There's another "public" meeting to discuss the proposed changes to Student Assignment for MNPS tonight: 6PM at Stratford High School in East Nashville. I'll be at a different education event tonight, one that's focusing on what we do with kids once we get them in classrooms instead of what classrooms they're assigned to.
I'd love to be able to be at the meeting at Stratford, though. It's the perfect symbolic space to have a conversation about how we determine where students go to school. Why? Because it represents a community in which 92.4% of the children go to public school and go to their locally zoned school. In other words, Stratford is a "neighborhood school," just like the new zoning proposal suggests should be the model for schools across the city. But it's also a school with a 58.0% mobility rate and a 68.9% poverty rate. In other words, even though this school is nearby to the families it serves, 575 of the schools' 940 or so students will leave the school before the end of the year. Yikes.
Maybe that's just the norm for Nashville? Unfortunately, no. Hillsboro High School is comparable in size to Stratford. It's a neighborhood zoned school, like Stratford. But that neighborhood is a bit different. Only 35% of Hillsboro's students will change schools this year and only 34.5% of those students live in poverty.
Those aren't the only differences, although they're pretty big ones. Students at Stratford received Out-of-school Suspensions about 1,200 times last year... only about half that number had OOSs at Hillsboro. Hillsboro offers nineteen different advanced placement courses. Stratford offers five, and only about 6% of their students pass the AP exams they do take.
It's not about zoning. It's not about neighborhood schools. It's about poverty, and the longer we insist that public education "works" so long as it works for children in wealth, the worse that problem becomes. Consider this review, published in the September Phi Delta Kappan, of last summer's OECD summit in Norway:
The reality.. is that socioeconomic status remains
the most powerful single influence on students' educational and other
life outcomes... Where you are born and grow up matters
enormously to what you are able to be and do... UNICEF's Innocenti Research Centre recently released
a report with the fascinating title of Child Poverty in Perspective: An
Overview of Child Well-Being in Rich Countries
(www.unicef-irc.org/publications). Using a rich array of data, it
compares the situation of children in Canada, the U.S., the United
Kingdom, and 18 other European countries on six dimensions, including
material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family
relationships, behaviors and risks, and young people's subjective sense
of well-being.
No country ranks high on
all six dimensions. The Netherlands gets the best overall score.
Canada's average ranking across the six areas is 1 2th, while the U.S.
and the U.K. are at the bottom. And the kicker is that the report
concludes: "Variation in government policy appears to account for most
of the variation in child poverty levels between OECD countries. No
OECD country devoting 10% or more of GDP to social transfers has a
child poverty rate higher than 10%. No country devoting less than 5% of
GDP to social transfers has a child poverty rate of less than 15%."
It is, as our Mayor noted so often, all connected. Children spend about two and a half hours a day with their fathers, but about 8 hours a day in school. Our public schools, then, hold enormous promise for addressing the trajectory of children and youth, a promise which should not be overlooked in conversations that focus on the expense of MNPS transportation. Chief Justice Warren said it best:
Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and
local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great
expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the
importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in
the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service
in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship.
Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural
values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in
helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is
doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life
if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity,
where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be
made available to all on equal terms.
Children do not choose poverty... their ability to benefit from our public education system should not be dependent on whether they have wealth. "Neighborhood schools" only work if neighborhoods are equal.
-Catherine McTamaney
