Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2007 > October > 21 > Entry
Lots of school board talk (must be an election coming up)
Can you tell there is a school board election a few weeks away? Just read our editorial pages every day. We’ve already discussed DDN’s endorsements and Ellen Belcher’s column about Joe Lacey.
But don’t overlook former state school board member Thomas Gunlock’s commentary. Gunlock says he was right earler this year when he say Dayton schools’ performance would slip and that the district, overall, was performing poorly. You might recall that Superintendent Percy Mack was livid after Gunlock’s prior commentary.
I know Tom reads Get on the Bus. Here’s my question for him. OK, you say Dayton schools have problems. Not many would argue with that. But your commentary was missing one big thing — solutions. What can be done to get urban schools performing better? Do your former colleagues at the state board of education or those in the legislature have any role?
Meanwhile, school board member Joe Lacey responds to Belcher’s criticism with a letter to the editor in which he takes issue with some of the details of her column.
And Belcher is back today with a commentary about Gail Littlejohn’s legacy. In essence, she says few have accomplished as much as Littlejohn did as school board president. Belcher’s lists Gail’s biggest accomplishments as professionalizing the board, getting a good superintendent in place, passing the school bond issue and redirecting more money into the classroom.
I think that is a good list.
People forget what this board was like before she got here in 2002. The board was very political.
For example, the board went two decades without closing a single school even though enrollment plummeted 25 percent. Why? Because everytime they talked about closing one, someone on the board had a political interest in keeping that school open. So nothing would happen. As a result, it cost more money to operate more building space than needed and that bled money from the classroom over to the operations side. Spending, over time, went pretty far out of whack, for that and other reasons.
Littlejohn put an end to that. Under her leadership, the board closed more than a dozen schools and pushed spending on academics from 47 percent of the budget to 66 percent.
Belcher listed Littlejohn’s most serious failures as the Reynolds purchase and her inability to forge a closer partnership with Mayor Rhine McLin. Both are examples of Littlejohn’s biggest vulnerability — sometimes she had a tendency to misjudge the politics around her actions.
In 2001, she made the mistake of beliving that because Mike Turner looked like a better candidate for mayor that he would win. So she accepted his endorsement and they campaigned together. Underestimating a McLin running for office in this town is never a good political strategy. It took a few years for their relationship to recover when McLin become the new mayor.
And Littlejohn did not see the political downside of the Reynolds purchase until much too late, long after the deal was done. The community resentment toward that purchase is hurting the board badly today.
In conversation with me last week, Littlejohn added better relations with unions as an unachieved goal. To extend this a little, I’d say overall the board did not connect well enough with employees.
They actually got more buy-in for their reforms than they get credit for. Many employees were sick and tired of the old ways of doing things in the district in 2001. But some of the blame that came the board’s way when times got tough the past few years showed they did not nurture that early connection with their workers effectively enough.
One unadressed question now is who will replace Littlejohn? Can they get anyone like her in terms of ideas, clout and energy? What do you think?
Permalink | Comments (6) | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Comments
By Laura
October 22, 2007 11:51 PM | Link to this
Mary, I agree with you that it would make a lot more sense for there to be a nationally standardized test than for each state to come up with their own. It seems like all states should have the same basic requirements. Since NCLB is a national mandate, it seems logical that every child in the U.S. should be held to the same standards. I just had a “vision” of the chaos that would reign as representatives from each state tried to agree on the wording of even one question!By Mary
October 22, 2007 6:41 PM | Link to this
Laura, if the tests are well thought out, they can be a useful tool. I agree with you the tests should be rational and not deceptive. However, when accountability tests were put into the system, it seems more energy was used to fight accountability standards than determining curriculum and test content. It blows me away that ststae cooperative or national tests were not developed to save states money. Why do states need their own separate tests? Is it really important that people in Arizona need to be evaluated differently in math or reading comprehension than people in Ohio and Alabama. States should have voluntarily worked together on this instead of paying millions for separate test development.By Laura
October 22, 2007 3:08 PM | Link to this
In an educational statistics course I took when working on my master’s, I was taught that the most educationally appropriate way to evaluate a student’s learning was to tell the student exactly what you wanted them to learn and then test them on that material. That is not what the state does. Teachers have to play a guessing game every year wondering what will be tested and how important the state will think the skill is this year. The state also tries to “trick” the students with answers that are so similar or there are two answers that could be correct, that even the teachers often can’t figure out what the correct answer will be. The state needs to tell us what they want the students to learn and test it in a fair format that does not resort to trying to trick or confuse the test taker.By School Supporter
October 22, 2007 1:14 PM | Link to this
Oldprof, I’m curious about the percentage of matriculants to and graduates from your institution who meet “Standards and assessments [which] must incorporate the nature of work and civic life in the 21st century: high-level thinking, learning, and global understanding skills, as well as sophisticated information, communication, and technology literacy competencies.” Your rhetoric continues to suggest certainty that your audience does not possess the citizenship skills which public schools are obliged to promote.By Oldprof
October 21, 2007 11:32 PM | Link to this
Gunlock ought to try to explain why the state changes its standards every year—they don’t even know what a passing score on the OAT is until after the tests are administered. He also ought to explain why, during his tenure, the state board couldn’t even figure out how to count enrollments accurately—and why they punished Dayton and other districts for the state’s mistakes by requiring a refund of millions of dollars of previous years’ funding. I’m glad Gunnie didn’t win re-election, though I have no confidence in his successor—I’m holding out hope that once Eric Fingerhut gets through ironing out higher education, he’ll be charged with K-12 reform at the top. That might lead to a state board made up of educators who would revise state curricular standards to something developmentally realistic, a state superintendent who did something other than politics, and one state system that was effective and thorough and consistently funded. I’m past weary of the waste of money, time and energy that constant tax levies impose, and charter schools that too often are mistakes—at best well-intentioned experiments by dilettants, and at worst money-making schemes by politicians’ campaign donors.By Laura
October 21, 2007 10:09 PM | Link to this
As far as the employees being tired of the way things were pre-Littlejohn- most still are. Too many things still haven’t changed in the opinion of teachers. There is still too much of “who you know” and too little of “what you know” and “how you can perform”. One good example is the small number of administrators from downtown who lost their jobs, compared to teachers and building administrators. That is one issue the public has been very vocal about and the board still doesn’t seem to hear them. There is so much mistrust of the administration and board by the teachers that I can’t imagine what they could do and how long it would take to turn things around. For example, take the year-round school issue. Instead of doing a legitimate poll of parents and teachers, along with supportive research (which doesn’t actually exist)they made a decision to go year-round. It was suggested that if they “had” to go year-round that they at least phase it in as they built the new air-conditioned buildings. Not everyone would have ever liked it, but it would have been much more bearable. I’m sure there are people who will say the teachers need to be more “giving” but the teachers have given and given and are still giving. It is in our nature. If we see a need, we more often than not, jump in and help out. My husband jokes that we will actually have more money after I retire and stop spending money on school and the students. I know I’m not the only one. Ms. Littlejohn may consider her inability to improve relations with the union as one of her unachieved goals, but I seem to recall that the goal of “breaking the union” was attributed to her and her “Kids First” group when she first joined the board. Whether or not she actually said that, I don’t think very many teachers would say she had done much of anything to improve the boards relationship with the union.