Jeff Bryant recounts the story of the revival of Erie, Pennsylvania, which was in the depths of despair, both as a city and as a school district.
Manufacturing was leaving the city, white- and blue-collar jobs were disappearing, poverty levels were rising, the public schools were losing enrollment, and the city and its schools were in deep deficit.
He writes:
As good-paying jobs left Erie, families increasingly left the local schools. By the 2016-2017 school year, the district estimated its schools were 5,000 students below capacity, reported the Erie Times-News, which meant less money was coming into the district from the state, compounding the district’s long-standing funding deprivation from the state—among the lowest in Pennsylvania, according to the Erie City School District’s assessment.
Asking local taxpayers to dig deeper was not an option in a city where almost 28 percent of residents lived below the poverty level, the median home value was significantly below the state average, and an abundance of government-related buildings made almost a third of the real estate tax-exempt.
Erie’s school district was also bleeding money to an expanding charter school sector, one of the largest in the state. In the 2015-2016 school year alone, Erie paid more than $22 million to charter schools.
Students remaining in district schools tended to be the ones who were the costliest to teach. In a 2016 report using data from the 2014-2015 school year, 80 percent of Erie K-12 students were classified as poor, and 17.6 percent qualified for special education services. The district was also in the top 3 percent among Pennsylvania school districts for the number of English language learners.
Jeff explains how a bold superintendent won emergency fiscal aid from the state and launched community schools, before he moved on.
The funding, of course, was crucial, and the community school modeled transformed relations among parents, teachers, students, and schools. As the model become established, it brought hope to a community that had been battered by years of bad news.
Read Jeff’s article to learn how the community schools work in Erie.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Community schools are the logical conclusion to working with populations with deep poverty. My school district in NY was about two thirds middle class, but the bottom third included an extremely impoverished ELL community. My district decided to meet the needs of these newcomers through direct investment in outreach and assistance. The district hired more social workers and staff that spoke Haitian Creole and Spanish. they helped families access the social resources they needed, and even filled out the forms with parents. In the winter teachers and administrators that spoke target languages met to fill out financial aid forms for colleges for graduating seniors. The ELL staff met with parents on a flexible basis at home or work. They often drove parents to meetings as transportation was often in this suburban community as well. The approach made a big difference in the lives of these students and families.
Community schools are an effective way to help the most vulnerable students. They make perfect sense. Students cannot focus on secondary needs like education unless the primary needs of food, shelter and access to healthcare are met.
summary LOGIC: meet their needs first
Retired teacher, you echo “The Threepenny Opera”: “First feed the face and then teach right and wrong. For even saintly folk may act like sinners,unless they’ve had their customary dinners.”
Thanks Diane. This may have been my favorite story for the year.
“Students remaining in district schools tended to be the ones who were the costliest to teach.”
Yes, and the fact that major media education journalists don’t seem to understand even the most basic economics is shocking. If there is an AVERAGE cost of educating students, that means that half the students are more expensive to teach and half are less expensive to teach. Charters accept a random assortment of students (not really, since enrollment requires motivated parents), and then have the complete and total freedom to treat those who are too costly in the way that encourages their families to leave.
I remember reading Chalkbeat editor Elizabeth Green writing about Success Academy’s great success in which she seemed be be completely unaware of this basic economic phenomenon. Without one bit of evidence, writers (I can’t really call people with questionable journalist skills but excellent stenographic skills “journalists”) like Elizabeth Green believe it is virtually impossible for a charter to cherry pick — not because they actually have any evidence that it is virtually impossible (except their racist belief that in a huge city where far more than 1/3 of the low income students in public schools are at grade level, a charter that teaches a tiny fraction of that number and is famous for high attrition rates could never cherry pick.) But because they believe the charter propaganda that it is impossible.
And thanks to this truly appalling reporting, the significant cost savings in teaching students who are the least costly to teach doesn’t stay within the system, as it would if these charters were public magnet schools run by the DOE, but instead the charter gets to keep it. They can keep that money to use to promote the profile of their leaders and to pay for positive PR and marketing and overpay administrators who are the most ruthless in shedding the students who are too costly to teach.
Apparently, journalists like Elizabeth Green think it is just a coincidence that the highest performing charters would have high rates of students who win the lottery not enrolling, and unusually high rates of attrition when compared to charters that are not nearly as high performing but have lower attrition rates.
Basic math and economics — if a charter is allowed to counsel out the students whose costs are above average and whose academic performances are below average, their school’s performance will look better AND they will save money.
That means that these bad practices are doubly incentivized. With no concern that the co-opted and math-challenged education media will notice.
Was manufacturing really leaving the city or were those white and blue-collar jobs being replaced by robots?
Click the link and check the GDP chart for Erie, PA.
“The All industry total includes all Private industries and Government.”
“Gross domestic product (GDP) by metropolitan area is the measure of the market value of all final goods and services produced within a metropolitan area in a particular period of time. In concept, an industry’s GDP by metropolitan area, referred to as its “value-added”, is equivalent to its gross output (sales or receipts and other operating income, commodity taxes, and inventory change) minus its intermediate inputs (consumption of goods and services purchased from other U.S. industries or imported). GDP by metropolitan area is the metropolitan area counterpart of the nation’s, BEA’s featured measure of U.S. production.”
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NGMP21500
Most of the manufacturing jobs in the United States were lost because white and blue-collar jobs have been replaced by robots.
Compared to 2001, the GDP for lake Erie has increased dramatically, but job growth has not kept up.
“Do Not Blame Trade for the Decline in Manufacturing Jobs”
https://www.csis.org/analysis/do-not-blame-trade-decline-manufacturing-jobs
The U.S. manufacturing sector is in 2nd place for the world ranking and 3rd place, Japan, produces almost half of what the U.S. does. China has been in first place for almost a decade but 70% of what is made in China is sold in China to a population of more than 1.4 billion people.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/countries-manufacturing-trade-exports-economics/
One of Trump’s lies during the 2015 presidential debates was “America doesn’t make anything anymore.”
Not true.