During this period of sometimes tumultuous debate about the proper future course to deal with the turmoil in the St. Louis Public Schools, it is useful to be reminded again of what is at stake and how we can best address the daunting challenges posed to us by the school situation. Washington Post columnist Colbert King cites the alarming statistic that more than 1,700 people, mostly young black men, have been murdered in the nation’s capital since the beginning of 1999. He reminds us that this horrific statistic has an impact far beyond the grave.
King writes: “Living within the city’s borders is an army of survivors: broken-hearted parents and grandparents; traumatized single women facing an uncertain future with fatherless children; bitter young men, undereducated and unskilled, scarred by violence themselves and roving the streets with hair-trigger anger. Many of those young black murder victims were enrolled at some point in the D.C. public schools. Quite probably they were eligible for free lunches and lived in single-parent homes. They were among the juveniles turning up in court. Some were fathers who never married their children’s mothers. Tragically, their stories don’t end with their deaths. Hundreds of other youths are growing up in similar circumstances. Besides their socioeconomic link, the deceased and the living have something else in common: their source of public education.”
A central objective that must be agreed to by all honest parties is that continued poor outcomes for the district’s students are unacceptable. D.C. Mayor-elect Adrian Fentry – who adamantly opposed the New York City school model, in which the mayor runs the schools, when he was on the city council – now seems to be fascinated with that approach. But no specific school-governance plans offer a cure-all for long-standing school district problems. Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, says, “The organizational boxes do not mean as much to the improvement of achievement as what the people in the boxes do.”
The system needs able teachers and principals with high expectations, as well as proper physical facilities, but even stable, well-run schools with dedicated educators need support from the home and community. There will be no substantive, sustainable change in student achievement until there is broad, needed reform of the district, along with greater effort to address family breakdowns. If there continues to be rancorous, unproductive squabbling about the schools, with simply more patchwork fixes of a dysfunctional system, there will be more funerals, more blighted lives and more lost opportunities in St. Louis.