DEL.ICIO.USCOBB COUNTY
Fresh board provides opportunity to start anew
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Once the November election is over, Cobb County will have completely revamped its seven-member school board from those embarrassing days — not that long ago — when it was attaching “evolution is just a theory” stickers on science textbooks and trying to spend $75 million on take-home laptop computers for students.
Fortunately, both those bad ideas were halted by judges who ruled the board lacked the authority to make such decisions. Yet the memories linger.
In January, four new members elected next month will join the three current members who were elected in 2006, with all seven replacing incumbents who were beaten or voluntarily resigned from the board since those controversies. And maybe, just maybe, that newly reinvigorated board will get its act together and focus on some important issues facing the Cobb schools.
At first glance, Cobb seems to be a prototypical American suburban school district, boasting some of the highest-achieving high schools in the state. But a closer look reveals a district in the middle of a remarkable transformation.
In recent years, the demographics of the 106,000-student district have changed dramatically. It is now majority minority, with no dominant racial group, and a disproportionate share of poor minority students (many of them Hispanic) clustered in schools on the south side of the county.
At the same time, newer subdivisions on the west side have become home to a burgeoning black middle class, overcrowding some existing schools that until recently were 90 percent white.
Those demographic changes should bring issues of race and student achievement into sharper focus in Cobb. But for the most part, parents and voters in sections of the county where schools are doing well rarely talk about how to improve education in areas of the county where schools are struggling.
A fresh new board provides an opportunity to start anew in dealing with the school district’s stubborn problems at bringing underachieving schools up to No Child Left Behind standards. Unfortunately, the Cobb board has a history of getting sidetracked by secondary issues that stir up controversy and distract attention from things that really matter.
In the board’s defense, many of those controversies have been stirred up by constituents who disagree with the school administration and simply refuse to let their pet issues die. Debates over issues such as early starting dates for the school year or block scheduling in high schools become great fodder for endless letters to the editor and online chatter. The tone and volume of the discussion often amplifies the issue beyond all proportion to reality.
For instance, this year some parents of elementary students were late to discover that their kids’ report cards will have numeric grades instead of traditional letter grades. For weeks, conspiracy theorists deemed that an effort to “dumb down” achievement. School board members who refused to reconsider the change were lampooned as captives of Superintendent Fred Sanderson, unwilling to stand up for parents and students.
Meanwhile, the number of Cobb schools on the No Child Left Behind “needs improvement” list declined last year, but there was an increase in schools not making adequate yearly progress. Nearly one in five schools in the county is now in that last category.
How will the new board deal with that? What lessons has the district learned from schools that have worked their way off the needs-improvement list? How can those lessons be employed to ensure that all schools hit their progress goals?
Those are the Cobb County school controversies that ought to keep the new school board and administration busy.
— Mike King is a member of
the editorial board.
.JPG)
Services »
