CURMUDGUCATION: Neighborhood Failure Factories

CURMUDGUCATION: Neighborhood Failure Factories:

Neighborhood Failure Factories

I am a big believer in the concept of neighborhood schools. I think schools are best as an extension of their communities. I've written pretty about why I see charterizing initiatives such as those in New Orleans as both bad educational practice and an assault on fundamental American values.

At the same time, it's important that I acknowledge the limits of the approach that I value so much, and nothing has highlighted those failings any better than this gut-wrenching story of how Pinellas County in Florida turned five thriving schools into "failure factories." I could hem and haw and hedge, but here's the brutal truth of how they did it.

They turned them into neighborhood schools.

They ended desegregation and starved the five schools of, not only the additional resources they needed to succeed, but also in some cases didn't even provide the basic level of support provided to other schools in the county.

This story, written and reported by Cara Fitzpatrick, Lisa Gartner and Michael LaForgia, deserves your time and attention. I'm just going to hit some critical points and draw some conclusions of my own. But you should read this piece. It tells the story of people who, once again, don't want to educate Other People's Children, and how neighborhood schools are not enough.

The county has a history. St. Petersburg zoned itself for segregation in the 1930's and put the interstate smack through the black part of town in 1970. Black parents went to court to force integration, and the federal government stepped in to monitor the district. That monitoring stopped in 2007, and Pinellas County immediately started working on resegregating their schools. 

Though the efforts were working — black students were posting steady gains on standardized tests — many parents bridled at the tools of integration. They complained about the inconvenience and the CURMUDGUCATION: Neighborhood Failure Factories: