Tag: Transition Planning Team

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Opinion

School Merger: Too Many Cooks and Nobody “Chopped”

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The schools merger needs a General Patton, or someone like him, to take command and give orders.

Maybe you remember the scene in the movie where George C. Scott as Patton comes upon a bunch of trucks and tanks gridlocked in the mud, and he wades into the mess, directs traffic, and pretty soon we’re back on the way to beating the Germans.

“I don’t want to get any messages saying that we are holding our position. We’re not holding anything. Let the Hun do that. We’re gonna go through him like crap through a goose,” Scott says in one of the great motivational speeches in moviedom.

Or maybe you’ve seen “Chopped,” the Food Network program in which four chefs compete before a panel of judges that chops one of them after each course. The chopped chef smiles in resignation and goes home.

And if cooking shows are foreign to you, then watch this clip from YouTube of variations of “sit down and shut up” in 70 movies.

We don’t need the menace or profanity, but the command and authority would be nice. This is not a drill. This is not a consultant’s report that can be put on a shelf and ignored, thank you very much. There is no do-nothing option and no going back to 2010 and separate city and county school systems. This is about payroll, school lunches, school bus schedules, attendance zones, and all the minutia of running a system that could potentially have 150,000 students and maybe 25,000 employees and impact everyone in Memphis and Shelby County as much as anything since the court-ordered busing and subsequent white flight of 1973. This is a big deal.

If the Transition Planning Commission’s plan isn’t accepted, then the unified school board will have to come up with something else, and that is like saying the students will decide what they want to do for the rest of the year. The 23-member school board is unstable, not mentally but structurally. There will be an election for seven positions in August, and in 2013 the board will shrink to the newbies and then possibly expand to up to 13 members.

The Tennessee state attorney general? Just another lawyer with an opinion, in the minds of some legislators and TPC members.

The superintendents? Neither one has been promised the job, and Kriner Cash is on the move.

The state legislature? A majority would vote for Tennessee seceding from Shelby County.

The Shelby County Commission or Memphis City Council? Please.

Our best hope is the TPC, with fresh guidance and affirmation from U.S. District Judge Hardy Mays via appointment of a special master — someone who can say, politely but firmly, get these trucks moving, you’ve been chopped, or sit down and shut up.

The TPC is facing a bear of a month of meetings in May to come up with a plan for a unfied system in June.
Most of these good and smart folks are volunteering their time, or their employers are donating their time. But it is the unified school board, according to Judge Mays’ ruling, that has the power for “making all transition decisions, operating the two separate school systems, and providing information to the Commissioner of Education.”

So far the special master that Mays spoke of in last order has not been appointed, and the TPC does not have the power to ask for one. I won’t pretend to understand the fine points of special masters, but it sounds to me like a good thing right now, or else we’re stuck in the mud.

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Opinion

Concerns Trump Hopes at Transition Team Meeting

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Again and again Transition Planning Team chairwoman Barbara Prescott urged speakers to express their hopes for the merger of the Memphis and Shelby County school systems.

And again and again speakers ignored her and politely but firmly told the planning team they do not want changes in the Collierville schools and fear that the merger will harm them.

Members of the planning team went to Collierville United Methodist Church Tuesday night, where several hundred people filled the sanctuary and part of the balcony for a two-hour meeting. They came from Memphis and other parts of Shelby County as well as Collierville, but the dominant sentiment of the 41 speakers was anti-merger and pro status quo.

The listening tour is supposed to do two things: gather suggestions about hopes and concerns that are within the planning team’s charge and demonstrate that the appointed group is open-minded and not imposing a preordained agenda, although the pro-merger and anti-merger views of some individual members are well known. Likewise, the names and views of some speakers are by now familiar. Self-styled Memphis government watchdog Joe Saino, merger opponent Ken Hoover, a student reading a prepared text and wearing a Stand For Children t-shirt, and a Memphis Education Association official spoke. Other speakers live in Memphis and work in Collierville or vice versa, and several of the speakers said they were teachers and/or parents of school-age children.

Speakers, most of whom gave their names but could not always be heard clearly or left before they could be interviewed, said the merger is “doomed to failure” and “we have a really wonderful thing going” and “smaller is better” and “it seems like there is more parent involvement in Shelby County schools” and “face the truth about what is wrong with all the issues facing urban school systems” and “if it’s not broken don’t fix it” and “if you don’t have a system you can respect and get behind then you’re lost” and “I’m concerned that my kids will be bussed downtown” and “my hope is that this plan does not succeed” and “there will be flight to private schools” and “Memphis proves that spending more money isn’t the answer” and “we need a school system that dos not exclude prayer or God.”

There were also speakers who favor the merger or at least favor giving the planning team a fair shot, but not as many as the opponents. This, of course, was no surprise. Collierville boasts some of the highest-performing public schools in the state. But county residents did not get to vote in the Memphis referendum that approved the charter surrender of Memphis City Schools. School system consolidation was considered so unpopular that the earlier dual referendum on general government consolidation made a point of excluding the school systems and still failed overwhelmingly in the county outside of Memphis.

Summarizing, Prescott said the speakers’ hopes reflect the guiding principles of the transition team, including high academic standards, a world-class school system, and community schools. It was a game effort, but called to mind that high school favorite poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” and the lines about “cannons to the right of them, cannons to the left of them” and “someone had blundered.” On this night, the anti-merger sentiment was clear. It could surely not be called a wake-up call because it was so predictable.

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Opinion

Memphis Looks to Charlotte Public Schools

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The last time that Memphis and Charlotte were mentioned in the local news together was 1993, when the North Carolina city won one of the two NFL expansion franchises that Memphis had long sought.

On Monday, Memphis will again look to Charlotte, this time at its racially diverse consolidated public school system with more than 135,000 students. The Transition Planning Commission meets at Christian Brothers University’s Sabbatini Lounge with leaders of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system.

Since 1993, Charlotte, the home of Bank of America, has left Memphis in the dust. Not only does it have an NFL team, its population grew 35 percent between 2000-2010, while Memphis declined .5 percent despite annexations. Its growth since 2000 has exceeded even Nashville by 300 percent.

In public education, Charlotte-Mecklenburg is famous as the city that gave America busing for desegregation after a series of court cases and failed efforts to establish an integrated school system. Today, the system has substantial white, black, hispanic, and Asian populations. The combined Memphis and Shelby County system, by today’s numbers, will be about 75 percent black.

The Transition Team, which was joined by the new joint school board, looked not so much at the consolidation in Charlotte, which occurred in 1960, but at the system’s ability to raise student achievement for all students and maintain a racially diverse population.

Fast facts on Charlotte-Mecklenburg: 136,000 students, 168 schools, 9 school board members; 53 percent of students are economically disadvantaged; 42 percent black, 32 percent white, 16 percent Hispanic; $1.15 billion operating budget; 40 magnet schools that attract 25,000 students.

The four visitors included a former superintendent, the current board chairman, a former school board member, and a former principal. The system won a national award this year for excellence in urban education, but this was not a butt-patting session.

“Progress has been painfully slow, and at the rate we are moving in Charlotte it will still be 15 years before the achievement gap is closed,” said former superintendent Pete Gorman.

He urged the committee to “build a bench” of future principals and assistant principals from among promising young teachers; move good principals and five teachers as a group to the toughest schools but not against their will; give new leadership three years to turn around a school; give good schools more autonomy; measure improvement, not raw scores, so that even college-prep schools must show improvement year over year; pick a superintendent for the consolidated district sooner rather than later; give the schools with the poorest students the most money, and give the wealthiest schools the least money; and expect to move on if you are the superintendent that has to close schools.

“You can’t close schools well,” he said, adding that “to do the job well, I sometimes question if it’s physically possible.”

Some differences between Memphis and Charlotte quickly became clear in the question-and-answer session. Charlotte’s downtown is its biggest economic engine, much moreso than the suburbs. The state legislature blocked efforts of municipalities to set up separate school systems and the number of school districts in the state has shrunk from 175 to 115. The cap on charter schools has been lifted, and this year there 20 applications were approved. Gorman said he expects “a glut of them,” perhaps more than 100. Arthur Griffin, a former board member, said the public schools went after private-school students with some success.

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Opinion

The Help: Schools Have Lots of It These Days

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H. L. Mencken said “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” There are several variations on that theme, from Woody Allen (“Those who can’t teach teach gym”) to the unknown cynic who said “Those who can’t teach administer.” Professional skeptic James Randi has collected several of them on his website.

Here’s one more: Those who neither do nor teach consult or tell others how to teach.

In nearly 30 years of on-and-off reporting on local schools, I can’t remember a time when there have been so many educational entrepreneurs, consultants, advocates, advisers, foundations, and reformers hovering around the Memphis and Shelby County public schools.

A list, probably incomplete, would include The Gates Foundation, the Hyde Foundation, the online education outfit K12, Teach Plus, Stand For Children, the MCS Teaching and Learning Academy, the consultants advising the suburbs on forming their own separate school systems, State Commissioner of Education Kevin Huffman, the Tennessee Charter Schools Association, the federal No Child Left Behind standards, Teach For America, The Council of the Great City Schools, the Memphis Urban League, the U.S. Education Department’s Race to the Top program, and at least a half dozen lawyers or law firms that weighed in on the consolidation process. Plus assorted PTAs, bloggers, columnists, and authors.

The newest addition to the mix is the Boston Consulting Group, which was chosen Thursday to advise the Transition Planning Commission. The consultants will be paid $1.7 million to prepare a merger plan by August 2012.

Some of these organizations put teachers in classrooms. Some of them advise from the sidelines. Some provide millions of dollars in funding. Some siphon teachers away from traditional schools. Some encourage parents and students to remain in traditional schools. Some help teachers network. Some measure the progress that teachers and their students are making, or are not making.

All are drawn to what is the biggest school system merger in American history. Teachers must feel like a patient with a mysterious disease who is prodded, poked, stared at, monitored, and tested by doctors at a hospital. They must long for the days when the PTA came through with classroom supplies, cookies, and a pat on the back.

How much actual reform there will be remains to be seen. It’s not great dog food if the dogs don’t eat it.

What we know for sure is this. Concerned parents will do whatever they have to do to get their kid into a good school. Suburbs are deadly serious about separate systems. “Choice” and “options” are other words for escape hatches. The hardest part of public education is teaching in urban schools, with 25-35 students in five classes a day. The fastest burnout is among classroom teachers. The pressing question for a classroom teacher is “what do I do Monday?” The stress is why they leave.

Now throw an observer, more paperwork, shorter planning periods, harder test standards, and longer hours into the job description. One of the best and most idealistic young teachers I know said “to heck with it” this semester, and it wasn’t because of the pay.

But at least there’s no shortage of advice.