Peter Greene wrote a post about the continuing deterioration and abandonment of public education in St. Louis. It is a sad story.
Teachers’ salaries are frozen. Teachers are fleeing the district. The school district is losing enrollment. The district has a school board but it is powerless.
Peter writes (open the story for the links):
But the school system’s population problems are part of the city’s problems, and the city’s problems include white flight. St. Louis is discredited with “the highest thirty-year rate of building and neighborhood abandonment in North American history.” The 2010 census revealed a loss of 29,000 residents since the previous head count.
Schools have been standing empty, and the public system has been in trouble going back to at least 2007, when the state stripped it of its accreditation and took it over, stripping local control from the elected school board. The school district is run by a three-person Special Administrative Board; they hire the superintendent and are themselves political appointees.
This big bunch of troubles has made St. Louis a prime target for charters, a confluence of sincerely concerned parents who wanted to get their children out of a struggling public system and charteristas who smelled a market ripe for profit overseen by a charter-friendly mayor. The newspapers and city leaders don’t seem to like to mention it much, but on top of everything else, the St. Louis schools suffer from the charter effect– students leave for charters, but there is no proportionate lessening of expenses in the schools they leave, and so they leave many students behind in an already troubled public school that now has that much less money with which to work.
And so last spring, charters were predicting a banner year with great enrollment. This even though the charter schools of St. Louis have not been anything to write home about, either; at one point the city shut down the chain of six Imagine Charters (containing a third of the city’s charter students) for academic failure and financial shadiness.
Meanwhile, Missouri is one of those magical states where the government has a funding formula in place– which it simply ignores. At the beginning of 2015, Missouri schools were being underfunded by nearly a whopping half billion-with-a-b dollars.
But you need to learn about how all this started, and the place to begin is with this essay by Peter Downs, who was then the president of the elected school board (which no longer exists). Downs, a journalist, warned in 2009 that there was a “plot to kill public education” and he supplies the details. Plenty of money for consultants, not so much for the students and teachers. You will not be surprised to learn that the leading actors in the destruction of public education were the Broad Foundation and a bankruptcy firm called Alvarez & Marsal, who confused bankruptcy with “turnaround.”
I may put up a separate post for Peter Downs’ essay. It is eerily predictive of what is happening in city after city, as corporate reformers move in to kill off public education.
That’s okay, they can always build more prisons …
What’s worse….is that the flight to the charter schools has killed the parochial schools in the city. Since charters came, parochial schools have been closing rapidly. Many of these schools, like the public schools, were holding neighborhoods together. One issue is that of race. Many of the charter schools look remarkably alike in terms of demographics as the parochial schools they essentially replaced. Most of the charter schools seem to be in midtown or in south city….where most of the white people are… but it can’t possibly be about SES or race…..
In St. Louis you had best believe it is about race. Having grown up in White Catholic County, oops I mean South St. Louis County, I know from personal experience that there are many many prejudiced people-people I’ve known all my life. Now having met many from whites from North St. Louis County in the last decade I see that it has been the same north of hwy 40.
Duane,
So where’d you go to high school?
You are right, even though people deny it. That’s what all the fuss was about when the Normandy students were looking for a new place to go. I noticed many of the school district closer were not rushing to take those kids….
Epiphany school closed in 2010? and a new charter opened up right away in the space. I saw those kids at a performance…looked remarkably like the same kids, not a single child of color. AFAIK, it is still the same.
Snup, the charter at Epiphany is part of the Concept charter chain. Dan Mihalopoulos reported in the Chicago Sun Times about the FBI raid on the headquarters of the Concept chain.
Do you have the links for that? I have heard nothing in our local news. The charter is called Gateway science and math academy…
The first of the series was around July, 2014 in the Chicago Sun Times. This website dianeravitch.net featured at least one of the stories. Dan Mihalopoulos is author.
Snup, July 21, 2014 is date of one of Chicago Sun Times stories. Diane Ravitch posted her link to story on July 22, 2014.
Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis, etc., etc. City after city we are seeing urban areas with large black and Latino populations essentially being destroyed, forcing residents to go elsewhere. And then, at least in Chicago, we eventually see those blighted inner city areas gentrify into areas that even middle class people have trouble affording. How is this not racial cleansing? And where are these people going? I know in Chicago some of the inner collar suburbs have seen a population bump, but I don’t believe it’s enough to account for the population loss of Chicago itself.
They are going to the Southern states–it’s called the New Great Migration, and it has been going on for decades.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Great_Migration
The migration has been spurred by lower costs of living and taxes, more job opportunities, reconnecting with family, and less segregation and racially motivated hostility than the northern/Midwestern states, even the very blue ones.
Tim,
Job opportunities… at lower pay.
Arkansas, home to Walmart, remains the 2nd poorest state in the nation.
A measure as crude as household income often doesn’t tell the whole story. The cost of living in Arkansas and other southern states is very low compared to most of the northeastern and Midwestern metropolitan areas that these migrants are coming from, housing and taxes in particular.
Do you not trust these departing families to make the right decisions for themselves? If not, why not?
This is a blogger you-all might want to read. He does some advocacy for public schools but he’s outside the “edublogger” group so you may not encounter him.
http://www.eschatonblog.com/2015/11/by-design.html
Here he’s talking about what his public school had when he was growing up (a planetarium) and I was thinking about that too- how public schools seem less and less..generous, less expansive, under a test-based regime.
In Jr. High PE, we had trampolines and gymnastic equipment (balance beam, parallel bars, uneven bars, pummel horse etc). We had track and field equipment (hurdles, pole vault, long jump). We square danced, played volleyball, learned archery, did presidential physical fitness, swam at the community pool, and played tennis at the community courts.
When I sub for PE, the kids either shoot hoops or walk around the track. Actually, the boys shoot hoops, and the girls sit around the edge of the gym with their phones.
This is more than AWFUL.
Sad, yes St. Louis has been plaques by white flight and black flight to north St. Louis county. Yes, it’s all about the money considering that most St. Louis charters perform worst than the public schools and close quickly or eventually. Parents seem uninformed about the nature of charter schools and go along with the delusion that their kids are getting a better education. Other parents are so happy that segregation has been resurrected under charter schools and the other group of taxpayers whose money, scarce money since education is underfunded in Mo., just don’t care.
Exactly. The neighborhood facebook page I’m on in the City…a woman asked about 2 public schools and all the other parents were like no don’t send them there. Send them to this or that charter school… because you know those public schools have children with behavior problems, etc….
But from the POV of the self-proclaimed “education reform” movement this is a triumph of “choice.”
Their choice. As for those that wanted the option of adequately resourced and supported public schools…
Well, the customers the charteristas serve are always right, and if all the other customers are too poor and too uninformed to make the correct choices plus fail to ensure that their offspring are good fits for charters and deserve the right options, so much the worse for them and their children and their associated communities.
No, you wouldn’t want to burden $tudent $ucce$$ Academies and Centres of Educational Excellence with Michael J Petrilli’s “non-strivers” and Mayor Rahm Emanuel “uneducables.”
The unworthy youth will simply have to learn to draw water and hew wood on their own time.
Thank you both for your comments.
😎
A couple of details about the kind of guy Peter Downs is….in 2005, he was able to point out that it was ridiculous for the public schools to be requiring any of their teachers to be attending scientology meetings. He was elected to the school board in 2006, and I asked him how difficult it was to be outspent by a margin of 7 to 1 and still be able to win. He said he thought the figures were exaggerated……his best guess was about 20,000 to 10,000…..I thought at the time…….this is a person who places a value on accuracy…..not show. I have not seen him lately—I have a feeling it is not because he has been too busy campaigning for Donald Trump.
wonder what ever happened to writer for the riverfront times kristin hinman—she knew a lot about scientology recruitment of children….http://studytech.org/?p=232
SAD!!! The story of America.
St Louis Public School district is run by an appointed board. On paper, the elected school board is supposed to have some auditing capacity, but in practice has no power. There has been talk of having the appointed board include an elected board member.
Where has that been talked about……they do have one tfa person who was selected a year ago….I wonder, by any chance, if she if the one they might consider qualified.
Joe, some AFT 420 folks have mentioned it, but maybe not in print. Can’t remember if some media reports have discussed it related to whether appointed board will stay. Dale Singer and Elisa Crouch are probably aware of this option for trying to keep appointed board, this would be to give political cover.
The Post Dispatch offered an article this morning about the Jennings school district receiving full accreditation. The article said a lot about how great things have been going in SLPS. (they did not mention whether the numerous charter schools are included in their stats, not did they mention the frozen teacher salaries). Maybe it was a response to what was presented here…..they are not ready to restore the people’s right to vote for a school board which has any power…..the explanation being that this spectacular one year is not enough…..it has to be more than just one year. They are covered either way…..another year of success……proves the necessity of the three person chosen board. If things go backwards…..not enough consistency to restore full accreditation yet…….the appointed board will remain in place. I do not know anyone who could challenge the stats they presented today….but 27 in math and 40 in reading sounds less than spectacular to me.