Neighborhood Failure Factories

I am a big believer in the concept of neighborhood schools. I think schools are best as an extension of their communities. I've written pretty about why I see charterizing initiatives such as those in New Orleans as both bad educational practice and an assault on fundamental American values.

At the same time, it's important that I acknowledge the limits of the approach that I value so much, and nothing has highlighted those failings any better than this gut-wrenching story of how Pinellas County in Florida turned five thriving schools into "failure factories." I could hem and haw and hedge, but here's the brutal truth of how they did it.

They turned them into neighborhood schools.

They ended desegregation and starved the five schools of, not only the additional resources they needed to succeed, but also in some cases didn't even provide the basic level of support provided to other schools in the county.

This story, written and reported by Cara Fitzpatrick, Lisa Gartner and Michael LaForgia, deserves your time and attention. I'm just going to hit some critical points and draw some conclusions of my own. But you should read this piece. It tells the story of people who, once again, don't want to educate Other People's Children, and how neighborhood schools are not enough.

The county has a history. St. Petersburg zoned itself for segregation in the 1930's and put the interstate smack through the black part of town in 1970. Black parents went to court to force integration, and the federal government stepped in to monitor the district. That monitoring stopped in 2007, and Pinellas County immediately started working on resegregating their schools. 

Though the efforts were working — black students were posting steady gains on standardized tests — many parents bridled at the tools of integration. They complained about the inconvenience and the high cost of busing and special programs.

In other words, desegregation, with its magnet schools and special programs and busing, required (White) Pinellas County to spend a bunch of money educating Other People's (Black) Children. And so they stopped.

The plan to resegregate called for neighnborhood schools. Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA told the article's authors what that gets you

“It produces schools that teachers don’t want to teach in and that are branded as failures by our state and national governments,” Orfield said. “When you go to neighborhood schools, whites and Asians get schools that function well and blacks and Latinos get schools that are impoverished and fail. This isn't a secret."

I don't want to think it's that simple, and I definitely don't care for how short a step it is from that observation to the observation that non-white students and families are somehow defective. But there's no denying what happened next to the five schools.

They had been successful by both the measures that reformsters like to use and the measures that those of us in the whole child well-rounded education community like to use. But what distinguished the new plan is what the school board chose not to do.

Giving up on racially balanced schools wasn’t the School Board’s only option.

They could have integrated schools by requiring a balance of children based on socio-economic status, as other counties were doing.

They could have carefully constructed magnet schools and special programs to attract more white children to schools in black neighborhoods.

Instead, they were ready to plow ahead, to scrap the most important parts of what they had done to guarantee black children got an equal education.

Having concentrated the most disadvantaged children in just five schools, the board could have-- and promised to-- provide additional supports, programs and staff. But they did not do that, and instead stripped staff and support. Administration provided minimal support for teachers, and teachers bailed in large and regular numbers; those that stayed were presumably not exactly loaded with high morale themselves. Superintendents are whirling through a revolving door, including one who was fired just as she started initiatives that would have helped as well as making good on the board's promises for support.

What is striking is just how quickly things turned to shit. Pinellas County is not an area of rampant crime, generational poverty or huger-than-anywhere drug use. It is, apparently, a region of generational and well-entrenched racism, but there are places in Florida with far worse crime and socio-economic stats. And yet in just eight years, those five schools have become among the worst in the entire state. 

There's a reminder of an important lesson here for folks on my side of the public education debate-- when we argue that charter advocates need to back away and return systems to neighborhood based schools, Pinellas County is what "neighborhood school" means to some folks, and it is no wonder that they see those of us advocating for neighborhood schools as being at best insensitive to and at worst enemies of students who are not white and not wealthy. 

But Pinellas County is not my idea of a neighborhood school any more than the crazy mess of charters in New Orleans is. Because what both systems have in common is a systemic and willful deafness to the voices in those neighborhoods.

The article notes that the problems in the five schools are not secret and they're not unknown and they're not undiscussed (nor did anybody have to check the state standardized test results to figure them out). But the voices raising a fuss and calling for a fix have been ignored. 

I believe in neighborhood schools-- I believe that the social capital and ties of support and strength that can be built there cannot come from any other source, and I think those ties of social capital and support are critical to future success (take a read through Robert Putnam's Our Children for starters). 

But-- and this is a huge, gigantic, moon-sized but-- the people in those neighborhoods must have a voice and they must have control and they must have the resources they need to build a world for themselves and their children. The poor cannot be abandoned to neighborhoods of poverty, and those neighborhoods cannot be shattered or colonized by outsiders who have no investment in those communities.

"We will come fix you," is wrong, wrong, wrongity, wrong wrong wrong. It's wrong when privatizers and charteristas say it, and it is wrong when advocates for public education say it. But it is also wrong to say, "We're just going to ignore you and give you no help at all." Helping people, lifting people up, empowering people, doing all that without silencing them-- that turns out to be really damn hard.

Charter promoters are correct when they say that parents should have a voice in their child's education; it's just that almost nothing we've seen from the charter sector in the last fifteen years actually gives parents that voice. Public education fans are correct when we say that neighborhood schools are the foundation of a healthy educational system; it's just that we can't forget setting up neighborhood schools without a hard-core system of support and resources just gets us back to an ugly world of separate but not-actually-equal. And everybody is incorrect who argues, "Those guys are dead wrong, so we must be right." A neighborhood school mired in poverty, unsupported and ignored, silences community voices just as effectively as any reformster system we've ever argued against.