In my original post, I miscredited the author of this piece. It is Carina Hilbert. I attributed the piece to someone who retweeted it. My apologies to Carina Hilbert.
Teacher Carina Hilbert is heart-broken. She was proud to work at Albion High School. She loved the kids. The kids were the best. So was the staff.
But they closed the school.
It hurts her to think about it, to talk about it, to write it.
“I may be gone from AHS, but a piece of my heart will always be there, hidden away in room 121, where magic happened, students learned and grew, and lives were changed. We are all Wildcats.”
Who are “they”? Who are these cold, callous people who blithely shut down a beloved school and disrupt communities? How dare they? And they piously claim they are doing it “for the children.” Did they ask the children? Did they ask their parents?
Of course not.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Diane, I wrote that and taught there, not Hector. He just retweeted it.
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Carina, I apologize. I made the correction. Thanks for pointing out that you are the author!
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Thank you!
The ones who closed our high school were the board members who voted for it (all but two–one against, one abstaining because he was told to), but the real power behind that was state-level pressure over the district’s deficit. There were many reasons that debt was there, loss of students due to school choice, mismanagement of funds, expensive buildings to maintain, paying for superintendents long gone after their buyouts . . . Still, the students do not deserve to lose their community, their educational home, because the adults screwed up.
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Two examples of the New Accountabully Math.
The first comes from the piece referenced by Diane [click on the above link]:
“We raised our test scores from the 5th percentile to above the 50th in the state in two years. Two years! No one else has done that, and that should tell anyone right there just how amazing our students were. We had some of the best students around, and it was a real honor to work with them.”
Under a new and improved VAManiacally precise formula, this inexorably mandates: shut the school, punish staff and students and parents, and cause havoc in the surrounding community.
The second is a heart stirring mix of EduFacts from the most EduExcellent Cagebusting Innovators of our [or any] time. Raise your students from the 13th percentile to the 90th. 98& of all teachers evaluated by nothing more than a perfunctory “satisfactory” on their annual evaluations . A 57% graduation rate = 100%.
Using the same VAManiacally precise formula—but in these cases needing to provide absolutely no data to support their claims—$tudent $ucce$$, celebrity, and political influence are awarded to [in order]: Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates, and the Amistad outlet of Achievement First CT.
And for those who can’t—or stubbornly won’t—follow this line of reasoning, remember the stirring words of Dr. Steve Perry: “Men lie and women lie but numbers don’t” [ok, he borrowed them from rapper Jay-Z].
Go figure.
🙂
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Oops. That’s “98%” not “98&”!
My bad. I apologize.
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How could anyone be so Krazy as to close a school doing what was described? That is the last school to close with what was described. This is the insanity of what is going on. That is why what happened at LAUSD yesterday is so important nationally. If the new board brings sense to the second largest school district as is more than possible with Richard Vladavic being the new board president, Steve Zimmer being the new board vice-president and with Marguerite LaMotte, the conscience of the district, Bennett Keyser and now Monica Ratliff who is both a very successful teacher who never stopped teaching while running for the board this can happen in your town also. If that happens the corporatist privatizers are finished by those who care about our youth not profit at the expense of our society as schools are what society is and teachers must again be highly respected professionals allowed to practice their profession which cannot be totally scripted as there are too many variables in each student. Teaching is really making a customized program when needed for each student who needs help. Without that the system crashes and that is what is going on now.
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Amen George, and we know up close and personally about the closures of some beloved neighborhood schools. Here’s hoping that this board will bring collaboration of communities,teachers and parents back into the reform process.
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Great blog. We need more people to speak out against what they are doing in Michigan to close schools, especially taking over the “bottom” 5% of schools and turning them over to the state.
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I also circulated Carina’s blog post, because I thought it was a powerful statement of what is going on in our state today. However, to understand what brought the Albion Public Schools to this point, it’s important to understand the context.
Albion High School was not closed because of academic performance or any “reform” effort on the part of the local school board. They closed the only high school, and voted to become a K-8 district, because of the impossible financial situation they found themselves in. There may indeed have been other, better, options, but it’s hard to escape the sense that this was an act of desperation.
Their financial situation, regardless of any local mistakes, is one faced by nearly every public school district in our state. Why? Because all school funding is set centrally, by the state legislature in the annual state budget. Michigan public schools have lost ground to inflation for years, and have been particularly hard hit when the Federal stimulus money ran out and our Governor and legislature chose to put resources into a $1 billion plus corporate tax cut at the expense of education at all levels.
The other factor is that Michigan funds schools entirely on the basis of a per-pupil grant, which is meant to represent the “average” cost to the district. But students are not average: high schools are more costly to operate, on a per-pupil basis, than elementary schools. Special education students are very costly, and state and Federal assistance does not cover the full cost, leaving the rest to be covered out of the “average” per-pupil funding. Moreover, there is no allowance for fixed costs in this scheme – if you lose 20% of your students, you lose 20% of your operating budget.
Albion Public Schools has declined from 1,175 students in 2008 to 855 this past school year. The high school (counting only grades 9-12) has declined from 412 students to 171 students over the same period. It’s hard to keep a high school going when you have lost more than half of your funding to keep it open, even if the number of students is much smaller.
While population loss is a real dilemma for much of Michigan, the cruelest cuts are coming from our state government, which refuses to consider raising new revenue for schools – or anything else, for that matter. Many of our lawmakers would be happy to see publicly-governed public education disappear entirely, and use public money to fund privately-managed (and thus more “efficient” and worthy) schools. This is where we find ourselves, and the threat to education owned and governed by the public have never been more clear.
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You can have whatever your daddy can pay for.
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Meaning?
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Property is private, within the family. The fundamental lie most public school teachers espouse is that the wealth of the country belongs to everyone. But it doesn’t. It belongs to those who assemble it. To individuals. America is based on private property, or at least it used to be. And it should be. Those who talk about the common wealth are thus both liars and thieves.
Where do you stand? Do you think you have a claim on anyone else’s money? Whose? And on what basis? As an heir you might have a claim on your daddy’s estate, but not on your neighbor’s estate. A large number of people believe they have a claim to other people’s money. It is the fundamental philosophical flaw in modern American popular economics. Accepting help from the government means someone else is paying part of your way. But the country is running out of someone elses, with only 58 % working. It can’t last.
To the extent you can, pay your own way. Accept other people’s money reluctantly. Doing so softens the will and rots the soul, makes one tolerant of dishonesty. It’s like not doing one’s own homework, copying from someone.
We expect fathers to support their own children. Current tax law compels us all to pay for the support of other men’s children as well as our own. Actually we borrow .40 of each dollar we distribute nationally. So we’re not actually paying. We are expecting our children, grand children, and great grand children to pay off the debt. Consider Obamacare. It extracts money from young healthy people to pay the health care costs of older citizens, just as social security transfers wealth from young working people to the pockets of older retired citizens not in their family. It’s a wonder they don’t revolt.
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I welcome your articulation of this extreme ideology, since it highlights the political climate in many parts of the country today. But I would argue that this position is fundamentally un-American.
What constitutes “accepting help from government”? Do you drive on roads built by the community? Would you reject assistance from the police when threatened, or from the fire department in case of accident? Do you resent the system of law and courts that allows you to enter into business contracts with the assurance that you can enforce them legally and not resort to thuggery? Would you prefer to have to pay or threaten your neighbor to stop them dumping garbage on your property rather than be protected by laws that define your property rights?
Education has been correctly seen as a community project since the founding of the Republic, not least in reaction to the heirarchical European systems where only those with means had access to an education which allowed them to prosper. Provision for public schools and their funding was included in the first acts of the new nation, including that which created the territories which would become the Great Lakes states. It seems to me that arguments such as yours have been rejected from the very beginning of American democracy. This is the battle being fought in state capitals across the country today.
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I’m interested in your family imagery, not least because it confirms George Lakoff’s analysis of how metaphors of the family drive politics as well. What role do you see for mothers in this family/social scheme? Don’t we expect all parents to care for their children? And, as a parent, should I care only for my own children and give no thought to anyone else’s?
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This is spot-on. We had lost vast numbers of students due to damage to our brand that came from without and within. In a survey of parents who lived in district but who sent their children elsewhere through school choice, we found many who thought we had zero AP offerings (we had 3–I taught one of them), that few of our teachers were highly qualified (all of us were), that the school was dangerous (one fight all year), and that we didn’t offer dual enrollment (we offered unlimited, free dual enrollment and had many students graduate with the first year or two of college done). Word of mouth was killing us, and we weren’t doing enough to fight that.
Still, there were options, people in the community were silenced during the process (yes, there were meetings, but people were cut off, told they couldn’t comment, etc.), and now our students are suffering for it. The kids shouldn’t have to pay for adult financial mismanagement on either the state or local levels.
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