The Language of School “Reform” Distracts Us from the Needs of Children and Their Schools
Despite its name, if you drive along Lakeview Road between St. Clair and Superior in Cleveland, Ohio, you cannot see Lake Erie. Today your view will be of boarded up houses. About a third of the two-family houses that line Lakeview and the sidestreets that cross it are boarded up. If you go to Zillow’s real estate map, you’ll find that most of these houses are listed as “foreclosed–auction.” There are lots covered with weeds or grass where there used to be houses before the foreclosure crisis. Sometimes enterprising neighbors have planted a garden in an empty lot next door. There is a four block interval between the recently bulldozed lots that were once the sites of two different public elementary schools—boarded up for years before they were demolished. The most viable institution is St. Aloysius Catholic Church at the corner of St. Clair Avenue, but the only other two institutions left on this mile-long stretch of Lakeview itself are a convenience store surrounded by cracked asphalt and gravel, and the Virtual School House, a charter school that advertises on the back of Regional Transit Authority buses. The Virtual School House occupies an ancient, decrepit nursing home that was toured several years ago by a not-for-profit group considering it for rehab as permanent supportive housing for the homeless, but the building wasn’t really considered suitable.
I have driven along Lakeview Road twice in the past month. Both times I have thought about the children living in this neighborhood. I know that their standardized test scores are likely lower than we would wish at the public school that is much farther away than before Lakeview Road’s schools were demolished. I am certain their school is considered a “failing” school. Low-performing. In need of turnaround. Perhaps closure. I have thought about the irony, on my trips down Lakeview Road, that these days we are likely to define the “education problem” in such neighborhoods as the teachers. Our policies blame those who would choose to teach here. Schools in our cities fail these days because of teachers’ seniority rights and the cost of any raises they have been able to negotiate. It is all set up to benefit the adults at the The Language of School “Reform” Distracts Us from the Needs of Children and Their Schools | janresseger: