Charleston County Schools Superintendent Nancy McGinley fools no one who reads the newspaper. Her op-ed in Sunday's paper [see CCSD's New Plan Draws a Clear Line in the Sand on Literacy ] shows that she has paid attention to the outrage expressed after a series of articles on the poor literacy rates of CCSD's students appeared last summer.
Does anyone believe that the CCSD School Board and its Superintendent would be focusing on literacy now if those articles hadn't run? What's been going on for the last forty years? Where was McGinley's focus when she came to Charleston to be in charge of academics for Maria Goodloe-Johnson?
Too bad the voters seem to forget these small items at election time.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
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8 comments:
Any educator knows the Superintendent was FULLY AWARE of the illiteracy problems facing our county. It's sad to think she chose to ignore it all of these years until the public became aware. I still don't trust her. She talks a good talk, but will she follow through?
Well my child and most of their friends can read....so there is this big literacy push...what about their needs...gifted and talented...hands on science...not so many damn worksheets and a little teaching outside the box. They are having to read so many books on their lexile level and supposedly won't be promoted if they don't...yeah right. They never retain the kids that need it. They just keep promoting them and then they hold the others back. My son has a child in his fifth grade class that reads on a first grade level!!!! I am sure he will be promoted again!
It's true that Diette Correge's reporting caused a great deal of embarrassment to CCSD -- and by extension to the school board, but is there anything here that would encourage supporters of real literacy in our students? I don't think so. What I detect here is the pronouncement that the district will simply spend more time doing what it has clearly proved to be incompetent at doing. And to get that time the district will happily sacrifice even more of the things that used to be taught to children: art, music, culture -- even economics and business stuff. It will all be left back in the Big Push to teach Reading. As if reading could be separated from what you read.
It's about time we had a school board that recognized that what CCSD is doing is clearly not working very well for a significant number of students, and that mandating more of what already doesn't work well is no recipe for success.
If anyone is seeing the response for alternatives...the Math and Science charter, Academic Magnet, SOA, Palmetto scholars...it should tell CCSD that what they are doing is not working. Major turnout for these schools. Unfortunately, waiting lists are long.
It's easy to run a school of hand-picked kids, or a school full of gifted and talented kids.
Gee, I wonder why the Academic Magnet has the highest test scores in the state...
If only neighborhood schools could pick and choose students, then they could be a charter school.
Anon 522, you have it wrong about a charter, they can not test their children, only magnets can do that, so you have to take the kids from a lottery for charters...it is supposed to give you more of a chance, charters are successful because they are meeting the needs of the children and the parents are involved and have input.
Organizers, teachers and community support groups have first dibs on slots in a charter school.
The rest is based on a lottery system, but charters do get to choose their students quite a bit more than their neighborhood counterparts.
Get ready for a bombshell from one of the charter schools.
7:37 may be technically correct about " Organizers, teachers and community support groups have first dibs on slots in a charter school". But the preference only applies to the first year. After that only siblings have preference if all the spaces are filled. This is true for every school in Charleston County including magnets and non-charters. The truth is a preference granted to those children of charter school organizers is rarely used to the extent it is believed. Of the 50 or so "community organizers" that comprised the initial board or organizing committee for the Charleston Charter School for Math and Science only one parent took advantage of this rule. The key was to make the lottery as transparent as possible and to win public confidence in believing it was fair. As for needing a lottery at all, this only happens when a grade level in a charter school exceeds the capacity listed in its charter. That's the law. Too bad CCSD practices no truth in advertising when it regularly overbooks St. Andrews Math and Science and runs its mysterious and seemingly magical lottery for Buist. Mistrust in the regular system is what is responsible for so many parents discovering the genuinely accessible choice that charter schools are offering. CCSD is still playing "bait and switch" with the public and calling it "choice". Given how many kids CCSD has put on busses to attend schools outside their legal attendance zones, it would be hard to say CCSD isn't handpicking the enrollments for most of its schools as it is. Just ask Marvin Steward about CCSD's long record of dumping poor performing students in certain failing schools while cleaning up the test scores of the schools those students came from. That too is cherry picking. No charter school has the power to do what Nancy McGinley has been doing ever since she got here.
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