To Superintendent McGinley, her flunkies, and the CCSD School Board:
- Stop putzing around. ("The Italians call it dolce far niente, sweetly doing nothing. In the Ashkenazi Jewish diaspora it's called putzing around.")
"Burns isn't the only school that should be seriously considered for reconstitution. We can begin with the list of the other 11 schools that appeared in The Post and Courier article last week about school report cards. These are the schools with a string of single stars by their names, indicating at least four years of failure. By the way, Charleston is the only one of the four local school districts that still has unsatisfactory schools."'Nuff said.
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Charleston County has the only school in the tri-county area in which there are 80+% poverty indexes feeding their schools.
"It's the community stupid".
There is always the potential for ineptitude in public schools (either leadership and/or classroom instruction), including schools that have mediocre leadership and teaching, but succeeds anyhow. Geez, I wonder how that can happen...
In fact, I know of one private/public school in the area in which the teaching and leadership is embarrassingly adequate, but yet receives accolades for its excellence.
Until schools are judged based on movement rather than stationary benchmarks, the real story will certainly never be told on this blog or in the Post and Courier.
It's too easy to pile on using politically expedient and simple constructs.
Ask yourself WHY such is the case for CCSD. These schools were created, deliberately or not, through policies of the School Board. Charleston County doesn't have a monopoly on poverty.
Charleston County tends to have a more concentrated population, Babbie, whereas the pockets of poverty in outlying counties are peripherally placed.
Burke gets it students from a population base north of Broad, hemmed in by the rivers and cut short in the north by the industrial areas of the neck.
Those few areas not impoverished (Wagener Terrace, the Citadel area are not prone to send their children to Burke (white flight?)
In North Charleston, both Stall and North Charleston High Schools are fed by a post industrial base that has been herded into pockets through Noisette/redevelopment. Look at the increase in size and density of places like Trailwood mobile home park and areas along Spruill.
The problems are exacerbated by the outflux of talented students to magnet schools (though north area participation has decreased recently due to some interesting unwritten policies and protocols), movement of middle class African Americans to Goose Creek, Summerville and West Ashley, and redistricting along Dorchester Road.
None of this is to say that children of impoverished homes cannot be talented, but they are more often than not, underprepared and unsupported.
The concept of moving students from failing schools is innately flawed from the onset.
If you have 100 students, 10 of whom score at the 90th percentile, and they leave, scores necessarily will decrease, causing more student outflow, etc...
Impoverished schools cannot win, and I for one think teachers who stay at these schools perform miracles, yet they are fired, reconstituted, moved, RIFfed, etc...
Not sure if the district is ameliorating any difficulties in the poverty schools, but it could well be the nature of white flight, money flight, gentrification and the creation of non-diverse poverty pockets.
All of what you say is true, except that in the past CCSD has encouraged transfers IN to failing schools; maybe it still does. I do not believe that most of the teachers at Burns are at fault--look at how many principals they have had to cope with! What is happening to Burns is a decision made by McGinley, since this was not the only way to go under NCLB.
I must disagree about North Charleston, however. It has an older white population and a younger black and Hispanic one due to segregation policies of the past. However, that is rapidly changing, albeit slowed by the recession, into a more middle-class diverse area. It has some of the most integrated neighborhoods in the Low Country. If you want to look at pockets, try driving around Sumter Avenue to see areas of new homes built cheek-by-jowl with trailer parks and slum housing.
You are not really disagreeing with me. The little influx of wealth, either, one, do not have children, or two, are sending their children elsewhere.
North Charleston High is not getting kids from these areas, but continues to get kids from the poverty pockets. White flight back to the north area are not having any effects on the demographic of the schools.
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