Whatever one may think of the Missouri State Board of Education and Chris Nicastro, the state commissioner of education, you have to admit they are trying to learn from their mistakes. Their handling of the current crisis in what was until July 1 the Normandy School District – whatever one may think of that handling – is a crafty attempt to avoid what would be an even more disastrous repetition of a previous decision that backfired.
As former Normandy Superintendent Stanton Lawrence argues in an online column that has been circulating in St. Louis public education circles, the Normandy district was doomed to failure by the previous decision of the state board and Nicastro to merge the failed Wellston School District with Normandy. Lawrence says the state should have known that merger would “be disastrous from the outset,” and indeed when you merge a failed school district with a failing school district, it’s difficult to imagine what could result but a larger failed school district. That is, indeed, what happened.
And that is why Nicastro and the state board worked so diligently to preserve a Normandy educational entity rather than dissolve the district and distribute its students among neighboring districts. Nicastro has said repeatedly that Normandy deserves schools in its community and that is why the Normandy Schools Collaborative was formed. However, it is equally true that Normandy students could not be merged with neighboring districts or we would soon be faced with a repeat of the Wellston/Normandy merger – that is, larger failed school districts. “Eventually, you get to the end of that game,” Nicastro has told The American. And that would be the end of public education as it is presently constituted in Missouri.
All of the decisions that Nicastro and the state board have made in the Normandy schools crisis must be understood in light of this end game. It explains the fussing with nomenclature for the new district – not accredited as opposed to being unaccredited. For once the collaborative was formed, predictable revenue was needed to keep it in operation, or it would go the way of the Normandy School District: out of business. Hence the move to have the new entity classified as having no accreditation, as opposed to being unaccredited, as Normandy Public Schools was. A district that is not accredited at all (thus far the state has succeeded in arguing) is not unaccredited and, therefore, is not subject to the state transfer student legislation pertaining to unaccredited districts that created the current crisis.
This also explains what looks to many as the hard-hearted approach that Nicastro and the board – most vocally, state board member Mike Jones – have taken toward the Normandy students who had transferred to some other districts that now, one by one, are saying that they are no longer bound by law to accept these students and won’t accept them. Again, the fate of several hundred students is being seen against an end game. The more students that continue to transfer out of the collaborative, the more likely the collaborative will fail – and the domino chain of failing school districts will be in motion again.
Again, one may or may not like the way Nicastro and the state board played this end game, but it is essential to understand that they are playing an end game if we hope to understand the decisions they are making.
We would also like to remind everyone of a plain, unpleasant fact that Stanton Lawrence makes in his commentary. Behind the crisis in failing school districts lie the ugly facts of poverty and segregation. “The school districts with the highest percentage of impoverished African-American students were performing least well on the state assessment,” Lawrence notes. And that is why the crisis in the public schools requires a total commitment to mobilize resources to address race-based disparities. As long as our worst poverty and highest unemployment are concentrated in majority-black urban neighborhoods, we will be playing an end game against failing school districts.
