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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > July > 26
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Editorial: Dayton lost; competition has to deliver
The Ohio Board of Regents has a tough, new policy when it comes to doling out money to special programs. Its competitive bidding rules send the message, “What doesn’t work won’t get funded.” That is the right attitude. Last week the new approach cost Dayton schools $730,000 and forced the ending of its adult basic literacy program. Superintendent Kurt Stanic said he was surprised by the cut and never got a good explanation for it. A spokesman for the regents said that a review of Dayton’s program showed it was far more costly and less effective than other programs. Money the state formerly spent with Dayton now goes to efforts in Kettering and at the Miami Valley Career Technology Center. The regents’ responsibility doesn’t end with this call. Now they must follow up and be certain they have chosen the right winners.
In this case, perhaps they have. Dayton’s program was incredibly costly. Consider that while Miami Valley CTC was spending about $200 per student, Dayton’s cost was $1,700. It’s hard to imagine how the expenses could be that different.
Mr. Stanic argues some of the reasons for higher costs make sense. Dayton deals with a tougher population, he said, with more than 400 adults served in the city. The district paid high rent to be at the Job Center because that was the best place to help people who need the services, Mr. Stanic said.
Also, Dayton’s program probably had more experienced, and therefore more expensive, staff. Mr. Stanic said his concern is that Dayton adults who need literacy services continue to get them.
“If they can serve the same amount of people for much lower costs, then I guess they were right,” he said. “Only time will tell. If they can, I have no argument.”
Mr. Stanic said he expects Dayton to bid again next year. He said with some feedback and lead time to address the state’s concerns, the district might have been able to acceptably reshape it, keeping the service going. Instead, Dayton school officials are now working to transition its students to the new programs.
There absolutely should be accountability and even competition for these sorts of programs. Going forward, the regents have a responsibility to see that the winning programs are not just cheaper, but that they are aggressively reaching out to a needy community they promised to serve — and succeeding.
If they do that, everybody wins.
Permalink | Comments (2) | Post your comment | Categories: City of Dayton, Editorials, Education, Scott Elliott
Scott Elliott: Black students doing better in the South
One of the most vexing problems in education in the United States today is the stubbornly large gap between the performance of black and white students on standardized tests.
Over decades, black and white students have improved their scores, but the overall national gap has persisted. Still, an intriguing New York Times report on a new federal study of this “achievement gap” shows that, state by state, there have been surprising changes.
It’s the deep South — states remembered for pervasive segregation like Alabama and Mississippi and where the test score gap was traditionally the widest — that in recent years has seen the gap narrow significantly.
Conversely the Midwest — nearby states like Illinois and Wisconsin — now has some of the biggest racial test score gaps. (Ohio, too, has had its struggles with the achievement gap, but was not cited as one of the worst offenders in this study.)
The Times reported that over time, black students made big gains in the South, while in the Midwest they made smaller gains, or, in some cases, actually lost ground.
How could it happen that the Midwest now comes off looking worse than the deep South? At least part of the answer is connected to the way school integration was carried out in big Midwestern cities like Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit — and a similar effect is evident in Dayton.
School integration in the South was painful, even sometimes violent, and only took place under intense pressure — including outright intervention — from the federal government. Segregation in the deep South was so pervasive, ingrained and flagrant that reformers set their sights for change squarely on states like Alabama and Mississippi. Schools ended up being the vehicle by which court challenges would lead to that change.
Under direct monitoring from federal courts, schools in those states were forced to integrate, often by busing students for racial balance. By chance, many Southern school districts were large, countywide systems. This made it difficult for white families to escape by moving farther out.
The result was the South became the region with the most integrated schools by the 1970s. And since then, the Midwest and Northeast have been the most segregated parts of the country.
That’s because as integration efforts pushed north, courts got cold feet. Repeated legal battles and a changing political environment eroded momentum and, in 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a crushing blow with a ruling in Detroit’s case that made it nearly impossible for Northern cities to include the suburbs in their integration plans.
Midwestern cities, Dayton among them, had to stop integration at the city limits. Families of means — mostly white, but also some black — continued to migrate to the suburbs. What remained were city school districts that were poor, mostly black and significantly disassociated from the rest of the region. While wealthy and white suburbanites in many Southern cities were forced to care about the quality of their urban public school districts, many in the Midwest wrote them off.
This is part of the reason why some of what are widely regarded as the worst big, urban school systems — Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland among them — are in the Midwest. Dayton, which routinely scores below Cleveland on state tests, is in that boat, too.
I can’t help but wonder if things might have been different had the Supreme Court not drawn that line. Would the Dayton region be better off if schools here were regionally integrated, causing suburbanites in places like Kettering, Centerville, Beavercreek, Englewood and Vandalia to be directly connected to — and therefore invested in — the success of Dayton’s inner-city schools? Under a regional set-up established 25 or 30 years ago, might black students here not be as far behind today?
In Dayton, there is a widely held sentiment that school integration and busing caused as much harm as good. Could have been different if it were done right?
Looking at Alabama and Mississippi, there’s a persuasive example that the answer might be yes.
Permalink | Comments (6) | Post your comment | Categories: Civil Rights, Columns, Education, Scott Elliott
