259 View Point
Lessons Learned: The “New” Urban School District
As they say in the State Department, Governor Pawlenty (R-MN),
chair of the SMHC National Task Force
(Strategic management of Human Capital), and I had “a frank exchange of views”
last year when I was gathering data on Montgomery County MD. In response to Governor Pawlenty’s observation
that few if any urban districts were doing well I offered Montgomery County as an
example of one “urban” district that was.
“Not so fast” he cautioned: “doing well to be sure but
Montgomery County MD is not an urban district. Name an urban area in Montgomery
County.” He has a point, shared by many
urban school superintendents: they don’t think Montgomery County and districts
like it (such as neighboring Fairfax) are "real" urban districts.
In point of fact they aren’t, but they offer a powerful lesson.
The concept of urban districts is important in education
policy circles because of the pathologies they exhibit: low achievement, high
drop-out rates, extremes of poverty and wealth, high rates of in-migration (which
means not only high ELL rates, but high turnover among students and their
families) high rates of “bright flight” to the suburbs and private schools;
together with high concentrations of racial and ethnic minorities their
circumstances are sobering. (The term
“minority” itself no longer means what it once did as minorities become
majorities).
The recent murder in broad day light of a Chicago PS
honors student is a case in point.
But so too formerly suburban bastions, which, until
recently, were free of urban pathologies; now they face many of the challenges
that were once the exclusive province of big-city schools.
A retrospective tout
de horizon is in order. When I attended high school in Chicago the urban
pathology was there in attenuated form, but big city high schools were still
“good;” by which was meant physical discipline prevailed. They were fairly safe, and by the time 16th
birthdays rolled around (the end of compulsory attendance) the drop outs
disappeared into the urban economy. As
for academic discipline, as Peter Drucker observed, they were schools from
which you could “extract” an education. My high school -- Morgan Park – had
good teachers in abundance but we wern’t spoon fed. For better or worse we had to seek them out.
I spent a lot of time in Montgomery County schools in the
last year (working on a co-authored book, Leading
for Equity, which I’m happy to report is available on Amazon) and I've seen
the future. Under Jerry Weast’s
leadership there is high academic achievement in a setting with increasing “urban”
pathology: poverty in the midst of plenty, increasing ELL enrollments and
shifting racial and ethnic demographics. When I attended Montgomery County elementary
and middle schools in the 1950's they were well-to-do and white.
Indeed, so wide-spread is this phenomenon (at least below
the Mason-Dixon Line where districts are few and large) that the Fordham
Institute is hosting a Conference on the subject in November.
One reason for their importance (mixed demographic,
quasi-urban districts) is that they have an incentive to improve across the
board: small suburban enclaves like Lincoln or Wellesley MA, Orinda or Palo
Alto CA, New Trier or Maine Township IL have no incentive to improve the big urban
centers they adjoin. They have challenges of their own.
Indeed, the problem may be simply that we need new
nomenclature: perhaps we should simply drop the sobriquet urban and describe them
as troubled districts as their demographics change. Indeed, even in conventional terms the first
suburban ring becomes the "new" urban district (just as in LA, Watts
didn't look urban to those of us who went there with a Middle Western or
eastern frame of reference) so too Montgomery County MD and the Virginia
suburbs around DC.
The US is the only country I know of in which the
"slums" are in the central city and not in the suburbs -- in the UK,
Mexico, Brazil, Australia, France and Spain, for example, the slums are on the
outskirts and the central city remains the prime residential area; that is
beginning to happen here with gentrification.
Indeed, gentrification follows long-cycle pattern; first
white flight, then bright flight (the Black and Latino working and middle
class); then childless working couples of all races/ethnicities move back in,
then middle--class couples with children. As the patterns continue central
cities will revive as schools snap-back and we may – over time -- see more
suburban than urban problems.
Without being unduly optimistic, the urban story of the
mid-twentieth century may be played out differently in the 21st; with
the suburban fringe avoiding trouble – as is the case in Montgomery and Fairfax
-- by learning from their urban brethren.
Denis P Doyle
October 1, 2009
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