reflect the notion that you allege, it is nevertheless true that children don't deserve the wealth or poverty into which they are born. It also is nevertheless true that while in general parents' involvement is crucial in education, in individual cases, some children do rise above the indifference, even the destructiveness, of their parents and gain the benefits of education. It is the responsibility of a moral body politic to provide the optimal educational opportunities for such individuals. By inisting that CPS keep WHHS at its present, underfilled capacity, the noisy parents are asking that more resources be devoted to their fewer children, meaning that less will be devoted to intervention and remediation.
We recommend that you give Glenn Loury a read to get a grasp of the moral imperative of devoting public resources to rescuing those who will to be rescued from the underclass.
The idea that a scarcity of education will make it more valuable and so more effective reminds us of the kind of thing that a villainous character in a Dickens novel might say. So we assume you're kidding.
Post a Comment