The Growler has been grappling with the Jefferson-Houston story ever since last Wednesday's meeting on our local elementary school.To hear the Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS)'s take on the event, it was a successful meeting, drawing more than 100 participants.
To the Growler, though, all was not as it seemed.
First, what was billed as a "town meeting" ended up to many attendees' surprise as a series of orchestrated focus groups designed to give ACPS "feedback." But it was also designed not to let anyone confront the School Board or ACPS Superintended Rebecca Perry directly and publicly about the problems at the school and why they let things go down the tubes for so long.
A few questions and comments did escape censorship, including queries about the nearly annual principal turnover (which has seriously destabilized the school), questions about whether the arts integration emphasis is part of the problem, and concerned inquiries about the reasons for low test scores. (JH was the only elementary school in town that was not accredited this year.)
But it was curious that Ms. Perry and her staff did not describe for the audience the specific measures they are already taking to improve the school, although one top official ticked off a list for the Growler in a one-on-one conversation. Did ACPS brass assume everyone present already knows what is being done? Why not tell the whole group? And what will ACPS do with the information already gleaned? There seemed to be no detailed plan for follow-up.
Nor was there any discussion about the socio-economic makeup of the school and whether this had any role in low test scores.
Whether ACPS staff and the School Board realized it or not, the audience included a number of Parker-Gray parents who must soon make a decision about where to enroll their young children. Many yearn to send their kids to the local institution and are by no means afraid of diversity. But some have already ruled out Jefferson-Houston in favor of private schools or plan to take the opt-out to send their children elsewhere. And it didn't appear this group had their minds changed by the end of the evening. And the Growler doesn't blame them.
The more the Growler ponders this event, the more the Cranky One comes to the conclusion that the whole event was window dressing. And here's why.
The Curmudgeon isn't normally one of those policy wonk types, but was curious enough to pull together all of the City's elementary school test scores for both 3rd and 5th grades since 1999. The spreadsheet ends at 2004, since ACPS didn't bother publishing details for either 2005 or 2006 results. (And why, we ask parenthetically? Also, why did the school publish principals' estimates in 2000 but not the results either?)
Read it and weep. Jefferson-Houston once had decent SOL scores, but fell off a cliff after the 1999 school redistricting, which took effect in the 2000-2001 academic year. And the school has been a problem child ever since. Cause and effect?
The purpose of the 1999 school redistricting was ostensibly to reclaim neighborhood schools and encourage participation by more affluent families, who were leaving the district in droves for private schools.
But the real intent of the 1999 measure was, in the Growler's opinion, to resegregate the Alexandria schools by moving disadvantaged children who were being bused around town back to the Inner City, where they could be concentrated in a single school.
Check out the spreadsheet and you can see which school benefited most: George Mason, in affluent Beverly Hills, which once had a segment of its pupil population bused in from public housing in Parker-Gray.
Quite cleverly, the 1999 redistricting also turned Jefferson-Houston into an arts-integration focus school so the handful of more involved and informed Parker-Gray parents could opt-out and find a spot for their child in places like George Mason. Once can't blame moms and dads for wanting the best for their kids, but this only further concentrates disadvantaged minority children at JH.
Interestingly, while the redistricting was orchestrated by Republicans like Claire Eberwein (whom the Growler didn't see at the meeting), white Democrats apparently never lifted a finger to prevent this discriminatory treatment of the City's most vulnerable children. Black voices were raised at the time, but ignored. So much for the Faustian deal they are alleged to have struck with the Democratic Party in Alexandria.
What's the long-term outlook for JH? There's a charismatic new principal, Kimberly Graves, and many parents expect great things from her. But the Growler is going to reserve judgment for now. We've had our hopes raised too many times before, only to have them dashed.
So now Growler turns to the audience for this blog and poses the question, "What can be done to turn Jefferson-Houston around?" Is it too late? Does anyone even care?
And don't all Alexandria children deserve a better break than the City is giving them?
18 comments:
The George Mason-Jefferson Houston saga is well known just maybe not to newcomers. So long as JH retains its arts focus families of a type will always opt out. That's why the inner city boasts two PTA Presidents-JH and George Mason's President elect. Growler like it or not we are governed by old style segregation policies. As for your stats Mount Vernon's turnaround bears scrutiny others have mentioned Maury. Parental involvement probably is a factor in both. I vote we break with tradition, tear the school down, and begin anew elsewhere. New name, new economic mix. A more radical solution is to disperse public housing thereby giving the disadvantaged ones a better educational mix. Does anybody know what kind of disciplinary problems JH has relative to the other schools? On the downside my kids aren't keen on tutoring other classmates and I am sometimes appalled by the street language.
Growler your stats are impressive. A pix is worth 1000 words. In 1999 JH took a hard hit.
The data confirms it. Jefferson Houston suffered. Somebody said the provlem was JH's unusually heavy concentration of special ed kids. Not so. The school was skunked! I vote we tear it down and start over.
Another vote for tear it down and build anew, in the Potomac Yard area as has been suggested before, would be a better socioeconomic mix and something developers should love. Think of the money the city could get on the existing JH land. Otherwise, I don't want to hear any more stink from the George Mason administrators who want to limit transfers. Until they do something about JH none of the others schools should be able to turn us away.
Are George Mason administrators arguing against inner city transfers?
Increased parental involvement in the school is probably the one major action that would make the most difference. By that I would mean somehow involving the parents in curricular and extra-curricular activities.
In visiting a few schools in the area that is the one way in which I would say that the private schools have surpassed the public schools and have offered better product. They require more parental involvement in everyday activities, and thus create a broader learning environment.
How to do that in the public schools I do not know. And I am not sure that I could become part of the solution as our plan is to send our daughter to catholic school.
Isn't Claire Eberwein again on the Alexandria School Board? From the George Mason district or wherever? Does anyone know how she thinks or what she thinks about us now?
No because she didn't even bother to show up to the Jefferson Houston meeting.
"didn't even bother to show up"
OUCH!
The data you show suggest that the kids from this neighborhood were doing just as poorly before the redistricting, but that their poor test scores were being masked by the higher scores of kids from more affluent parts of the city.
Given the declining school population in the area, it's hard to justify building a new school. If they decide to shut down JHAA, the kids would just get spread out across the other schools.
Elizabeth
I don't think I understand your point. The data clearly shows Jefferson Houston's test scores declined as a result of the redistricting. What was masked? A new school is one kind of argument, I am more interested in the children's academic performance. It could be that we are interpreting the same data differently. We've got some family decisions to make and this has been an eye opener.
Without knowing the distribution of test scores pre- and post-redistricting it is difficult to tell if there is "masking" or not. If the distrubutions of scores are fairly normal each year then the numbers in the spreadsheet show basically a downward trend. If the distributions are not normal (e.g., many extremely high scores) then you might be able to say that a few strong performers were causing the older averages to be higher.
It seems that it is difficult to make a school choice based on test scores alone. As far as I know only public schools have to take the tests (just a guess on my part). And for a parent the one score that would count the most would be your own child's score.
As a progressive democrat of the caucasion persuasion, I'd like it known that in 1999 redistricting process, there were quite a few of us who saw the resegregation that was going to occur and we did speak up in opposition. Officials weren't listening to us either. Most of the students at JH at that time were being bussed in from the west end of Alexandria. When Tucker Elementary School was finished those kids stayed in the west end. The east end kids were shifted around, Maury and Lyles Crouch were (very unfortuneatly) unpaired, Parker- Gray and Berg families' kids were no longer sent to George Mason, where they (many of them) were finally feeling like they belonged. What remained basically untouched was the rather large school area in the central district, which we called the "land of big yards". Had some of that population been shifted eastward, J.H. could have had a better socio-economic balance. But that posibility was passionately resisted by the families in that area. In Rosemont/Delray a group of (middle class) hispanic, black and white parents working together came up with some pretty good ideas for the redistricting, but in the school board hearings we were competing for attention with parents from every other school and I think most of the decisions were made without our input.
I suspect this is more than you wanted to know about this particular point, but you touched a raw nerve. I still have emotional bruises from those days.
"So now Growler turns to the audience for this blog and poses the question, "What can be done to turn Jefferson-Houston around?" Is it too late? Does anyone even care?
And don't all Alexandria children deserve a better break than the City is giving them?"
Of course people care and of course children deserve a better break.
But thats not what City leadership is interested.
I get the sense in reading ur blog and in listening to City leaders talk about Parker Gray that there are some in this city who seem more interested in "keeping it real" and fighting against things like gentrification and economic revitalization than they are in improving the lives of Inner City residents. Its no secret as to what JH suffers from, and GW as well; total lack of focus on education on the part of many parents and highconcentration of low income housing populations in these two schools, which creates additional needs that are too much for JH to overcome.
Since there seems to be little income diversity in ACPS, what u get is all the wonderful kids at JH crowded out by thugs and hoodlums, and we all know who they are by now. Ask anyone who drives by Atkins or Bland at night and watches 8 year old kids outside playing at 1 in the morning, or watches kids with books get picked on, or has to listen to a stream of F-bombs every time they walk home from the Metro from kids as little as 6, you can figure out whats killing JH and how to fix it.
But again, since the City enjoys its "poverty prison" otherwise known as Parker Gray, the idea that somehow JH can recover simply my getting new principals or building a new school seems to be another ACPS band-aid to a recurring socioeconomic disaster.
And good luck with the whole "lets move kids somewhere else" or "lets move the school somewhere else".
Thats the whole problem. The other ACPS schools dont want these kids and the other neighborhoods dont want a school with them; u think parents in any part of Alexandria want kids from Adkins or Bland (if they have ever driven down Route 1 and looked out their window at what 7 year old kids are doing late at night)?
Deep down Alexandria is just a bunch of NIMBYists and limousine liberals who are perfectly content throwing all their problems into someone else's census tracts (and we all know which ones those are)
So good luck on the Potomac Yard idea. I am sure Pulte and the Delray associations would love that idea.
I agree with basically every comment on this board. I felt the summaries that the administration provided were anondyne and not representative of the passion and disappointment with the current situation at Jefferson Houston. To get past the filter that was applied, I addressed the school board Monday night. Here's a copy of my notes from that address:
• The more I reflect on the “town hall meeting” on Jefferson Houston, the more disappointed I become by the process and the output.
o First, there was no agenda.
It’s very difficult to get parents engaged on issues involving Jefferson Houston.
When you have no agenda and then you throw in 30-45 minutes of time on a skit, you tell people that their time is not important and their views are not valuable.
That’s not to say that skits weren’t fun or entertaining, but simply that the event was not advertised as a skit and show.
• So, parents like me who took off from work early to provide their input in person, could have avoided taking time off and arrived 30 minutes later – something that really makes a difference.
• Similarly, parents who only had an hour of their time to dedicate to the town hall meeting had to leave early before they had an opportunity to share their views in the discrete, 15 minute periods where public comment was actually solicited.
If there had been an agenda, parents could have planned accordingly and focused their time on where they wanted to be.
Next time, parents and community leaders should receive an agenda that describes the event accurately.
o Second, we saw a serious disconnect between the open dialogue of a “town hall meeting” format, and the mediated discussion groups we experienced.
I’ve never been to a “town meeting” where there was a skit and breakout sessions and where we weren’t able to interact with the elected officials.
If the skit and breakout sessions was the method that you had chosen, that’s fine, but we should have been told.
Now parents, community members, and the public are going to be suspicious and skeptical of future town hall meetings.
The job of getting the community involved just got that much more difficult.
o Third, the summaries that the school administrators presented to the school board at the end of the meeting generalized and summarized the suggestions and discussions to the point of irrelevance.
For every point, there was a counterpoint and the tenor and tone of the summaries did not always reflect what I thought were pretty relevant and striking concerns.
The evening ended by everyone being urged to email concerning the arts curriculum, specifically whether it should be retained or jettisoned.
I had thought that the whole point of the open, public event was to receive feedback from us about that very subject. But the meeting left the impression that people's time would have been better spent writing a note to the Board about the school’s need for a curriculum that parents actually want to have their children use.
• In sum, I don’t think the town hall meeting reflected the views of the public. Here are a few of the unmediated comments I heard at my table.
o The arts curriculum is not working.
Lyles Crouch traditional academy has an impenetrable waiting list, but Jefferson Houston has hundreds of empty desks.
Parents and their children are voting with their feet for a more traditional curriculum.
If the city must have an arts curriculum, it does not have to be at Jefferson Houston.
o The school should have a modified calendar.
If children are arriving unprepared and falling behind, a modified calendar might help improve academic achievement, particularly if the additional time were dedicated to focus on math and science.
o The facility is dark and dysfunctional.
Every child in the city should have access to a facility that is on par with others in the system on the inside and out.
The school board should make a decision now to close, rebuild or remodel the school in the next five to ten years.
A long-term comprehensive plan will allow people to plan their lives around what is happening at the school.
o The school is set up for failure.
The district includes an intense concentration of impoverished, disabled and ESL students.
These students represent the vast majority of students attending Jefferson Houston.
Until the district is converted to something that is less gerrymandered and less concentrated in poverty and dysfunction – it will continue to fail.
• Every student can learn and succeed. At Jefferson Houston, however, the city needs strong and decisive near term leadership from this board to move things definitively in the right direction.
There were a few nods of agreement after I spoke, but I think I also sensed some annoyance that I had raised these issues. I'd encourage anyone who wants to see change at Jefferson Houston to speak out. Address the Board at its next meeting, or write Rebecca Perry and the School Board about your feelings, or both.
We really need to make Jefferson Houston the squeaky wheel in the system. Please feel free to contact me directly if you'd like to help out or speak out. Feel free to contact me at 703-926-5933. Thanks!
Trey Hanbury
Trey, I admire your tenacity. The city's tendency, always, is to bury the problem once "properly" discussed with the public.
I don't know if anyone is still reading this, but I was also at the town meeting, and don't think the overall feel was either as negative as Trey portrays it or as cheery as the school system press release.
My impressions were:
* People felt strongly both in favor of and against the arts curriculum.
* People were pleased that the school had made AYP, but felt that no one could explain they had done right to achieve it and so couldn't explain how the school would continue to progress.
* People liked the playground improvements, but thought the facilities were generally shabby. One particular question was why couldn't they put doors on the classrooms.
* In general, Ms. Graves has made a positive first impression, but the long sequence of principal changes has made everyone wary. There's a lot of frustration with the lack of explanation for what happened with Ms. Shupes (especially since the school made AYP under her).
* People generally felt like the teachers were caring and were doing a good job under very challenging circumstances. Most people with kids currently in the school felt like their kid was having a good experience. (Obviously, there's a selection issue.)
* There was a lot of frustration with the poor communications between the school system and parents
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