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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2008 > June
June 2008
Companies: City kids should ride private bus service
A coalition of bus companies are making a pitch that the city school district could save 40 percent of its $12 million annual transportation costs by turning its bus service at all grades over to an outside company.
On Monday, the Greater Dayton RTA hosted a meeting with representatives from the National School Transportation Association, which argued the current high school bus service plan violates federal law by setting up direct routes to schools on city buses that run only when school is in service.
City and school officials said high school busing on RTA is not expected to return this fall because of tight budgets, leaving students to find their own way to school.
Lori Ward, the head of business operations for the district, said at the meeting that a study group examining busing will meet for the first time next week in hopes of making recommendations for future changes to the school board in August. But that committee’s work will not affect the plan to drop high school busing this fall.
Last summer, private bus companies filed a complaint with the Federal Transit Administration, overseer of public bus systems, alleging the RTA contract to bus high school students on limited service routes broke federal law. RTA officials said the contract has repeatedly passed muster with the federal agency.
In response, RTA Executive Director Mark Donaghy invited bus companies to present options for private service.
Terry Thomas, who heads a Youngstown company called Community Bus Services, brought with him school board members from Columbus, Youngstown and Warren to tout privatized service.
Thomas also pointed to Cincinnati, a city with private bus service. He said that city’s bus fleet and student population both are bigger than Dayton’s but their cost per student is 40 percent lower. He promised a private company could transport Dayton kids at the same cost as Cincinnati while maintaining union contracts and working with existing drivers.
The big savings comes through a wide range of small efficiencies, Thomas said — replacing expensive old buses with cheaper new ones, carefully devising routes, keeping buses full and reducing fuel costs by shutting off engines when idle, to name a few.
“The Cincinnati costs would be the costs here,” Thomas said.
Ward said there are many issues to be addressed because of the complexity of Dayton’s system, which transports an unusually large number of special education, charter school and private school students.
“If you are telling me you can find a way to transport 14,000 students to 66 schools efficiently at $800 per student, I need to listen,” she said.
Ward invited the private companies to join a committee examining the district’s transportation operation.
(Image credit: Columbia (Mo.) Tribune)
Permalink | Comments (24) | Post your comment | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Career mentorship done right
Here’s my problem with “job shadowing” and other career experience programs that place young students with professionals to learn about their jobs — too often the kids are just checking a box on a form.
In some cases, the kids are required to complete so many job shadows, sometimes up to three or four in their high school careers. And, too often, there is little effort to match the kids with the right mentors or even with the right careers they might actually want to pursue. Some kids are reaching for a second or third job to shadow, choosing something they are just vaguely interested in.
That’s not how they do it in Darke County.
Eileen Litchfield, the coordinator of Darke County’s Career Mentorship Program, first called me almost 10 years ago. I was a reporter in the DDN’s Troy bureau then, covering the northern Miami Valley, and Eileen had a Darke County student who was interested in journalism. (For more about the program, go here.)
I do many journalism job shadows. As the paper’s education reporter, I’m usually one of the first contacts for such requests and I’ve always felt a particular responsibility to help kids learn about this profession, whether through job shadows, speaking to them in groups, etc.
From the very beginning, the Darke County kids were different. Mostly, they were really interested in journalism. They asked smart questions. They rarely looked bored.
The key was on the front end. Litchfield does a lot of work screening the kids to find out what they are really interested in. And when she finds a successful mentor, she won’t let them get away. That’s how I’ve stayed involved with the program for almost a decade. She sends me one or two students every year.
Not all of them, probably not even most of them, continue on to study journalism in college. But all of them start a genuine interest. And my time is well spent with a student like that.
Litchfield tells me she is moving on from the program, which is a partnership of the school districts in Darke County through its educational service center. I’ll miss working with her, but fortunately the program will continue under new leadership. To Litchfield, I say good luck on your new endeavors. To the rest of the Miami Valley’s school districts, there is a good model to study in Darke County.
I wish I had a list of their names, the Darke County kids who mentored with me through the years. But I remember many of them, even if their names escape me.
Let me tell you one story of mentorship gone right.
In 2004, I was asked to work with a couple of other reporters who were investigating former Wright State University basketball coach Paul Biancardi’s involvement in a recruiting scandal when he was an assistant coach at Ohio State University. Part of my role was to fight Ohio State for records.
On the day one of the Darke County students was visiting, we hit the jackpot. A huge package of records finally arrived from Ohio State after weeks of wrangling. They contained a list of numbers called by Paul Biancardi’s cell phone while he was working there.
Our other reporters had obtained from other sources the cell phone numbers used by a shadowy Yugoslavian sports agent accused of taking money to shop foreign players to American colleges, in violation of recruiting rules. Biancardi had denied any significant contact with the agent.
The student joined me and a half dozen reporters gathered in a conference room with the box of records. She took a highlighter just like the rest of us and noted line after line of calls between Biancardi and the agent. By the end of the day, we had built a pretty strong case contradicting Biancardi’s story, and the student had a real taste of investigative journalism.
“That was pretty cool,” she said, on her way out the door after contributing to what would become a major front page story that Sunday.
I thought the same thing. Every job shadow should go like this.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Teaching and Learning
How important is high school busing?
On today’s opinion page, the DDN’s editorial board asks if the school board is doing enough to save high school busing.
The editorial notes that dropping the district’s RTA bus contract will have two big effects — it will almost certainly lower the district’s attendance and it will put thousands more kids downtown every day. A consequence of lower attendance could be a decline in academic achievement. Kids can’t learn if they aren’t in school.
The big question is whether the district can let that happen or if it can (or should) rework its budget to make high school busing a higher priority.
The editorial board argues that the consequences of dropping high school busing potentially are very serious and asks why there isn’t more urgency for the board to solve this problem. Some of the parties that came together last year to help — especially the city and the RTA — are not in a fiscal position to offer assistance this year. And they’ve been direct with the school board about that for a year.
But the school board’s financial woes are real. At the board’s finance committee meeting this week, finance officers were scrambling and scraping to hold the financial ship steady until the June 30 end of the fiscal year. And the district cut it very close this year, finishing the year with just a small surplus of cash.
Still, all budgets are built on priorities and a fair question has been asked by the DDN and by some readers here at GOTB — if busing really matters, how can the $2 million cost not find its way into the district’s $180 million budget for next year?
Is it really impossible to find something else that can be traded out for $2 million?
Let’s take sports, for example. The district has not announced any change to its athletics program, so if they follow last year’s plan there will be at least five varsity sports teams at the high school level. Now, the value of sports has been debated a lot here, but let’s give the benefit of the doubt and assume all the good things about sports are true — that they help kids build character and obtain useful life skills.
Even so, is that more important than getting kids to school so they can learn in the first place? I don’t have the figures in front of me, but wouldn’t the money for sports make a decent dent in the busing deficit?
Some time back, the district presented a potential plan to curb spending on the operational side by extending the rotations for some routine functions. For instance, the proposal suggested cutting grass every other week instead of weekly. That plan dissolved and has never been heard from again. Could the district adjust maintenance, custodial and groundskeeping routines to save money for busing?
The DDN editorial questions whether the district has really dug for money by reprioritizing in this way.
What do you think? Is high school busing important enough to make these moves? Or is it fair to ask the kids to find their own ways to school?
Permalink | Comments (30) | Post your comment | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Dayton grad rate still going up
The city schools’ graduation rate will rise again when the district’s state report card is released in August.
This time Dayton will report 82.8 percent for its graduation rate for 2006-07, up from 79 percent on last year’s report card. The report card’s graduation rate data is always one year behind.
The gain continues a trend that has seen the city schools’ graduation rate jump from 53.8 percent four years ago.
“It’s been a team effort,” Superintendent Percy Mack told a joint meeting of school board members and city commissioners Tuesday.
Mack also broke down the data by gender and ethnic groups, showing gains in every area. White students, who excel compared to minority groups statewide but tend to graduate at a lower rate in Dayton, made a huge gain over the four-year term — up to 69.7 percent from 36.7 percent.
Also making big gains were boys — 78.5 percent, up from 46.6 percent four years ago.
School board member Jeff Mims said the district should be commended for the performance of black students, who statewide trail far behind white students when it comes to graduating. But in Dayton, where the district is more than 75 percent black, those students outperform the district average, graduating at an 86 percent rate (up from 59.8 percent four years ago).
“Nationally, Ohio is near the bottom in African-American graduating rates,” Mims said. “We are several cuts above even other urban districts for African American graduation rates.”
Other graduation rate data:
—Girls: 86.6 percent, up from 60.8 percent four years ago
—Hispanic students: 78.6 percent, up from 66.7 percent four years ago
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Big ‘oops’ helps Middletown, hurts others
A budget correction bill passed by the legislature will fix an error in school funding and also will cost two area districts a chunk of state cash.
West Carrollton and Northridge schools each will have to pay back more than $200,000 to the state by receiving lower payments than anticipated starting this fall. The change subtracts about 3 percent from Northridge’s state aid and 2 percent from West Carrollton’s.
On the other side of the coin, Middletown gets almost $1.5 million extra — the biggest windfall among the 118 Ohio districts getting more money out of the change. That equates to about 7 percent of the district’s state aid. Monroe schools in Butler County get $445,000, which equates to 11 percent of its state aid; Miamisburg schools get $$718,000 or about 4 percent of state aid; and Anna schools in Shelby County get $249,000, or the equivalent of 9 percent of state aid.
All four of those districts are among the 20 biggest winners in the recalculation among Ohio’s 610 school districts. Miamisburg and Northridge are among the five hardest hit. Most area districts were not significantly affected.
For Middletown, a district with financial struggles that just passed a levy, the money can be an immediate help, Treasurer Eric Sotzig said. And the new calculation method will bring more money in upcoming years, too.
“This certainly impacts Middletown schools in a positive way,” Sotzig said.
In all, 188 districts will have to pay back about $6.4 million collectively while another 116 districts get an extra $15.9 million.
The fix was related to the gradual phase out of the tangible personal property tax, which taxes inventory and equipment held by businesses. The Columbus Dispatch first reported Monday that state reimbursements for the lost taxes — which will shrink every year until disappearing in 2017 — were based at first on projected enrollment rather than the actual numbers of students in each district.
Ryan Shone, treasurer of West Carrollton schools, said the $289,305 overpayment to that district will not be a major problem as it is subtracted from state aid payments in August, October and May of the upcoming year.
“The amount in October last year was higher than what I was estimating,” he said. “It turns out what I was estimating was pretty much on target and the state sent us more. The net effect is that they are sending us this year the amount that I was estimating a year ago.”
Slone said new money coming in from a recently passed levy will help make up any small shortfalls that might occur. With $36 million in total revenue from state and local taxes, the deduction amounts to less than 1 percent — a manageable sum, he said.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: School Funding
High school busing on the chopping block again
With just seven weeks before Dayton schools resume classes there is no plan to maintain special bus service and routes for high school students, which could force up to 3,000 kids to get to school by paying their own way on regular city bus routes.
School, city, county and business leaders last year worried that dropping high school bus service could erode school attendance by making it harder and costlier for kids to get to school while also potentially creating headaches downtown, where most city bus routes go to allow passenger transfers.
““The implications really are that parents are going to have to find a way to get their kids to high schools,” Greater Dayton RTA Executive Director Mark Donaghy said. “We expect a great deal of that will happen on the RTA regular service.”
Just weeks before the start of the last school year, four partners joined the district to cover the $2 million cost of its RTA contract. The city provided $350,000, Montgomery County gave $350,000 and RTA reduced bus pass prices by $200,000. The county’s job and family services department added $500,000 in social services to free up district money for busing and the district contributed a $600,000 state subsidy it would not have gotten had it not offered high school busing.
None of the parties who stepped up to save high school busing service last summer has offered to make a contribution to keep busing for 2008-09.
“Our budget is tight, but everybody else has some struggles, too,” said Yvonne Isaacs, city school board president.
The district’s contract with the RTA provide free transportation for high school students and provides 39 extra buses on the road when school was in session. Many of those buses follow direct routes that pick kids up from their homes and take them right to school.
Still, Isaacs said she was still searching for a way to keep busing before the Aug. 11 start of school.
“This time last year we were in a similar situation,” she said. “My hope is, like last year, we will find a solution. But we know we have to move fast.”
Permalink | Comments (25) | Post your comment | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Board to name Stanic superintendent for 2008-09
The Dayton school board will name Kurt T. Stanic interim superintendent tonight, a transitional post that could last a full school year.
Board President Yvonne Isaacs said Stanic, who last year retired as superintendent of North Olmsted schools near Cleveland, was a unanimous choice.
Three others were interviewed — Jane McGee Rafal, the district’s executive director of elementary education; Norris Brown, recently retired superintendent of Jefferson Twp. schools; and Ronald L. Victor, chief business manager for Toledo Public Schools. Deputy Superintendent Debra Brathwaite declined the position, which was offered to her first before the interviews began.
“I think he is the right guy to get us through this interim period,” Isaacs said. “He is just a great leader. He has fantastic leadership skills and is very strategic in his thinking.”
With a levy try expected in November, Isaacs said the board does not expect to begin its national search to replace outgoing Superintendent Percy Mack until 2009. Stanic, she said, has offered to work without a contract and leave whenever a permanent replacement for Mack is picked.
Mack leaves June 30 to take over the superintendency of Columbia, S.C., schools. Stanic, who has an undergraduate degree from Wittenberg University in Springfield, has twice retired from superintendent jobs. He served as a superintendent in Black River Schools before moving to Euclid. After retiring as superintendent in Euclid, he moved to North Olmsted from 2002 to 2007 before retiring again.
“He has lots of experience in urban districts and districts that have been changing in terms of demographics and economics,” Isaacs said. “He is supportive of teachers, but holds people accountable for performance. He seems to be a very good overall manager.
Permalink | Comments (0) | Post your comment | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Two more candidates for interim superintendent
The Dayton school board hopes to decide this week who will lead the city school district while it searches for a permanent replacement for departing Superintendent Percy Mack.
Mack leaves after June 30 to become superintendent in Columbia, S.C. The candidates for interim superintendent are:
—Jane McGee Rafal, the district’s executive director of elementary education. Rafal returned for a second stint with Dayton schools in 2005. She formerly was a principal and administrator here before becoming assistant superintendent in Warren, Ohio. She later won the top job there and then went on to Mesa, Ariz., as assistant superintendent.
—Norris Brown, recently retired superintendent of Jefferson Twp. schools. Brown, a 41 year educator, returned to Jefferson in 2003 after retiring from Middletown schools. Brown was a teacher, principal, coach and assistant superintendent in Jefferson for 27 years before a 10-year stint in Middletown as pupil personnel director and interim superintendent.
—Kurt T. Stanic, who last year retired as superintendent of North Olmsted schools near Cleveland. Stanic also served as superintendent in Parma, Euclid and Black River schools. Stanic is graduate Wittenberg University in Springfield.
—Ronald L. Victor, chief business manager for Toledo Public Schools since 2007. He is the former superintendent of Garfield schools and business manager of Euclid schools. He was a candidate for superintendent in Westerville schools near Columbus last year.
School board President Yvonne Isaacs said the board could name someone as early as Thursday if a consensus is reached during a closed meeting tonight.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Taking language instruction seriously
I’m just back from visiting western Canada, specifically British Columbia. This a beautiful area, which I highly recommend for your future vacations.
But while I was there, you might not be surprised to learn, I was paying attention to the education issues they were discussing. And a big one there is language instruction.
British Columbia, it turns out, is Canada’s only officially bilingual province. You may know that Canada has a large French-speaking population, especially in Quebec. In British Columbia, knowledge of two languages is viewed both as useful (Vancouver, its major city, has a very international flavor) and as important to protecting the heritage of the province.
OK, so if it is generally agreed that language instruction is important, that should be make it easier to agree on effective instructional programs, right? By comparison, in most of Ohio there is basically no pressure for serious foreign language instruction, especially at early grades.
But in Canada, one effective means of teaching language is through immersion at an early age. This means a student who speaks English at home is placed into a school environment in which instruction is given in French in most subjects. The idea is that this immersion environment promotes fluency in French, so the student is fully proficient in both languages by the end of school.
In Canada, test scores have mostly dispelled the concern that this approach could somehow harm the English speakers’ academic skills. But still, immersion can be controversial.
In fact, on Vancouver paper last week had a story about parents fighting for immersion instruction. For schools, immersion is expensive and some are trying to wriggle free from it.
It’s a shame that language immersion and other early instruction options are not generally available in our area, even in the best scoring and wealthiest school districts. In the U.S., we just don’t take foreign language seriously. Wouldn’t it make a difference if school boards here knew they’d have a fight on their hands if they cut language programs or didn’t offer language at early grades?
Skipping out on teaching other languages seems especially risky today, given the increasing globalization of our economy. Aren’t we are just giving away this potential competitive advantage to other nations that make it a priority?
(Image credit: Lifesport)
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Foreign Language and Study Abroad
10,000 reasons to say thank you
I’m traveling the rest of this week in Canada while still keeping an eye on the blog and education news. But the break from work gave me the chance to notice that last month this blog saw its 11,000th comment. That’s on about 1,150 blog posts since Get on the Bus launched on Aug. 8, 2005.
That’s an astounding 9.5 or so comments for posts. Or at least it’s astounding to me.
I’ve gotten some nice praise for Get on the Bus over that time, and nearly every good word includes a compliment about the vibrancy of the reader comments and the general politeness of the exchange of ideas here. Sometimes I am actually pressed by those starting their own blogs to explain my “magic” formula for keeping the conversation here civil, as if I have some sort of secret ingredient.
When I tell people that I think I’m just lucky that people in Dayton who read GOTB generally are passionate but polite, they think I’m being coy.
So from time to time I like to say thanks to all of you for reading and helping to create an active and cordial discussion here.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Journalism
Jane Rafal, Norris Brown seek interim post
The Dayton school board interviewed two candidates Tuesday for interim superintendent and hopes to interview two more.
Deputy Superintendent Debra Brathwaite will not be among them.
Jane McGee Rafal, the district’s executive director of elementary education, and recently retired Jefferson Twp. Superintendent Norris Brown interviewed Tuesday. School board President Yvonne Isaacs said the board is looking to add two more candidates before week’s end with the goal of naming Superintendent Percy Mack’s temporary replacement by early next week.
Rafal returned for a second stint with Dayton schools in 2005. She formerly was a principal and administrator here before becoming assistant superintendent in Warren, Ohio. She later won the top job there and then went on to Mesa, Ariz., as assistant superintendent.
Brown, a 41 year educator, returned to Jefferson in 2003 after retiring from Middletown schools. Brown was a teacher, principal, coach and assistant superintendent in Jefferson for 27 years before a 10-year stint in middletown as pupil personnel director and interim superintendent. Since 2003 he has guided Jefferson schools through academic and budget crises.
Superintendent Percy Mack announced in May that he was resigning to take a job as superintendent in Columbia, S.C. He starts in Columbia in July.
Brathwaite has said she wants to be considered to replace Mack as superintendent but she declined the opportunity to take the interim job. Brathwaite has been a finalist for superintendent of Toledo, Akron and Princeton schools.
The school board has said it wants an interim superintendent while it conducts a national search for Mack’s permanent replacement. The board also has said it expects to place a levy on the November ballot.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Is a national search worth the cost for Dayton?
Kay Royster and Greg Thornton
A couple years ago, I read a fascinating book called Good to Great, a study of companies that made extraordinary growth and emerged as worldwide leaders in their industries.
It’s an interesting book on many fronts. The routes to success these companies took were sometimes unorthodox and counterintuitive. One chapter discusses the position of CEO. Here’s what author Jim Collins and his team of Stanford University researchers found — the companies they studied were often run by people who were promoted internally from jobs like chief operating officer or finance manager and often had long tenures with the company.
They were not usually hot shots hired away from other companies (in fact, there was some evidence in the book that those sorts of CEOs had a negative effect on company performance).
Not long after I read the book, I heard Dayton Deputy Superintendent Debra Brathwaite mention it during a presentation to the school board. I asked her about it afterward and she raved about the book, saying she had given a copy to Superintendent Percy Mack.
Coincidentally, Brathwaite now stand in the position of candidate for the school district equivalent of CEO as an internal candidate with a COO-type job. So perhaps it is no surprise that she is somewhat irked that the school board wants to conduct a national search for Mack’s replacement.
But getting beyond the personalities and the politics there are bigger questions here. Among them:
—Can Dayton afford a superintendent search?
—More importantly, can the district afford a national candidate for superintendent?
—Can the board expect a better candidate from a national search?
Dayton has had some success using consultants to search for talent. Mack, in fact, was brought in as deputy superintendent by a consultant, as was Brathwaite. But there have been less successful consultant-led searches, too, like the one that nearly put a convicted criminal in the deputy superintendent’s chair.
But let’s go back to the last national search Dayton conducted for a superintendent. This was in 2000. Back then the district brought in a well-known national firm called Hazard, Young and Attea out of Chicago, which proceeded to persuade the board to violate Ohio’s open records law, among other missteps.
While ignoring potentially good candidates, esepcially local ones, the firm trotted out two finalists for Dayton — Kay Royster, then superintendent in Kalamzoo, Mich., and Greg Thornton then an assistant superintendent in Winston Salem, N.C.
The lack of a local candidate outraged Daytonians, turning the next board meeting into a circus as speakers lined up to rip the board until it finally relented and promoted interim superintendent Jerrie Bascome McGill.
But whatever happened to those other candidates the consultant brought in?
We reported at the time that the Kalamazoo board was desperate to get rid of Royster after her relationship with the community soured. She eventually landed in Peoria, Ill., where she made more enemies and was again forced out. Now it looks like she has just lost her job again, this time in Missouri.
Thornton has had more success, but not as a superintendent. He struck out not long after Dayton for a superintendent job in Connecticut. I can’t find the story, but at the time a newspaper reported Thornton’s strange behavior at an interview led the board to question his honesty and they ultimately picked someone else. Still, he went on to success as an administrator in Maryland and now has ascended to chief academic officer in Philadelphia. In fact, last year he was a finalist for superintendent in Seattle.
Now imagine one of those two had gotten the job here. How would that have turned out?
I’ve been told Royster had the inside track during Dayton’s 2000 search. Based on her troubled history in Michigan, Illinois and Missouri, it’s hard to see how she would have been a success here. Dayton was the fifth or sixth district to make Royster a finalist but none picked her after researching her work in Kalamazoo. However, I was told she put on an impressive show during interviews when talking about how to raise test scores.
Thornton might have been a different story. He is not much different from Mack — a southern administrator who had never been a superintendent before. Like Mack, he was mild mannered and hard working. But his resume today suggest something else — the Philadelphia native likely was not looking to settle down here and has often had his eye on the next opportunity.
And then there is the matter of cost. The 2000 search run by Hazard, Young & Attea cost Dayton about $30,000 plus the expense of flying the candidates in to interview. Today, I think a national search firm could cost as much as $50,000. Consider Memphis, where the recent superintendent search run by Ray and Associates cost $42,000 and yielded a field with James Williams in it. Not much return on investment there.
After funding the search, the next problem for the Dayton school board is paying the new superintendent. The attributes the board is looking for — a good leader with a proven track record of success in urban school reform — are rare. Getting a sitting superintendent with that resume would likely cost more than the $140,000 the board was paying Percy Mack.
Mack, in fact, is a good case in point. He went to Columbia, S.C., where the school district is slightly larger but the cost of living also is only slightly higher than Dayton. Mack’s new contract will pay him $195,000 annually.
I don’t know if Dayton, in the midst of a financial crisis, can justify to the public spending almost $200,000 for a superintendent and maybe as much as $50,000 to conduct a search.
The board could perhaps get cheaper candidates by asking its search consultant to aim for someone with a resume like Mack and Thornton had in 2000 — up and comers with potential and track records of success in a responsible supporting roles who are shooting for their first superintendent jobs.
Wait, that sounds a lot like Debra Brathwaite …
Permalink | Comments (9) | Post your comment | Categories: Dayton Public Schools
Kids and politics: A learning experience
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama
John McCain
A presidential race is always interesting, and it offers a great chance to teach kids about American democracy, our electoral process and the issues that face our nation. To me, this is an opportunity to invite kids into adult conversations about where our country is headed.
And sometimes we learn something, too.
Back in the fall, I had started getting questions from my three daughters about the presidential race as it began to heat up. So one weekend afternoon I sat them down and started to explain how a presidential election works and who the candidates were. Eventually, I went through the candidates one-by-one, explaining where they were from and what their issues were.
When I got to Hillary Clinton, my oldest daughter — age 9 — stopped me in the middle of my verbal profile with a question: “Has a woman ever been president?” When I told her no, she stated emphatically, “Then I’m for Hillary. It’s time for a woman to be president.”
Frankly, I thought she was being a bit rash making her mind up that way and that quickly. I suggested she might want to learn more about Clinton and what she believes in first. But she was sold and before long, she had brought along her two younger sisters.
I didn’t worry too much about this at first. In fact, I wasn’t much older when volunteered on John Anderson’s campaign for president as a boy. I was naive, idealistic and didn’t understand the bigger picture issues of that race, but I still learned a lot from the experience of rooting for a candidate for president.
As the primary process went along and the race against Barack Obama grew more heated, my daughter became more virulent in supporting her candidate, even wearing an “I-heart-Hillary” button on her backpack. As the Ohio primary neared, the question was coming up a lot — was I going to vote for Hillary? There were four candidates left in the race — Clinton, Obama, John McCain and Mike Huckabee — and I was undecided.
The day before the primary, I sat the kids down. They were all excited about Ohio’s big place in the race and I felt I owed them an explanation about how I had made up my mind. So I broke the news to them — for a variety of reasons, I was not going to vote for Hillary.
The three of them were, well, crushed. The youngest, the five year old, actually burst into tears. This is when I realized what this all really meant to them. It wasn’t about the politics or the issues or the parties. When you’re a young girl growing up in a country that has never elected a woman president, the possibility of a woman winning the job is an intoxicating idea. A Hillary win would have meant they, too, could dare to dream to chose a path some day that others might think is crazy for a woman to try.
And the three of them just could not believe that, as the father of three girls, I wasn’t going to vote for the “girl president.”
I think they’ve forgiven me now. We’ve had long discussions about my reasons and our differing views on this year’s presidential race. My oldest daughter sat with me and watched Obama claim victory in the Democratic race last week. She was a little sad but she remains interested in the fall campaign.
Today, I finally got around to watching Hillary’s farewell speech. In it, she spoke to the hopes and dreams of girls and women — young and old — who supported her campaign, including some senior citizens who can remember a time when women were not permitted to vote.
I had to admit it was an inspiring and at times moving speech.
Overall, I think this election is an especially good lesson for young people in general. It has already shown that you can be a serious candidate for president of the United States even if you are a woman, an African American or a moderate in a conservative party.
And for some kids, those are life lessons that really matter.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: Teaching and Learning
Teacher performance pay: Costly and complicated
Ron Budzig, retired MeadWestvaco executive, was the first to bring up the question that was on the minds of several business leaders as Percy Mack gave his response to a consultant’s report on the district:
What about pay-for-performance?
Mack ducked and bobbed for a minute before committee chairman Tom Breitenbach, who is CEO of Premier Health Partners at his day job, essentially ordered Mack to add an investigation of performance pay to the plan.
But do business leaders really know what school-based performance pay looks like and how different it is from the labor contract-free pay raise systems many of them use at their companies?
In education, performance pay is different and often costly. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a bad idea.
Several school district are experimenting with performance pay, including Toledo and Cincinnati in Ohio and Denver, which has gotten a lot of press for its effort.
But these plans don’t junk the salary scale systems that are common to schools under their labor contracts. Instead, they seek to alter those scales to change incentives for teachers.
The simplest plans just dole out extra money. Sometimes this means schoolwide bonuses when schools meet their goals. Or the money may be awarded by grade level. Or sometimes individual teachers can get bonuses for meeting individual goals.
But those are not the performance pay plans that are getting the most attention right now. The hot plans seek to re-engineer teacher pay scales.
Mostly, the new performance pay scales seek to provide teachers a career ladder, giving them opportunities advance their skills and take on new responsibilities in ways that will reap better pay. At the same time, teachers who don’t take any steps to advance their training or responsibility will find their pay growth dramatically slowed. This may create incentives for ineffective or apathetic teachers to change careers.
Here’s how this type of plan works.
The usual scale moves teachers up in pay each time they add experience, which can be as often as every year or every other year. In addition, teachers can add a pay premium for additional academic degrees or coursework.
The elevation up the scale is basically automatic. Earn the degrees or hit the experience milestones and you get more money.
Under the performance plan, teachers still get automatic pay raises for added experience and education. But there are also four levels on the teacher career ladder. The ladder looks like this:
Beginning teacher
Emerging teacher
Career teacher
Master teacher
In each ladder level, there are steps, but they are limited. A beginning teacher who gets a doctorate can get added pay and there might be, say, four experience steps. But a five-year teacher with a doctorate who never advances to “emerging teacher” will no longer get automatic step increases. This doesn’t quite freeze their pay but it slows pay growth to the point at which making a career of teaching could look much less attractive.
How do teachers move up the scale? It usually involves some degree of peer or administrator performance review. Usually, part of the master teacher’s job requires them to review or mentor less experienced teachers. It may also require teachers to achieve internal teacher training goals.
But here is what these performance programs don’t do. They don’t scrap teacher pay scales entirely and gives principals or administrators a free hand to reward and punish teachers financially as they see fit.
And performance pay plans generally cost extra. The basic bonus style plans are simpler, but you need extra money to dole out the bonuses. Re-engineering the pay scale requires cooperation in labor talks and generally unions don’t give things that work for them (like the existing salary scales) away for free. Districts have to make the new scales worth their while.
The bottom line is that performance pay is not a simple fix.
(Image credit: Education World)
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Ed Week gives Ohio a good grade for graduation rate
Education Week’s Diplomas Count report on graduation rates nationally is out and there is generally good news for Ohio. Compared to other states, Ohio’s graduation rate grade might be described as a high “B” and that rate is growing faster than most states.
Still, Ed Week estimates more than 200 kids a day drop out and that this year’s statewide graduating class is missing about 38,000 kids who should be getting diplomas. Those are disturbing numbers.
Diplomas Count is a really good report. Take a look and let us know what you think in the comments.
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Debra Brathwaite and the superintendent search
What’s going on with Debra Brathwaite?
That is the question I’ve been getting a lot since this story broke Saturday with Brathwaite saying she had refused an offer to become interim superintendent.
Brathwaite’s friends don’t understand why the board won’t simply make her superintendent. She’s been groomed for the job, they say, and now that the job is open why not give it to her? Her critics believe she is placing unreasonable demands by trying to force the board’s hand to pick her now rather than conduct the wider search board members want.
Who’s right? That’s a tricky question. How has it come to this? That’s one I will take a crack at. The answer comes down to a simple truism — things change.
I remember the first time I met Percy Mack. He was introduced at a school board meeting as Jerrie Bascome McGill’s deputy superintendent after a troubled search that lasted more than a year and had a couple of false starts. A high level school official tapped me on the shoulder soon after that night and said “Keep an eye on Percy Mack. He looks like our next superintendent to me.”
The Gail Littlejohn-run Kids First team, which took control of the school board in 2001, took an immediate liking to Mack. It was also clear from the beginning that McGill’s days were numbered. With a pretty big nudge from the board, McGill decided to retire less than a year after the 2001 sea-change election and very quickly Mack was introduced as her replacement.
Take note that there was no search at all.
Mack had taught the district the value of having a strong No. 2 — someone who could be depended on to get things done and who could step up and take over if needed. So the district went searching for the next Percy Mack and found Debra Brathwaite.
Brathwaite was well regarded when she arrived. At the time her mentor, Cleveland Superintendent Barbara Byrd Bennett, was something of a hot shot among big city superintendents. It seemed very clear that Brathwaite was brought in with the idea that she could potentially be developed as a future superintendent much as Mack had been.
And, in fact, Brathwaite worked hard to make her case that she was superintendent material. She began working toward a doctorate while managing the day-to-day academic operations of the district. Her work was noticed by several large districts — Akron and Toledo most prominently — which brought her in to interview for their open superintendent jobs.
So what happened? If the board hired her with the idea that she could potentially be groomed for superintendent, she had bolstered her resume for that role and the job is now open, why not just hire her?
Well, again, things change.
Littlejohn and the Kids First team are gone with the exception of school board President Yvonne Isaacs. Littlejohn resigned and moved to Houston. Last fall, two Kids First allied board members — Mario Gallin and Lee Massoud — were defeated. Six of the seven board members have joined the board since 2005.
The new board wants a chance to pick its own superintendent.
So you can see how both sides’ feelings can get bruised here. Brathwaite can fairly ask why she has not been promoted, since it was — at a minimum — hinted to her through the years that job would be hers if it ever came open. This board, on the other hand, never made those promises and even Brathwaite acknowledged when I spoke to her that the board has every right to conduct the search any way it wants.
Will a national search yield a better candidate? That’s hard to say. Maybe we should ask the folks in Memphis.
The last national search here was a fiasco. For a recap, go here. It is hard to get someone good in a consultant-run national search. Many of the names on those consultant lists are folks who are looking to make a quick mark and move on. The board has unanimously said they want someone who will care about the community.
But you never know. A consultant found Mack and the board was pleased with his work and his commitment to the community over six years.
If board members go forward with the search, where does that leave Brathwaite? Unless she reconsiders her position on being interim superintendent, it is hard to see how things wouldn’t be awkward for her.
Perhaps the board finds a retired local CEO to fill in during the search. Brathwaite would be reporting to that person. Or, even worse for her, the board could appoint someone who now works for her as her new boss. If the board goes one of those routes you’d have to expect Brathwaite’s job search to kick into overdrive.
That’s where things appear to be going, though, unless she or the board has a change of heart.
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Renting out Ludlow II part of district savings plan
Mack and Lucas
In response to a consultant’s study of the city school district’s business and education operations, Superintendent Percy Mack launched a plan Monday to make money-saving changes.
The study was commissioned by a committee of business and community leaders seeking to help the district reduce costs so it can ask for a smaller levy this November than the 15.17-mill levy that was defeated in 2007.
Mack said the district must recognize that the local economy is troubled.
“People don’t have discretionary money,” he said. “Even if they wanted to, they don’t have discretionary money to give. We have to work hard to get the levy down as low as possible.”
Among the cost-saving measures targeted in Mack’s plan was leasing out one of two downtown office buildings the district purchased from Reynolds and Reynolds in 2003 for $15.5 million and consolidating administrative offices in the other building.
Treasurer Stan Lucas said circumstances have changed since the 2003 purchase, including last year’s $30 million cuts and more than 400 layoffs in the wake of the levy defeat. But he still believes buying the Reynolds buildings was the right move.
“At the time, we made the best decision for the district,” he said. “We didn’t know in 2003 there would be such a cut back. It was the right thing to do then and this is the right thing to do now — try to maximize the use of the facilities.”
Mack’s plan also includes:
—Busing. To ride a school bus, students currently must live at least 1.5 miles from school. That perimeter will be extended to 2 miles. A new committee will review transportation operations to identify other cost savings.
—Nutrition. A consultant will review nutrition operations in search of savings.
—Facilities. The district will conduct a review of warehouse space and a committee from business operations, human resources and the legal department will have recommendations by month’s end on union contract changes that could bring savings.
—Budget. A new financial oversight committee will include the treasurer, assistant treasurer, chief operating officer, chief academic officer, audit committee members, the executive director of human resources and business community volunteers.
—Education services. The Council of Great City Schools will send consultants for a comprehensive review of special education and early childhood programs. A new team will monitor teacher training and the district’s data staff will visit every school next year to help principals use data better. Also, the district will explore pay-for-performance plans.
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Researcher paints gloomy picture of Dayton’s economy
Stock and Breitenbach
A researcher painted a bleak economic outlook Monday for business and community leaders seeking to help Dayton schools plan for a November levy.
Richard Stock, director of the Business Research Group at the University of Dayton, said the city has seen declines — and in some cases dramatic drops — in employment, median income and real estate values in recent years.
Stock said the prospects for a recovery in the next three years are slim. And while the tax burden in Dayton is lower when compared to nearby communities, it feels heavier to city residents who, on average, have much lower incomes.
“There are reasons why lower income people are concentrated in the city of Dayton,” he said. “There is a reason why, as a collective, they make decisions about the kinds of taxes they can afford.”
Stock gave his report to a committee that is reviewing the city school district’s operations to recommend changes that might bring cost savings with the goal of reducing the size of the November school levy.
Tom Breitenbach, president of Premier Health Partners and chair of the group, said he was still optimistic about the levy’s chances, despite Stock’s report on the economy. He pointed to recent successes in countywide levies for Human Services and Sinclair Community College, the resiliency of the school district and the community’s commitment to its schools.
“I think there is grounds for realistic optimism,” he said. “We shouldn’t view the statistics out of that wider context.”
Among the economic factors cited by Stock were:
—A steep decline in the employment index since 2000, in contrast to employment gains in Cincinnati, Ohio as a whole and nationally. The losses were driven by 33,000 job cuts in manufacturing over that period.
—Median income, adjusted for inflation, is 10.5 percent lower in Dayton today than in a decade ago and has fallen faster here than in any other major Ohio school district.
—The poverty rate for children age five to 17, which had improved strongly from 1995 to reach 24 percent in 2000, declined to 32.8 percent in 2005.
—The taxable value of real estate per student in Dayton, which grew steadily over the last decade, has now fallen to its lowest level in 20 years.
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Memories of Dayton
James Williams
For those of you who just can’t get enough of former Superintendent James Williams, a Buffalo-based website has a two-part epic looking at his career, including a long recap of his time in Dayton and revelations about what a shallow job the Buffalo school board did researching Williams before hiring him.
Williams has now pulled out of the running for superintendent in Memphis and is under fire back home in Buffalo. Hmmm. That sounds so familiar.
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