[I am reposting this because the original post earlier today seems to have disappeared.]
Sixty years after the landmark Brown decision, school segregation is on the rise. The nation marks the anniversary of the decision every ten years but neglects its promise to end racial segregation. One of the most egregious examples of malign neglect occurred recently in the Normandy school district in Missouri. That district had been a high-achieving all-white district in the 1950s. After years of white flight, the district became all-African-American. As its test scores fell, the state of Missouri put the district on provisional accreditation. Help was definitely not on the way. After 18 years of provisional accreditation, the state merged the struggling Normandy district with another struggling, all-black district that had been under state supervision for five years. After the merger, the new district was stripped of accreditation.
Dr. Stanton Lawrence, who wrote the post below, was appointed superintendent of the Normandy school district in 2008. At that time, it was the second lowest-performing district in the state of Missouri (98% African American students/94.5% poverty) and had been provisionally accredited for 15 years. Two years later, the State Board of Education merged Normandy with the only lower performing school district (100% African American students/98% poverty) in the state, Wellston School District and stripped Normandy of its accreditation two years later. Dr. Lawrence wrote me to say, “My understanding is that this has never happened anywhere else in the country. There was a much higher performing district adjoining Wellston, but there would have been an atomic explosion if the African American students had been sent to University City School District.” The new district, like the old one, will be nearly 100% African American.
Stanton Lawrence asks in this post, “Has the Brown v. Board of Education Decision Been Institutionally Annulled?” He describes the actions of the state of Missouri as “punitive disparity.” Did any civil rights organization sue the state of Missouri? No. Did the U.S. Department of Education intervene? No. Did Secretary of Education Arne Duncan use his bully pulpit to demand desegregation and support for the children in the Normandy School District? No. The children in this district were essentially written off by the state of Missouri, and no one cares. Where is the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, Democrats for Education Reform, StudentsFirst, and Students Matter? Why aren’t the billionaires saving these children?
Stanton Lawrence writes:
On May 17, 1954, the United State Supreme Court handed down its historic decision in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, lawsuit. This landmark ruling stipulated that “de jure” segregation, racial separation that is required by law, could no longer exist in public schools. Further, the high court ruled that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”. The reluctance of many southern school districts to enforce this new law resulted in many school districts receiving federal desegregation court orders mandating that they desegregate their schools. In recent years, despite Brown v. Board, many of these school districts have once again become more segregated than they were prior to 1965.
Nearly fifty-eight and one-half years later, on September 18, 2012, the Missouri State Board of Education decided to reclassify the Normandy School District as unaccredited. On its face, there was nothing unusual about the decision. The school district had been provisionally accredited for nearly eighteen years, and the dismal academic performance of its students was largely to blame. One could certainly make a strong case that the time had arrived for the state board of education to take meaningful action and send a clear message that a change was imperative if Normandy students were indeed deserving of a high quality educational experience.
But what was kept strangely quiet during the two hours of deliberations preceding the Missouri State Board of Education’s vote was the fact that only two years earlier, this same Board decided to merge a failed school district into the Normandy School District. That fact was never mentioned even once, almost as though it had never happened. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education had exercised oversight of the Wellston School District for five years. When the state determined that there was insufficient progress in Wellston, they decided to lapse the school district and merge it into the similarly struggling Normandy School District.
Again, the decision would have been considered unremarkable, however, with a couple of critical exceptions. Every student in the Wellston School District was African American, and ninety-eight percent of those students received free or reduced price lunch, the federal threshold for determining poverty. In fact, Wellston was the only school district in the state of Missouri that was 100% African-American. Ninety-eight percent of Normandy’s students were African-American, and ninety-four and one-half percent of those students were from impoverished families. In essence, both communities were experiencing concentrated poverty and racial segregation. Was this decision made to effectively segregate the students in both school districts?
Not surprisingly, a trend line of longitudinal academic data of all school districts in the state of Missouri, when juxtaposed on a trend line reflecting the percentage of African American students from impoverished families in each school district, offers some distressing reflections. There is a near perfect match which reflects that the school districts with the highest percentage of impoverished African American students were performing least well on the state assessment. One can easily make a relatively compelling argument that the state could have easily projected that the Normandy-Wellston merger would, in essence, be disastrous from the outset and that it would not turn out well for any of the students involved.
The decision of the Missouri State Board of Education becomes problematic at best when one considers that no state board of education in any state has ever made a decision to attach two failing school districts (both characterized by concentrated poverty) as a remedy for poor performance. Routinely, such a decision would involve merging the failed school district with one that is performing quite well academically and, at the same time, a school district that is fiscally viable. A fitting example is the recent merger of the North Forest Independent School District (Texas) into the Houston Independent School District. In September, 2013, the Houston system received the $1 million Broad Prize for Urban Education, which implies that it is the best urban school district in the nation. It would have been nearly impossible for the poor academic performance of 5,500 students from North Forest to adversely impact the progress of Houston’s 203,000 students.
In essence, what has occurred is indeed a disturbing political precedent. In the 1950s, Normandy School District was one of the preeminent school districts in the state of Missouri. Concentrated poverty was not on the horizon, and not one African American learner attended school in the district. However, the white flight trend that occurred in the seventies in suburban communities across the country signaled dramatic residential shifts in the racial makeup of the school district. Normandy alumni who graduated prior to the 1950s have an extremely difficult time identifying with the circumstances that prevail in the district today. A front page headline in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on May 5, 2013 proclaimed in two inch-high letters, Normandy High: The Most Dangerous School in the Area. The school reform of punitive disparity in the form of the Missouri State Board of Education proclaimed that the Normandy School District would be closed, effective June 30, 2014.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is a great piece of work. People probably have no idea about the complicated history and deliberate decisions that were made.
Well done! It really deserves a wider audience.
His point about Houston is really important.
With all the researchers and policy people Broad employs, why isn’t this discussed?
Hey, Jim, does this post help confirm your IQ based theoretical considerations for the differences in racial and/or cultural subgroups in ‘academic achievement’?
It’s not in the least bit surprising that schools that are heavily black have poor academic performance compared to schools that are heavily white. It’s a near universal pattern.
The so-called achievement gap, in reality, is a grotesque gap in opportunity, and I’m speaking of medical inequalities: unequal access to good pediatric care when children are babies, when they’re infants, when they’re toddlers. I’m speaking of unequal access to preschool education, so these kids enter public school typically two or three years developmentally delayed, behind children of affluent white people in New York City, who typically go to very expensive preschools before they come to public school. And then we’re speaking of gross inequalities in resources, in money spent per child, in salaries paid to teachers, in class size, once they enter public school. Yes, there are all sorts of other factors that influence the low test scores of inner-city children, but the vast majority of factors are matters that society could change if we had the moral will, but we refuse to do so. It doesn’t do any good to simply pass a bill, which involves a lot of exhortation, rhetoric and bombastic utterance about holding children to high standards, holding them accountable. None of that makes the slightest difference in the world if they’re still in separate and grotesquely unequal social and educational settings.
Savage Inequalities
Jonathan Kozol
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/341/6149/976
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-is-average-iq-higher-in-some-places/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1310767/
The simple expedient of providing an M&M for each correct answer resulted in a median increase of 12 points on the Stanford Binet Form L IQ test.
You give yourself and your research results far more credit than they merit. The column referenced below to include comments posted by locals are quite revealing as to the real life circumstances surrounding the Normandy students. I find it quite appalling that top educators and administrators persist in perpetuating the false notion that race itself, irrespective of these factors, can be a primary indicator of low performance.
Does race consistently reveal low performance for students of color, from families with higher income, who also attend attend schools considered to be high performing? When social, economical, and environmental indicators are equal, is there evidence sufficient to conclude that race, itself, is a dependable predictor of low performance?
Have this nation’s best educators, administrators, and researchers been able to conclude that the Brown vs. Board of Education’s Supreme Court ruling in 1954, outlawing segregated educational institutions, is entirely irrelevant and should be nullified? If not, shouldn’t they conclude that they have done exactly that?
Duane,
Jim, your IQ based theories will never have any merits in so far it they relate to “academic achievements,” because your subjects are each an individual specimen with immeasurable characteristics and will always respond in a unique and variety of ways, even to the same stimuli. Time itself may vary the response to the same stimuli. You may attempt to set “independent variables,” but it is impossible for you to draw any definitive conclusions anything because your specimens are each innately different.
One of the biggest problems today is that educators believe they can encapsulate and definitively measure with reliability predictability an individual’s intelligence based on a set of specific independent variables or worse, race.
If you ask one individual one hundred select questions and they get them all wrong, they may be yet able to answer the next 500 correctly. Are you to conclude, definitively, that individual lacks intelligence? If you then gave him the next 500 and he answered them all correctly, more could be said about your “test.”
Tests have their limitations, but seldom if ever do those who created the test acknowledge their limitations. They usually have a special interests in examiners believing their tests to be valid.
Tests that have been constructed by those who believe themselves to be superior to those being tested will thus have further limitations because of their “subjective” construction.
Some of the world’s greatest inventors were not educated at all. Are we to conclude that they lacked intelligence and critical thinking skills simply because they may not have been able to obtain a specific score, on a test constructed by another human who warrants that it accurately measures their intelligence? Perhaps they have other intellectual capacities (revealed in their inventions), the specific test may not have been designed to “measure.”
ogel,
I’m not sure what part of your post is addressing my purposely sarcastic jab at Jim’s IQ nonsense. Is there something that you wanted to comment on of what I wrote?
“One of the biggest problems today is that educators believe they can encapsulate and definitively measure with reliability predictability an individual’s intelligence based on a set of specific independent variables or worse, race. . . . Tests have their limitations, but seldom if ever do those who created the test acknowledge their limitations. They usually have a special interests in examiners believing their tests to be valid. . . . Tests that have been constructed by those who believe themselves to be superior to those being tested will thus have further limitations because of their “subjective” construction.”
Quite correct, ogel, in the first and second sentences. To further understand why and to have more rounds for your mental holster in fighting these educational malpractices see: “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
As far as the third, we don’t need to delve into the minds and hearts (“believe themselves to be superior”) of those developing these tests as it distracts from the basic epistemological and ontological errors involved in developing educational standards and the accompanying standardized testing regimes. Again to understand those errors that expose the COMPLETE INVALIDITY of said practices read Wilson.
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
Duane,
My biggest error was my failure to realize that your post was in jest. I am not a professional educator, rather an individual who remains passionate about the lack of equal opportunity education for the poor,
I am most appreciative of your very detailed and apparently professional response. I fully intend to read it with great care, as well as follow up on those additional sources you recommended. I am confident that with such a detailed response that I will learn something that will be of great benefit to me as well as others who read it.
Thank you.
We need more and better educated, more knowledgeable non-educators to understand what is happening with these educational malpractices. I applaud you ogel for taking the time and putting in the effort to do so!
Realize that reading Wilson is not going to be the easiest read as it is a doctoral dissertation but it can be understood with a little work, patience and
re-reading some sections. I have read the work many, many times and still come away with something new each time.
Good luck and learning in your reading and if you have any questions about any part feel free to contact me at dswacker@centurytel.net . Just make a reference to the study so I don’t automatically delete your email. (which I need to go clean up now after not attending to my email for 3-4 days).
Take care,
Duane
P.S. There is another Wilson read that is shorter and a bit simpler that deals with validity. Here is the link: “A Little Less than Valid: An Essay Review” found at:
Click to access v10n5.pdf
Chiara, I couldn’t agree more. This story needs to be on the front page of the NY Times!
The following article to include comments by locals provides more insight as to those conditions facing Normandy Students. I believe it to be quite relevant as they seriously impact school performance issues.
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/drop-in-center-for-homeless-youth-opens-in-north-st/article_cc27e8e9-f69f-553c-b94c-629a126decfc.html?mode=comments
So, where’s the NAACP? Southern Christian Leadership Conference? the whole spectrum of civil rights organizations? They do still exist (http://www.naacp.org/), (http://website.nationalsclc.org/). Call ’em.
The St. Louis County NAACP leadership never became involved!! They are busy hosting dinners and raising money! The members of this organization, and others you mentioned, should hold their leadership accountable.
@Dr. Lawrence, well done. @Hazel Irby, sadly, neither did the St. Louis County Exec, who is due up formre-election, ever get involved and he resides in the Normandy School District.
The real story is how they abandoned this generation!
I grew up in St. Louis and lived there until I was 24. This post is spot on.
Weathly, white West County has written off large portions of the city and North County. A good example is the Metrolink rail system. Many suburban residents fought hard to keep light rail from reaching them. They’d rather go without useful public transit than let “those” people into the suburban enclaves.
This is Pruitt-Igoe all over again.
Having grown up in “white County”, oops I mean south St. Louis County before Hwy 270 was there and Tesson Ferry was known as Hwy 21 I can attest to the historical racial factors that have gone on in St. Louis since the sixties but especially after “deseg” in the 70s. Deseg was one of the best things to happen to districts that were for all practical purposes white. Those of us who grew up in the totally taken for granted that “blacks were inferior” areas certainly needed to have a jolt of cultural juice. The crap still goes on in “white county” oops I mean south St. Louis county.
One of the great ironies of “new urbanism” is how much it is now costing those “white only” – or even just predominantly white – suburbs when they limit mass transit access. Arlington, Massachusetts, closed itself to “Red Line” expansion in the 1980’s in Northwest Boston metro area, which would have linked them to Cambridge and Boston at low cost for huge inflation to local business and housing. In fact, they’d already closed down a trolley line that ran through their town for fear of “those people.” Well, now they’re still appreciating, like most of the Boston area, but at a rate about 1/4 that of some of the surrounding towns where transit continues to grow. The cost-benefit of “white flight” is a lot less compelling over time, and the contrast with nearby Somerville, with annual housing appreciation of over 10% per year for nearly 20 years and 57 languages in its high school, is pretty sharp.
We need a new Civil Rights movement and more light on just how segregated our schools are becoming. What will it take?
A suit, or perhaps just matching pants and jacket!
The reformers don’t want the kids in Normandy or Wellstone to succeed; the reformers need them to fail.
When you yoke together two failing districts, the reformers get a failure-palooza that will keep them in high cotton for the next decade.
Wellston, RIP!
From” http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2014/06/20/francis-howell-no-longer-accepting-students-from-normandy/
“ST. LOUIS (KMOX) – The 400 students who transferred to the Francis Howell School District will no longer be able to attend school there.
Francis Howell Superintendent Pam Sloan says the board decided in closed session last night to no longer accept Normandy transfer students. The board is using its 2005 policy that says they don’t accept non-resident paying tuition students. Sloan says the state education board’s decision to dissolve Normandy and change it’s accreditation status means Francis Howell is not legally required to accept transfer students.
“It was a hard decision for me for our board, for everybody involved in educating these kids for a year, the decision was emotion because we built relationships with these kids,” Sloan says.
She says with the district having the ability to reformulate, it’s important for them to have all resources in place to do that.
“I believe Dr. Chris Nicastro (Commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) has a plan to rebuild the district,” she says, calling her very smart.
And to those who may question the decision, Sloan says, “We strongly believe schools are the bedrock of the community and we are willing to do our part to help them to be a strong district again and that was the basis of the decision that was made to help them.”
When asked if the $4 million the district received from Normandy was a windfall, Sloan said the board used tuition calculations and felt the tuition charged was a fair representation of what it cost to educate a child in Francis Howell. Sloan says she has spoken to Normandy Superintendent Ty McNichols and told him they will do whatever they can to make the transition back as smooth as possible.
“I know it’s been disruptive,” she says.
William Humphrey, President of the Normandy School Board, questions the decision, saying districts like Francis Howell “did not seem to have a problem taking transfer students when they were receiving more money than it took to educate them.”
He added, “I would say to those individuals who embraced the children when money was available, they have to reexamine why they are in education.”
Humphrey believes the decision to no longer accept transfer students from Normandy is being made because the state has capped tuition at just over $7,200.
He says that amount is reasonable, however, explaining that it’s the same amount of tuition paid for a student who was in the Voluntary Desegregation Program. What is not known is whether Normandy will reopen an elementary school it closed or rehire over a hundred staff and teachers it laid off in order to make it to the end of the year. The district spent a total of about $10 million to more than a dozen school districts who transferred out after the district lost its accreditation.
As far as the students who will come back to the district, Normandy released a statement that reads in part,
“The hundreds of Normandy students who participated in the transfer program this year at Francis Howell will once again be welcomed by teachers, staff, administrators and the community of the Normandy Schools Collaborative.
“Our focus and mission remains the same as the new Normandy Schools Collaborative – to ensure that every student is successful inside the classroom by reaching their full academic potential,” said Dr. Ty McNichols, superintendent of schools. “We look forward to the upcoming school year.”
When speaking of “white flight” Francis Howell School District is one of the primary districts that “benefitted” (sic) from “white flight” over the last 30 years. Sloan is only protecting her own position and that of the “white flighters”.
Ty McNichols is a very intelligent individual that understands the socio-economic implications of the “white flight” and understands what equal education for all means. He is an outstanding individual!
Sloan knows who butters her bread and will not tolerate anyone who challlenges her to the point that she was willing to attempt to have an AP file false sexual harassment charges against me because I didn’t (as World Languages chair at the high school in which she was principal at the time) kowtow to her biddings. Fortunately the AP was strong enough to resist her. She has nowhere near the intellectual capabilities of Ty (whom I got to know as a doctoral student when he sat in on our Saturday morning doctoral discussion group).
Sloan has done her best, to make sure that those “others” from Normandy wouldn’t stay long in FHSD as those who support her are those “white flighters”. And of course she thinks Nicastro is “smart”. Sloan knows how to brown nose those above her.
The stuff about the Francis Howell district is important….just in the coldness of it….the new appointed board had the rules changed so if they were going to transfer any students, they would pay a lot less to do so….Francis Howell will not be the last white people to surprise and embarrass the Post Dispatch with cynical I don’t care attitudes….the state commissioner will be tops on the list….she is not real smart…..
The vice president of the state board has a contrasting view….he is a very forceful character….so much so, that the Post Dispatch just barely ever quotes him…he was nominated to the state board by his ex-wife, who had been trashed and destroyed as a senator by the Post Dispatch. (a so called liberal paper). I actually offered the editor that I would give my November social security check to United way if the PD would interview him. He is a top adviser to st. Louis county commissioner Dooley, another black person on the pd sheet list. I mocked them today, by posting some of his comments from a black publication called the American…here is just the tip of the iceberg from him, and I disagree with him on some things—-but the psychopathic hatred for him from the pd is just bizarre… part…..http://www.stlamerican.com/news/political_eye/article_30d21cb2-ec48-11e3-a478-0019bb2963f4.html “the board should be seven people (I think seven is a better governance number than five) who have the collective skills and leadership qualities the situation requires.
They must be a majority African-American board, including the chairman. This cannot be a neo-colonial takeover like the U.S. in Iraq, and we know how that turned out. The black community needs to see itself as in charge and responsible. Black children need to see black adults taking responsibility for their welfare and their future. Black children cannot and will not be rescued by white people. They will be saved by black adults with the help of progressive white people. So the white response should be, “What can I do to help?
when he says the board….he is talking about a new state appointed board for Normandy, which will eliminate the non accredited status which triggered the transfer law that bankrupted the district….they will have no accreditation at all, and will not have the same burden….he and the state commissioner seem to agree with the Post Dispatch and Arne Duncan….they want the same sort of thing that Michigan is having so much fun with….EEA……they might seem to agree, but, trust me…..a wild collision is coming…probably in July. Who cares about the kids and parents….there are territorial power issues to be sorted out.
I have a thread in which I compare what Jones was quoted as saying in the PD, compared to what public radio reported….same day…..it is a recurring phenomenon.
“You really want to say, ‘Come work in Normandy if you want to make history,’” said Michael Jones of St. Louis, vice president of the board. “Because that’s what we’ll be trying to do.”
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/e…05ad5c921.html
public radio found a word or two more, worth reporting….
Mike Jones of St. Louis, who was one of two votes against the plan that was adopted, said the board has to be realistic about what it was approving.
“We just ought to call it what it is,” he said. “What we are doing is redefining this situation to give us an option that the Normandy school board didn’t have. We didn’t want to saddle the (new) board with a financial situation that would not allow it to perform educationally. We just ought to say that and let the chips fall where they may.”
Jones also said the state board members need to realize that they are dealing with children, not just numbers.
“We need to put faces on this,” he said about the 131 students who would be barred from transferring, “even if we can’t put names….
“It’s obvious to anybody who can count that there is no way to sustain the Normandy school district and still maintain those options for all of those children. So those are casualties. There is going to be somebody who planned on doing something this year that will not be able to do it as a result of some decisions we make today…. We need to be aware that this is more than a financial consideration.
this part…I am a bit worried about…
…..In an interview after the meeting, Nicastro said that the old ways of dealing with poorly performing districts has been shown not to work, so the state needs to try a new approach.
During the meeting, Jones sounded a similar theme.
“This is an opportunity for the public education infrastructure to actually create a national model about how you fix urban schools,” he said. “So we shouldn’t be planning just to get Normandy accredited. That’s a worthy ambition, but we ought to be trying to figure out what can you do when you take over a school district dealing with low-income children of color, and achieve extraordinary results within the public system of education….
“If you want to make history, come to Normandy. That’s what we’re going to try to do, make history.”
But, he cautioned in an interview after the meeting, that kind of transformation will take time, if it happens at all.
“The real results that we’re going to get a chance to show are probably really in the second year,” Jones said, “as much as I hate to say that. It’s unrealistic to think that you can go through this much transition after this much turmoil and walk away with extraordinary results.
“I think we can make progress, but it’s going to take a lot of work, and it’s going to take a little more time than 12 months.”
Typical of the difficulty involved was this exchange between Jones and Ron Lankford, deputy education commissioner, when he was asked what kind of revenue Normandy needs to function effectively.
“That’s a tough question,” Lankford said.
Replied Jones: “That’s the only kind I have, unfortunately.”
http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/mis … ning-panel
oops…the links did not work to public radio and the pd….
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/normandy-will-be-first-school-system-under-direct-state-oversight/article_5dc4184c-7cb1-56ce-9e61-22c05ad5c921.html
http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/missouri-school-board-limits-normandy-transfers-appoints-some-members-new-governing-panel
this article, where Jones compares the structural obstacles with hyenas….I am not sure how much of it I agree with, but the guy says things that should be reported…..
http://www.stlamerican.com/news/political_eye/article_30d21cb2-ec48-11e3-a478-0019bb2963f4.html
Think of it like this. How long would lions survive if adult lions didn’t first protect and then teach lion cubs how to recognize and deal with hyenas? In fact, killing hyenas is one of the prime responsibilities of adult male lions.
Well, these children are our cubs, and the structural barriers that threaten them are the hyenas. Our responsibility – no, really, our duty – is to first protect them, then educate them to recognize and deal with hyenas and every chance you get kill a hyena.
This post is an almost perfect compendium of everything that is wrong with this subject.
For instance, the writer asserts: “There would have been an atomic explosion if the African American students had been sent to University City School District.”
B.S. The parents in the University City School District would not have cared about the Normandy kids’ race, but they most certainly would’ve cared about their children going to school with kids from the portion of society that produces the “most dangerous high school in the state.” And homeowners would’ve cared about the precipitous drop in their property values.
But the writer can’t even get basic facts straight: “Ninety-eight percent of those students received free or reduced price lunch, the federal threshold for determining poverty.”
No, free and reduced lunches are offered to children above the poverty line. IIRC, reduced lunch is available for families at 150% of the poverty line. Granted, that is still not financially well-off, but terms have to have some actual meaning.
Not sure what the Houston situation has to do with Normandy, given the tiny size of the North Forest district, but it is certainly weird to see anything on this blog that positively references a Broad grant.
One of the unwritten rules when it comes to this type of article is that the writer and the readers must dance around certain inconvenient facts, liberally employing coy evasions — we must never, never allow our thoughts to stray into the forbidden areas of thought crime. Thus, Normandy used to be a high-quality school district, and now it’s not, and this… just happened, like magic. No doubt it was some nefarious scheme of some sort. Those students would’ve been top scholars if only they had been sitting next to white kids.
And the violence-ridden schools… yeah, those “just happened,” too. Never mind that there are plenty of poor rural schools that don’t have nearly the same problems with this.
I live in an area that still has some busing, and the kids who start the fights, skip class, skip school, etc. are primarily the transfer students, despite the fact that they are being given exactly the sort of opportunities being demanded in this blog post. There are cultural problems in our urban areas that cannot be solved by moving kids around to different schools. Until people get real about this, magical thinking will continue to rule the day.
These problems are not cultural. For example the 2-R allelle of the MAOA gene occurs in black males at a frequency of about 5%. The frequency among white males is way less than .5%.
This is not a cultural problem. The 2-R allelle of the MAOA gene occurs in black males at a frequency of 5% as compared with less than .5% frequency in white males.
The distribution of MAOA allelles by race clearly shows a generally greater prevalence of low repeat allelles among blacks as compared to whites.
Speaking of inconvenient facts…….one is that when Wellston was joined with Normandy, the Normandy board was told by the state board that their provisional accreditation would not be changed for at least three years. The state board found two years worked better than three for their interests, and broke their promise. SLPS, which was unaccredited, had theirs changed to provisional. SLPS has a state appointed board, Normandy had an elected one. Rest assured, all this was necessary for the good of the children.
I live next door to Normandy in U City and we have seen this going on for decades. We have fought even bringing in the U S Dept. Of Education, twice. There is too much Caucasian political power satisfied with the status quo.
Holston, the point you make rings true. I think it has to be confusing to outsiders to look at Normandy and figure out what has been and is going on. There was a rule, passed by democrats about 1993, requiring the right to transfer children out of schools which lose accreditation. It is a law that should have been repealed, but for a republican legislature, it was simply a handy bargaining chip….doing nothing worked perfectly for them….it turned everything into a mess. To me, the accreditation process in Missouri is a political tool…..it was raised in St. Louis, which prevented a huge district from being subject to the transfer law, but rushed to unaccredit Normandy so they would be subject to it. I believe it is significant that slps has an appointed board, (it was a brutal, ruthless takeover in 2007) but Normandy had an elected board. Both in St. Louis and in Normandy, people were elected to make changes….those changes did not fit with the state board’s agenda…..I cannot say with certainty that they are headed in the same direction as Michigan’s EEA, but it certainly looks like it. Five schools are already being considered by the st. Louis board to be given over to outside control in the next 15-16 year.
Joe: One thing you’ve absolutely got right is that the 1993 transfer statute should never have been passed and should have been repealed long ago. There should be a movement now to REPEAL it, not tinker with it, now that we’ve seen it in action. The law does not fix the problem, it only makes it harder for the unaccredited discrict to improve.
This is both heart-wrenching and disturbing. We can look at world history to note where this blatant disrespect for children and the oppression of a large group of people occurred, and was met with silence, disregard and more oppression. An intervention to bring learning, community, hope, and great plans need to be done. We can’t count on Arne.
Nothing new. Read Jonathon Kozol’s book – Savage Inequality? 1991. East St. Louis figures prominently.
Did Stanton Lawrence do anything to help? No. There were internal resources there to put back into the district that were overlooked. The buildings that were closed after the Wellston/Normandy merger were not sold appropriately, the furniture and electronics were not sold or recycled appropriately. Internal theft ran rampant throughout the staff. The administration were overpaid to the amount that Mr. Lawrence left in his three years as Superintendent with well over $600k.The contracts for construction were also inflated for the amount of work that was done at the high school, middle school, and Barack Obama Elementary. All of the copper fascia and guttering that was removed from all of the schools mysteriously cane up missing, as did all of the window unit air conditioners that lined the halls at the maintenance shop. The captain is suppose to go down with the ship….. seems like Mr. Lawrence grab a raft, filled it with what he could and jumped ship. Leaving the children to drown in this sea of politics and red tape without so much as a life preserver for their future.
This toxic and deliberate personal attack on this Stanton Lawrence does nothing to nullify the facts that he has stated, and raises more questions as to the prevalence of hostilities and negative attitudes among administrators that certainly had to be counterproductive.
The students deserve better.
Dr. Stanton made some important and relevant inferences. However, he failed to mentioned that the DESE did not force the Wellston students upon Normandy. Normandy welcomed them. In fact DESE is on record saying that the they could only do this if a local school district agree to take them. Normandy was the district that said we want those students. Normandy had lost over 500 students and had laid some staff off. By absorbing the Wellston 400 students that would replace most of what was lost. Receiving Wellston student was about money for Normandy and politics by the State Department. Also the article failed to mentioned that A Wellston student was the Valedictorian of their next graduating class. Wellston was 100% Black as stated. It was also the only 100% black district in the state that had 100% of its students going on to college after graduation. Many of those received scholarships to four year colleges. The graduation rate, attendance rate of Wellston students were higher than Normandy. Neither does this mention that Wellston had received enough point to be accredited and almost enough point to become fully accredited. This was celebrated by the Wellston Staff and DESE officials and and event hosted at the Science Center. But because of political issues these points were removed and that resulted in Wellston losing its accreditation and being run by the State. They were accused of cheating on the test. Test were sent to 3 different agencies and all came back with there was no evidence of cheating. But the State dept still chose to disallow the scores.
Stanton is correct it didn’t make sense to put and “under-performing” school district into another under-performing district. There were other options such as Clayton, U-City, etc. I believe Clayton was the other Option other than Normandy. However, when this was mentioned to NiCastro her response was that they will be better off at Normandy. She constantly stated that Normandy will be better because of the improvement to the building in Normandy and that they have this new $1,000,000 athletic facility. As if the newer facilities and a new athletic facility would mean the student will perform better. This same NiCastros had said that no decision had been made. But the truth is the paperwork had already been filed to Jefferson City and approved to reallocate tax dollars from Wellston Schools to Normandy Schools. All of the legal issues that need to be done and clear was completed. She was the one to push for Wellston to be closed even though there was significant progress even though Wellston had just been given an additional two years because of the progress that was made. Progress was being made even though Wellston was suffering even more financially because of paying higher tuition for students that attended other district other than Wellston. This didn’t allow Wellston the ability the accomodate student that were presently attending the district.DESE realized this was a huge factor for Wellston and that no district could operated like this. This is also why DESE made a change to the law that allowed them to put a cap on the amount of money it would send Francis Howell. Wellston did not have that luxury. If Wellston received $7,000 per student and Clayton received %12,000 per student to educated them for any Wellston student that attend Clayton Wellston does not receive the $7,500 for that student. It was sent to Clayton. Not only that but Wellston had to pay an additional $4.500 per student to Clayton. That is ore than half of what Wellston has for one current students. This puts Wellston in red. Wellston had to do this for any district that their student attended other than Wellston. Wellston received less money per child than any other district in MO. Losing that much money forced Wellston to cut staff, not make needed improvements to the facilities, cut back on school supplies, etc.