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This Strikes Us …
A Sojourner’s Truth Editorial
Two weeks ago, a number of local
organizations called for the Toledo Board of Education to
put together an independent committee to examine the issues
confronting the school district.
We whole-heartedly agree with that
suggestion.
Certainly there are a host of issues the
committee needs to take a hard look at: fiscal management
being one such important matter. Above all, however, there
is the lack of educational attainment on the part of so many
TPS students.
And speaking of academic achievement, the
question that bewilders us is: how can a school district
that is continually in the “continuous improvement” category
be continually improving?
Well, that’s a semantic issue, we realize.
It’s just a “C” on the State of Ohio Report Card for the
Toledo Public Schools. But when a district has carried that
label for what seems like an eternity, the words “continuous
improvement” carry with them all the false hope and empty
cheer that administrators and board members can muster.
Nine schools in the inner city, two more than
in the previous academic year, fell in the “academic
emergency” category and black and disabled students, as
groups, did not meet expectations in math and reading.
New Superintendent Jerome Pecko finds “good
evidence that things are continuing to improve in the
district,” (there’s that curious phrase again) and Toledo
Board of Education President Bob Vasquez mentioned how
“proud” he was he was of the students and of the district
and, presumably, of everyone who had a hand in this
not-so-spectacular achievement.
The problem with low expectations is that you
almost always get exactly what you expect.
For the record, while Toledo’s continuous
stay in continuous improvement continues to keep the
blinders on, let it be noted that of 610 school districts,
only 74 of them are in “continuous improvement” or lower.
That places TPS’s academic performance in the bottom 13
percent of Ohio school districts.
We don’t see any good evidence of improvement
in these marks or any reason to celebrate our pride in such
substandard performance.
Therefore, we applaud the call that went out
two weeks ago to form an independent committee to take a
look at all aspects of TPS’s operations.
Recently Vasquez has called on the community
and appealed to community leaders and experts to reach out
and offer the board and administration their assistance. We
don’t see much value in this scheme. We have to presume that
the TPS administration and the board itself have plenty of
experts in place. If they are not experts, why are they
working for the district or why are they running for such
seats? Our board members all assured us when they were
running that they were experts in at least some aspect of
education, management or finance.
Adding another level of experts doesn’t seem
to be a recipe for achieving any meaningful goal –
especially on the academic front.
Right now, what we see in the district is a
total lack of coordination with respect to academic efforts
in the community. There are so many groups and organizations
willing and able to pitch in and lend a hand but the help
that the community can extend is applied in a scattershot,
hit-or-miss approach.
We have after-school programs, summer reading
programs, tutoring and mentoring organizations galore. What
we don’t have is any systematic way of ensuring that
students who need such services are getting them or that
they are getting them more than once or twice during their
stay with TPS.
On another page in this issue, Rev. D.L.
Perryman will discuss the problems that he sees on the
teaching end of the equation. What we also need to address,
what an independent committee needs to address, is how TPS
can put to use community resources to improve academic
performance.
We cannot stress enough the importance of the
independence of such a committee. Too often in the past, as
one member of the group that called for the committee noted,
reports from committees have been shelved along with their
recommendations. An independent committee would have more
than one way of bringing such issues and recommendations to
light.
If this community is ever going to move
forward and improve its academic performance, particularly
in the inner city, we are going to have to be brutally
honest about what exactly is holding us back and what we
need to do to overcome the obstacles. We can’t get such
honesty from a president’s kitchen cabinet of so-called
experts.
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