No Child Left Behind is leaving whole cities behind.
Posted on July 18, 2007
As the school year begins a lot of high-schoolers in Roanoke City will decide to call it quits and drop out. It’s a problem that isn’t really visible on the surface. But, ten years down the road it can kill an economy’s growth. A few years ago, the odds of a ninth-grader actually graduating were about 60/40. The math around graduation rates it complicated. Different agencies use different formulas. But, for argument’s sake, we can say that the graduation rate is somewhere around 60%. The state defines dropout rates as the number of students who do not return as a percentage of total students between the 7th and 12th grade. In Roanoke City, that number is close to 4%, more than twice the state average.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has commissioned several studies about public school systems to determine the root causes of the dropout epidemic, as they call it. Taking an innovative approach to the problem, they actually interviewed hundreds of recent high-school dropouts. The results are surprising. The typical dropout is not necessarily the would-be delinquent. Instead, the typical dropout goes through a prolonged process of disengagement. They fail to see the connection between the classroom and the real world, they lose interest, begin missing classes, fall behind and finally give up.
The study goes on to make several recommendations, including programs to make the curriculum more tailored and more challenging. This is difficult in a system that puts so much emphasis on standards of learning, which typically aim for the lowest common denominator rather than the highest. They study also recommends early warning systems that recognize the point at which students become disengaged. And, when these students are identified, it recommends that there should be a system of intervention by parents, mentors and advisors who can put the student back on track to graduation and a career.
As we all know from the superintendent drama, we will be starting the year with Dr. Rita Bishop at the helm of the school system in place of the recently departed Marvin Thompson. She returns to Roanoke after a three-year stint in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The similarities between Lancaster and Roanoke are striking. The Lancaster metropolitan area includes the Manheim Township and Conestoga Valley school districts. These school districts adjacent to the urban core have much higher reading proficiency scores and graduation rates. They also spend less per student and have larger classes than Lancaster, yet perform better.
One aspect that simply cannot be ignored is the socioeconomic diversity of these school districts. Roanoke City is 48% black and 46% white and 4% hispanic. Lancaster is 51% hispanic, 24% black and 22% white. In both cases, the suburban school systems are between 81% and 95% white. In Roanoke City, 58% of students are classified as “economically disadvantaged” versus 15% in Roanoke County. In Lancaster 62% are disadvantaged versus 7% in Manheim Township.
This is more than a coincidence. All around the country, urban school systems and their suburban counterparts share similar disparities in diversity and performance. The reading proficiency rates in the Roanoke County, Botetourt County, Franklin County and Salem City schools hover around 90%, versus 72% in Roanoke City. Ironically, Roanoke City spends more per student than those school systems and has a lower sudent/teacher ratio. But, comparing urban school systems with surrounding districts is not comparing apples to apples. There are more economically disadvantaged students in urban schools. So, a lot of the additional money per student is spent on meals and other expenses no related to the classroom.
Since the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education ruling made segregation illegal, school districts around the nation have been struggling to find a system that provides equal education to all. And, just recently, the Supreme Court declared that race cannot be used as the basis to ensure integration within a school district. In Roanoke, the attendance zones were established in 1971, after an 11-year debate over integration. They have not been updated since.
We still bus students from one side of the city to the other based on these attendance zones, even though they could walk to a neighborhood school. For a child of any race, being forced to commute up to an hour to school when you could just as well walk is not in the child’s best interest. It is a wasteful practice that does little, if anything, to improve the quality of education the child receives. In fact, it only serves to erode the sense of community that is such a supportive element in a child’s development. The state recently issued an audit that suggested the city could save $2.2 million over five years by discontinuing the unnecessary busing and redrawing the attendance zones.
Closing the performance gap between the city schools and the other districts in our metro area will require more than redrawing attendance zones. It will require the entire community to muster up a sense of pride and realize how much the education system affect our ability to grow and prosper. There is currently an effort to improve the Roanoke City schools called the Promise of Roanoke, led by Dr. Suzanne Morse, President of the Pew Partnership for Civic Change. Under Dr. Morse’s leadership, a cross-section of Roanoke citizens is using her Smart Communities model to develop strategies for change. This effort represents an interesting partnership between the City of Roanoke and Virginia Tech’s Center for Organizational and Technological Advancement, where Dr. Morse is currently a fellow.
The Smart Communities model applies seven strategies to create a thriving community, or in this case a thriving school system:
1. Investing Right the First Time – identifying the high leverage issues and decisions that yield the greatest return.
2. Working Together – building the partnerships necessary to create new opportunities for success.
3. Building on Community Strengths – emphasizing what is right and unique rather than what is wrong.
4. Practicing Democracy – developing ways for citizens to actually decide the future rather than always just reacting to it.
5. Preserving the Past – using buildings, history, and culture to inform and catalyze the future.
6. Growing Leaders – creating opportunities for citizens to learn and develop their capacities to take action together.
7. Inventing a Brighter Future – encouraging risk-taking and entrepreneurship in tackling tough community issues.
If all of this seems idealistic, it is. But, Dr. Morse has been studying the process of civic change for three decades. Between Dr. Morse, Dr. Bishop and the hundreds of citizens who share a vested interest in bringing our city schools up to the standards of our neighboring school systems, Roanoke City should be optimistic about the possibilities. However, 227 teachers will not be returning to city classrooms and morale among those remaining is low. Let’s not leave it up to one person to fix that. It will take all of us supporting the teachers and students, who may both be disenchanted about our future.
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