Almost No Teachers In District's Low-Performing Schools Considered 'Ineffective'

No, I said that poverty was 90 percent of the problem.

 

It read differently -- sorry. Makes my posts superfluous in certain respects

 

There probably is a program or two that could help these kids.

 

The city of Lansing, like Saginaw, Flint and most of Detroit, has been utterly dismantled by the shuttering of much of the GM production apparatus. Lansing's entire manufacturing base has evaporated in the last 15 years.

Lansing has been hit by a double-whammy because its other primary employment driver, state government, has also been dramatically cut back (first under Fatboy Engler in the 1990s, now under Koch-Slurper Snyder). Add the ripple effects of support industries and suppliers, and basically the economy of the Lansing area has utterly collapsed since 2000.

Somewhat unusual for locales where the public school districts are in free fall, Lansing has not been overrun by a swarm of charter/private schools -- there are a handful, but that's it.

Basically, the school-age population has just left. The students aren't there any more so the public school system essentially has to manage a systematic shutdown. Which of course is the objective.

 

From what I've read, the decline in the school system has been accelerated by schools of choice, which has a lot of families of means sending their kids to the surrounding districts. For Lansing, in a way, at least those are people who haven't simply moved out of town, but it's a case of pick your poison -- the families leave, or the kids go.

Also, the Lansing schools are caught flat-footed in actually being expected to create college-ready students. While the industrial base was great, the schools just had to keep kids in a line and show them a few basics until they were old enough to walk across the street to work in the Oldsmobile plant.

 

With only a couple of exceptions -- mainly the university faculty bedroom communities of Okemos and East Lansing -- the surrounding schools are generally no great whoop academically, either. Although they're definitely a step up from Lansing.

 

Yep.

If we judged college football coaches the way a few here would like to judge teachers, Larry Coker has outperformed Art Briles, Rich Rodriguez and Bill Snyder.

 

Actually, on re-reading my post I realize it wasn't written all that clearly or accurately. Per the link from Bob Cook, only a portion of teacher evaluation (in this instance) rests on student progress (growth and development). At present the minimum percentage is 25%, and by law that is to increase to at least 50% in the coming few years. Student progress is to be evaluated using a "student growth assessment tool" (which hasn't been developed yet, and upon being developed will have to be approved by the state legislature). Raw student performance (e.g., the proportion of a given teacher's students who perform at or above some predetermined minimum) neither does nor will play a role in individual teacher evaluation.

 

That's pretty hyperbolic.

I can't imagine that anyone here would not acknowledge the role poverty plays in student achievement. Well, maybe YF. Not many others.

But the idea that teachers shoulder none of the blame at all would make it unique among all professions, would run counter to how teachers are known to select their district of employment and, for whatever it's worth (very little, I suppose), would run counter to my own brief contacts with classrooms in an inner-city school district.

 

Maybe the school performance in Lansing would have been far worse if heroic teachers weren't fighting the good fight against enormous obstacles every day?

 

That's true. The performance would have also likely been better if the heroic teachers were better teachers.