June 19, 2007
An Open Letter to the Selectmen, the BET, the Members of the Greenwich RTM, the Board of Education, The RISE Task Force, and the voters of our city.
A Cynic's View of the Current Schools Debate
Our community is experiencing a declining school enrollment and an escalating school budget for both capital improvements and operating expenses. Our schools administration has responded to these pressures by promulgating certain solutions that (a cynic might claim) seem designed to justify the continuation of the current school programs and new programs (that our cynic believes serve only) to fill underutilized facilities and retain (and enlarge) current staff.
Ending or scaling back a government program is a difficult thing. Bureaucracies fight back and politicians seek compromises. And imagination is often in short supply. This essay seeks to redefine the problems and to offer simple and effective solutions that will both dramatically improve our schools and substantially reduce costs.
What's the Primary Problem?
A declining student enrollment leaves our schools with excess classrooms and underutilized buildings.
And How is the School Administration Dealing with it?
1. Our cynical view is that the School Administration has waged a campaign to spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD). By focusing attention on our primary schools, the Administration created a climate of fear and factionalism in and between our neighborhoods. The administration raised the specter of redistricting -- forcing families into more distant primary schools, and closing the least used (and most antiquated primary school) -- thus pitting the parents of Glenville pupils against the parents of Parkway pupils and holding hostage the promised renovations to Glenville. The Administration has (quite effectively) removed the option to close schools from the current public debate.
2. By conflating the primary problem with secondary issues school diversity and reduced class sizes the Administration seeks to increase staff and to convert classrooms to alternative use to soak up excess classroom capacity and to justify budgetary expansion.
3. By creating a blue ribbon commission (the RISE Task Force) with a loaded mandate -- the only solutions they may consider are for the problems as defined by the Administration -- and a (five year) plan to kick the can far down the road.
4. The RISE Task Force has (predictably) turned into something of a farce. The Greenwich Schools have a questionnaire on their website, purportedly seeking community input for this commission. There is a place on the web page to input comments and suggestions -- but it's limited to 500 characters. FIVE HUNDRED CHARACTERS! NOT WORDS -- CHARACTERS! The cynic sometimes requires more than that just to sneeze (Aaahhh ... Aaaaahhh ...)
Our cynic wishes that the Administration would manage our schools as well as they practice politics.
How Should We Deal with Declining Enrollment?
We should close some schools -- but not by redistricting. Instead, we should restack the grades. The primary schools are our neighborhood schools. They define us and offer the closest and most effective partnerships between our schools, our parents, and their children. If we are faced with declining enrollment (and we are), we should look to moving the six and seventh grades back to our primary schools and the eighth grade to either the primary schools or to the fifth house (that we built at great expense) at the high school. And, we should close ALL of the middle schools, Eastern, Central, and Western.
Closing the Middle Schools would yield significant savings and would greatly improve student performance. Instructional costs would stay about the same, but administrative, physical plant, and busing costs would be sharply reduced.
And closing the middle schools would do much more than improve space utilization and save money. Middle school configurations serve NO educational purpose and contribute greatly to our children's academic and behavioral problems. Middle Schools present an unneeded additional transition for children and introduce incipient problems for well meaning -- but unfamiliar -- staff, who have no history with these children. Middle Schools are a failed experiment (much like the open classroom design of Glenville that now demands remediation). Indeed, there is a growing national trend towards eliminating middle and junior high schools in favor of K-8 and 6-12 configurations.
Middle Schools impede academic performance, contribute to budding disciplinary problems, sever the relationships between teachers and students (and parents!), and are costly to operate. The only voices that will rise to their defense will be from the people who work in them or the folks whose empires encompass them. Parents will be much happier with a K-7 or 8 configuration -- and their children will be much better served. And the Greenwich taxpayers will cheer!
And, if we close the Middle Schools, we can eliminate the false problem of insufficient student diversity with one more (small) step -- Open Enrollment.
How Would Open Enrollment Obviate Diversity Issues?
The State's interest in desegregating schools extends only to acts by the State (or local governments) to assign students to attend specific schools. If parents were free to choose their children's schools, the State would have no issue at all -- regardless of the outcome. Indeed, Connecticut General Statute 10-226b specifically mentions, school attendance districts in the context of the statute. No attendance districts? No problems.
And, if we closed the Middle Schools and kept only the primary schools and our sole high school, the only choice parents would have would be to either send their children to their neighborhood school or to send them elsewhere. All things being equal, parents would overwhelmingly choose neighborhood schools without regard to overblown concerns about specific racial or ethnic population percentages (such is the way of the world).
If we embarked upon this plan and we did encounter a significant shift from a specific school, then this would be indicative of a problem with that school and could, should, and would be addressed as a management problem within that school.
Then What Should the RISE Task Force be Considering?
The Task force ought to be looking at improving the efficiency of our schools.
1. Better facilities/staff utilization (Close the Middle Schools -- see above). The Central Middle School facilities could become an adjunct center for the high school providing sorely needed athletic and arts capacity (not to mention parking). Central could as well become the new building the School Administration insists it needs. Eastern could be the new building Riverside desperately needs. And Western would make a fine civic center (or subdivision).
2. More homogeneous instructional environments -- less educational diversity.
There's a reason we provide classroom instruction within divisions by grade. It's just a more efficient model than the old "one room schoolhouse" (As an aside, my ninety year old mother really did get her primary education in a one room school house in Harris, NY. And yes, her descriptions do evoke images of Spanky and Alfalfa). Dividing student populations into grades makes it possible for a teacher to lecture to the entire classroom at once instead of dividing classroom time to educate students who perform at vastly different levels.
We seem to have lost sight of the fundamentals -- try to provide the best education at the lowest costs. We've decided to lump everyone at the same grade level into common classes, without regard to their individual abilities. And we make our teachers teach to the lowest common denominator -- trying to go slowly enough so as to inculcate some basic knowledge within the less able -- and yet going fast enough to keep the more able students from banging their heads against their desks.
Of course, this is absurd. It simply doesn't work well at all and leads to remedies that worsen the overall situation. We end up with TAG (Talented and Gifted) and Special Ed programs to sop up the outliers. And these programs come perforce with their own administrative staffs and costs and in the end, satisfy no one. And, there's continual pressure to reduce class size (and increase classroom utilization and staffing costs) because teachers can obviously do a better job catering to a diverse class if the class size is smaller.
The TAG programs are really an abomination. Higher achieving students are removed from class for enrichment (presumably, just before they're bored to tears). Remember, the thrust of this section is efficiency. So let's look at education as an industrial process and figure out if this makes any sense. Consider a commercial bakery as a model. Would it make sense to have each production line operating at the same fixed speed with an oven operating at the same temperature for products ranging from soufflaes to bagels? With the TAG model we'd have to pluck the soufflaes off the conveyer before they were burnt (out) and then reintroduce them down line for finishing and packaging. Does that make sense? Or should we tailor the line speed and oven temperature to the needs of each group of bakery products? Which model would be more likely to stay in business?
The Special Ed programs are different (as an aside, I'm the parent of a since-graduated Special Ed student at the Greenwich High School and I am reasonably intimate with the programs). Yes, Special Ed is costly -- but it need not be so much if we applied its reasoning to the general school population and modeled the general school programs in the same vein.
Special Ed presumes (and demands) that each student be individually assessed and an IEP (Individual Education Program) formulated for each student -- with the participation of his parents (each year). Gee, this sure sounds like something the schools should be doing for all of their students. And if they did so, it wouldn't be an extraordinary expense (or would necessarily require additional staffing). And, if they had an IEP (or reasonable facsimile) for every student, our schools could group students with similar abilities and thus satisfy the needs of all of our students at much lower cost. Students would be better educated, there would be far fewer outliers both above and below the curve, and we could increase class size because teachers could more easily pace lessons to the level of their classes. And all students would learn more than they would otherwise with the current models. And, Special Education costs would be drastically reduced because there would be educational tiers in regular classes that would be suited to the needs of more Special Ed students.
Oddly enough, this is the methodology that schools used to use, way back when I was educated (in the fifties, btw). It used to be called "Tracking" and fell out of favor because minority students seemed to be disproportionally assigned to the slower tiers, and those not assigned to the upper tiers suffered from low self esteem. Our cynic suggests that it's time to recognize that what has replaced it (TAG and Special Ed) yield far poorer results at much higher costs. The cynic asserts that Tiering (can't call it "Tracking"), combined with annual assessments for each student (IEPs or similar evaluations) would pass muster (Equal opportunity -- not equal results). And self-esteem can't be taught -- it must be earned.
IEPs for all would yield additional benefits. It would give us a yardstick to measure teacher performance. If we knew a priori what each student ought to be capable of learning in an academic year and we measured what he did learn -- then we'd have a scale to use to evaluate his teachers. And then perhaps we could incentivize teachers with better compensation for better performance.
Would you like to see test scores improve? Try tailoring instruction to the levels of the students.
3. The Structure and staffing of our School Administration
Do we really need all these people? What functions could and should be outsourced or pushed down to the individual schools?
4. Real Community Input
The Task Force should junk the silly webpage the Schools Administration provided and set up a web log (a "blog" to the cognoscenti). Let the comment boards fill with a free and open discussion (they would need a moderator) and let's get these ideas vetted by the public. Greenwich is full of really smart (and opinionated) people who gladly give their two cents -- and then some, to the discussions. We'll all learn from the experience.
What Shouldn't the RISE Task Force Consider?
1. Magnet Schools:
The Middle Schools should be closed and their grades restacked. There would obviously no need to make Middle Schools more attractive if we eliminated them. Instead, the Task Force should make a rough assessment of whether it makes more sense to move the eighth grades back to the primary schools (along with sixth and seventh) or to the high school fifth house. And if we move to Open Enrollment, we won't have a problem with "Racial Imbalance" (whatever that is). And Open Enrollment would make every Primary School a magnet (with the principal attraction of being close to home).
2. Central Pre-Kindergarten:
Give me a break! Does anyone need a better example of the School Administration's intent to keep expanding its budget and to keep all of its buildings? Daycare for Greenwich? Changing diapers? Come on!
3. Year-round school:
Please! Can we please rescue our schools from the inmates? Public education is the only example our cynic can think of where we let "academics" test their unproven theories on our children. Look at the Glenville School. We have to pay to renovate this relatively young structure because at the time it was built the bureaucrats believed "open classrooms" were the cat's meow and built that monstrosity accordingly. Another example? Look at the science wing of Greenwich High School. Every classroom was configured at great expense as a laboratory. How many classroom hours actually involve laboratory experiments? Our cynic has undergraduate and graduate engineering and science degrees and had (and all post-secondary schools have) separate classrooms and labs. It makes no economic or educational sense to make all classrooms into laboratories -- but that's what GHS did with our money. Sensible schools know to schedule classroom time and laboratory time and know to build only what's needed.
4. Anything else suggested by the Superintendent of Schools.
Discussion:
Easier said than done. The ideas in this essay may not all make practical sense. But we citizens should insist that our town government task the Board of Education to explore the options outlined herein -- fairly and honestly.
Special Ed is more complicated than suggested herein. There are mountains of rules and practices and an ample litigation history. But just makes more sense to try to fit the schools and school programs to the needs of all students and to group the students by their abilities than to expect one size to fit all (and then be surprised at the number of outliers).
And there is a Connecticut Statute that demands honest attempts to deal with "Racial Imbalances". There is a possibility that the state might not agree that parents have the right to determine whether there are too many or too few representatives of each racial category (de jour) in their children's schools for their tastes. But, this cynic would rather see the town litigate over parental choice than beach access.
That said, the advantages of closing the Middle Schools are manifest. There are no good reasons to maintain them and the savings would be immediate.
Respectfully Submitted,
A Cynical Taxpayer
UPDATE
The Supreme Court has ruled that schools may not assign students to schools on account of their race. The money quote from Chief Justice Roberts majority opinion: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,"
This puts paid to the Rise Task Force primary mission, "Racial Imbalance, Space utilization, Enrollment".
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