We're not going to magnet our way out of this

From the July 4 Tennessean article on the 3rd District school board race:

(Fred) Lee, who is an adjunct professor in the psychology department at Tennessee State University and retired science teacher and guidance counselor, is proposing to expand the school system’s magnet program geared to top students. To do so, Lee would like to convert international baccalaureate programs at Goodlettsville and Bellevue middle schools into expanded stand-alone magnet schools. 

He also would downsize the district’s large high schools such as Hunters Lane into smaller neighborhood schools, with one school operating as a stand-alone magnet school. Magnet schools are public schools with stringent academic standards, and each year more students apply to attend than the current magnet programs at Martin Luther King and Hume-Fogg can accommodate.

In MNPS, we have three types of magnet schools: academic magnets, application only with geographic preference, and thematic magnets. Academic magnets (Hume-Fogg, MLK, and Meigs) are the ones I think Lee is talking about.

There's nothing wrong with academic magnet schools, per se. In district as big as Nashville's, they have a role to play as the Ivy League of the public school system. But in the higher ed world, we have Harvard, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Memphis, and we don't expect the latter two to graduate students who are unprepared for the next level. But that's exactly what we're doing in Nashville. (Scroll down to the ACT breakdown by school.)

His plan for MNPS indicates that Lee believes that not all children are capable of achieving at a high level. This is a harsh judgment, but we should do Lee the favor of taking his plan seriously. A major reason he thinks people should vote for him is because of his experience, namely that he's taught in Metro.

Given his plan, I can only assume that as he thinks back on all of the students he taught, he must think only a relatively small number of them can achieve at a high level. That is, after all, the idea behind academic magnets --  to attract a select group of students away from the masses in order that those students, free of the burden of being around lesser pupils, are free to finally, finally achieve on a high level.

The sad fact is that many people both in and out of public education share Lee's belief about designing a system to benefit the top performers. Teaching isn't the inspirational journey Hollywood makes it out to be*; many people leave the classroom bitter towards students and cynical about their prospects. (Take a stroll around the comments section of some edublogs if you doubt me on this.) They believe that intelligence isn't malleable, that a student's potential is largely fixed, so therefore schools should primarily function as sorting institutions.

There are two problems with this:

#1 So what about the kids who don't make the cut? What's the plan for their zoned schools? Is the schools' performance acceptable or are we going to do something about it? 

#2 People who believe intelligence -- and therefore a student's potential -- are both fixed are wrong, wrong, wrong. Want to know the biggest impact on whether a student will be successful? The teacher's belief in whether that student will successful**.

There's no way around it: we are either going to increase the number of high-peforming classrooms or we will continue to have about 70 percent of our graduates be unable to succeed in college.

Everything else is just shifting deck chairs on the Titanic. How about we stop the boat from sinking in the first place?

*****

* The Substitute excluded, of course -- that movie is completely true to life.

** Instead of getting wonky here, permit me a short anecdote: In my first year as a teacher in Philly, I had a student transfer in to my 11th grade English class. Joaquin tested at a 5th grade reading level. Six months later, he had moved up to a 9th grade reading level. This wasn't because I was a great teacher -- I was kind of terrible, actually. That said, my class was under control compared to most of the school and Joaquin was willing to work with me. Turns out he just had to make a few critical connections between Spanish and English. Then he started reading even more stuff in English and voila! -- high school level literacy.


This sort of thing happens all of the time in a functional school. Kids can change awfully fast. The book is never finished on what a person can become.