Responding to AdvancED's request for studies on community-based schools

Where you want to assign politics to the discussion of democrats or republicans, the term is also defined as "of or relating to the conduct of government".   These disagreements are political in the sense that people are disagreeing about the conduct of government, in this case the elected and appointed WCPSS BoE.   The new BoE is explicitly political in the sense that they are exclusively responding to their specific campaign supporters.   Everyone in WCPSS does not agree either with them or with their campaign supporters, regardless of party affiliations.    Elections will continue to happen and the BoE majority is at liberty to continue to focus solely on their supporters and bet that their positions are those of a majority of voters in future elections as well as their 2009 campaign supporters.

Your 99% statistic holds no meaning for me.   Every community differs in composition.   I've said before and will say again -- I'm not wedded to any particular assignment model.  I believe that many models could work depending upon the composition of a community. In WCPSS, somewhat uniquely, community schools could work with careful management.   So could neighborhood schools, so could the existing model.   What I've failed to see and continue to fail to see is any objective  assessment and study of how to best structure any model, be it diversity or neighborhood or community or any other, in WCPSS including how to maintain it.    Repeatedly, there have been requests for information on how the decision was made on the new model.    Including now, AdvancED making that same request.    So I asked and you responded that there was no thorough study of where WCPSS should go, just a sense that those campaigning and elected didn't like the existing model.

BoE supporters need to get a clear message on how assignment relates to achievement.   According to quotes from them and their supporters, one day the two are purported to have no relation, the next achievement and assignment are intertwined.   One day achievement is discussed on it's own, the next it is discussed within the assignment process.   I happen to think achievement should be the key goal of the system.   Achievement is impacted by many factors for each student with assignment being one of these many factors.   This is easily demonstrated by the many personal claims here regarding the old diversity policy and how student achievement has differed based on where and students were previously assigned or the discussions on how stability in assignment impacts achievement.    Impacts on achievement are not limited to only one type of assignment model.   To imply that neighborhood or community schools or any other assignment model outside of the diversity model would have no impact, good or bad on achievment, is, well, a lie at worst, disingenuous at best.   All assignment models are one of the factors impacting individual student achievement.   This will be true until Snordone's goal of each and every school being high quality and filled with highly effective teachers and healthy budgets becomes a reality.

As for achievement, this is just another iteration of a discussion held multiple times on this blog.    There was and is no reason for any WCPSS BoE to not always have put student achievement first.   There is no reason why past BoE's let achievement begin and continue a downward slide.  None whatsoever.   There is no reason why all of the BoE's, this one included, somehow always put assignment first.   For this BoE, there were many actions that could have been ongoing since that Dec. gavel fell.   Those actions could have been conducted in parallel with and to optimize the development of the new assignment model.    I've seen only the EVAAS discussion that won't have much impact until 4-5 years from now.    Is that a good thing -- yes.   But we'll have to agree to disagree that it was necessary to focus so heavily on assignment and to create a situation where people have had to review whether they were to be reassigned in March, April, May, August, and September (so far in 2010) for 2010-2011 and 2011-2012 while initially undercutting so many achievement related activities and only getting the EDSATF meeting regularly at the end of the school year.  And even EDSATF is way too focused on EVAAS and how well it was implemented to the exclusion of other potential actions, again playing to the political campaigns.

The MYR is a separate discussion for me.  You apparently put time and effort into studying MYR.  That's great.   YR was designed to improve individual student achievement by minimizing gaps in time in school NOT to minimize the number of schools required by WCPSS due to financial constraints.  The latter was always a perversion of the original remit.  One of the issues the system has faced and will continue to face is the ever-increasing number of students.   We've now learned that we'll need 34 (?) more schools by 2020, with all of the ES on YR.   The reality is that there is a conflict between the number of seats we have and the number of projected students.     What is not feasible is to expect sufficient seats to magically appear.  We have to pay for them and there has to be a frank discussion of how many schools of what type.  If, as you say, MYR is not going to continue, then we may well need more than 34 new schools and you'd best get that discussion happening with the BoE so the bond issue will be sufficiently large to avoid MYR schools moving forward.     If MYR is unpopular with parents, then the BoE needs to find ways to sell more schools to voters in the county to avoid the need for MYR yet provide the choice of YR for those who want it.