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It was on that day 65
years ago that the Supreme Court, supposedly, ended racial
segregation in public schools when it handed down its
unanimous decision in the case of Brown versus the Board of
Education of Topeka, Kansas.
Yet, six and a half
decades later, public schools still remain both racially
separate and unequal. Despite the high court’s historic
ruling, wealthier school districts show better learning
outcomes than their counterparts located in areas of high
poverty, revealing an achievement gap in education between
black students and others.
I spoke with Stephanie
Eichenberg about the challenges of public school education
in its contemporary context. Eichenberg has been a member of
the Toledo Public School Board since 2015 and is currently
running for reelection. This is the finale of our two-part
conversation.
Perryman:
What are the current challenges facing the district?
Eichenberg:
There are a lot of challenges and we’re going to continue to
have many, many challenges. A part of that is from
socioeconomic factors that we as a district don’t control,
but I think we can help to influence. So, if we can engage
students and help them feel at home, help them feel safe and
make sure that they’ve had some meals and, hopefully, also
connect them with community partners who can help them
afterschool and help them outside of school, then we as a
district can help overcome some of those big challenges.
Perryman:
Challenges other than the socioeconomic ones?
Eichenberg:
One of the biggest challenges we have as a district is just
that we are a large district and so that means a lot of
communication and just being really clear so people
understand what’s going on. Sometimes we see our staff get
frustrated, that’s part of it, but I think that focusing on
how we as adults can work together and communicate is
something we can continue to improve on.
Perryman:
What are your thoughts concerning talk in both the media and
community about the district’s low performance in its state
report card grades and the potential takeover of the schools
by the State of Ohio.
Eichenberg:
The possibility of a state takeover, obviously, we don’t
agree with. I think the takeovers that have actually been
executed have been basically a nightmare in those
communities. What happens is that you’re bringing somebody
in who may not be from your community, they hire a CEO who’s
probably not from your community and who doesn’t know you as
well and they just want to implement new ideas and see what
sticks. And so, you see these kinds of very sad stories
happening and it’s very dysfunctional.
Our job, as a district, is
to just get out of being eligible for state takeover, that’s
the first thing. But as a board, politically, I feel like
it’s my job to say to the state, ‘hey, this doesn’t work,
let’s try something that does.’ Struggling districts are
struggling for a lot of reasons. Some are in your control,
some are outside of your control. No city should be
punished for the things that are outside of their control
and that’s essentially what they’re doing. They’re
punishing a city by taking away their democratic
representation.
Perryman:
From a practical standpoint, how do you move the district
out of its current status?
Eichenberg:
Well, you get all of your folks into with what are the
elements that it takes to move the needle on the grade
card. There are about five or six separate elements, but
the best way is get more kids to graduate and help the kids
engage academically, which is what everything else is about,
so that you’ll start lifting the scores.
And, at the same time, I’m
going to continue to advocate to say ‘hey, is this grade
card really working and is it fair?’ I don’t think it is
and I think a lot of people don’t think that. When I went
down to the state house I was asked that question because I
had said something in my testimony about you can design a
model to reflect what you want and I believe this model was
designed to make districts that had a lot of resources look
good and the districts where the students have less
resources aren’t going to look good and so there’s pieces of
that model that need to change. But in the meantime, we also
just have to do our best to lift ourselves up out of it
(takeover status). And I think we’re very close, I hope we
make it this year and if not, hopefully we can make it next
year.
Perryman:
As it relates to the challenges that large schools face and
that TPS, in particular, faces, how inclusive have you been
at getting input from the community, particularly the
African-American community or the Latino community?
Eichenberg:
I think we’re making strides. We’re certainly not perfect.
I’m not sure if you’re aware, but we’ve got a small staff
right now trying to develop a department of equity,
diversity and inclusion. I think just making that step is a
super important because that says we acknowledge this is a
formal effort and we need to figure out what does this
formal effort look like to really make sure that we are
treating students in the community equitably, so that’s one
piece.
I think that the piece
that’s hardest to move about inclusion is that we don’t see
a lot of African-American graduates in the education field,
and if they’re not in the pipeline, it’s really difficult to
hire. But we are looking at it and we did just have some
adult students get through the Teach Toledo piece. So, we
also need to support alternate certification or coming back
from the workplace certification.
The other piece that we
want to think about, is that we actually have good diversity
in our building leadership. Monthly, we look at building
leadership versus administration type jobs versus teachers
versus the rest of the staff that supports the school
buildings. And the numbers look great for leadership and for
the rest of the staff. However, it’s our teaching staff that
we have to continue to engage and find creative ways to try
to make it more diverse because if you just look at who’s
graduating from multiple teacher programs and education
programs, you’re not going to find people, and that’s one of
the things that we’ve really had to work around and why it’s
so difficult to move that needle. I think that’s the
toughest task ahead of us because you have to have a long
game.
I was in an event where
there were these very impressive students and Dr. [Romules]Durant
looked at them and he goes ‘You’re going into education,
right?’ And he said it to each of them. We have to build
up the profession to them and also acknowledge that not
everyone wants to be an educator when they first leave
school, but I think with time there are people who gravitate
back to education because they understand now that they’ve
been out in the workplace that they have something to offer
students, and they like to teach. But sometimes you don’t
know that just going to school, you learn it out in the
world.
Perryman:
Thank you.
Contact Rev. Donald Perryman, D.Min, at
drdlperryman@centerofhopebaptist.org
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