Like a child being dragged into the bathtub while they still want to play, the leadership of the Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) continues to resist urgent reforms.
IPS’ middle and high school system has been broken for years. In IPS there’s a bizarre dichotomy. The percentage of high school students graduating on time has increased, but the percentage of those students passing state competency tests hasn’t shown comparable increases.
With few exceptions, IPS’ middle schools have been educational disaster areas; feeding ill-prepared students into high schools.
In fairness, IPS has built a record of some progress at the elementary level. The paradox is that the progress hasn’t moved with the students into middle and high schools.
A few years ago, with hubris rivaling education reformer Dr. Michelle Rhee or maybe Charlie Sheen, Superintendent Eugene White rammed through a compliant IPS Board a scheme placing sixth, seventh and eighth graders in with high school students.
Many in our community thought the idea was silly or foolhardy. A high school that’s grades six through 12, (aka junior/senior high school) may work in rural areas or small towns, but reams of research says the concept doesn’t work in urban areas.
Any educator worth their salt will tell you the tough part in America’s education system occurs in our middle or junior high schools. That is the age when body changes, raging hormones, etc. make students the most challenging to educate.
IPS’ move to sixth through eighth graders into high schools was controversial. Now that decision returned and bit IPS in the butt because it was the poor scores of middle school students that helped doom six IPS schools to the purgatory of state intervention.
Dr. White complains that the state cooked the books, fudged the numbers. White insists the state should’ve considered Arlington, Broad Ripple, Howe and Washington as four year high schools, not de-facto junior/senior highs.
But White can’t have it both ways. You can’t place sixth through 12th graders in the same building, label it a “community high school,” and then expect the state to evaluate you as a four year high school.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett has a point. Every other junior/senior high school in this state was evaluated the same way and none were on five year probation, much less the dreaded death penalty sixth year.
Dr. White bet that combining middle and high school students would work. It didn’t and he and IPS are paying for that folly (and IPS’ failure to improve).
Now, let me direct some columnist fire towards some Indianapolis Star columnists, editorial writers and those anti-IPS white radio talkshow hosts.
This group, and uneducated TV reporters and producers, repeatedly fall into the trap that the Indianapolis Public Schools are THE school system for America’s 11th largest city.
Let me clearly state to my friends (and enemies) in the city’s mainstream media, and the rest of my readers.
IPS is NOT the school system of the City of Indianapolis. Last school year, 143,951 attended public schools, including charters, in Indianapolis. Just 33,116 attended IPS. Do the math for yourself. That’s nowhere close to a majority.
Yet, the Star, and the hysterical radio commentators, continues to wail that IPS alone taints public education in this city.
The Star, the self labeled information source, is most guilty for perpetuating this continued myth.
Their editorial writers, columnists, editors and publisher haven’t bothered to contact their Gannett colleagues at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix.
See, Phoenix, America’s sixth largest city with a population 60 percent larger than Indy’s, is the only other major American city where school district boundaries don’t equal the city’s boundaries.
From the City of Phoenix’s official web site: “Phoenix is home to 325 public schools in 30 school districts along with more than 200 charter and private schools.”
When they talk about education in Phoenix, they don’t talk about the “Phoenix Public Schools” because it doesn’t exist. They talk about improving all public education in Phoenix.
We must start doing that in Indianapolis. A city with 178 public schools in 11 districts with another 28 charters.
In a major policy speech last week before the Downtown Kiwanis Club, Democratic mayoral candidate Melina Kennedy said, “Education is, unfortunately, an area where our city is failing to score even at the mean in some cases. We should not settle for an ordinary education system, but we should demand of ourselves an education system that is extraordinary. Our children deserve it and the future of our city depends on it.”
The first step isn’t just insisting that IPS cleans up its act; but that every school system and charter school in Indianapolis cleans up its act as well.
What I’m hearing
in the streets
It was embarrassing. At Dr. Tony Bennett’s press conference announcing school interventions and possible takeover operators, I had to bring up the fact that one of the companies, EdPower, is in Indiana.
Bennett never mentioned it or mentioned that EdPower is a Black-owned/managed entity, having successfully run Charles Tindley Charter School for six years.
Whether Tindley can handle the challenge of bringing their highly intense, results focused education to the Black students attending some of the takeover school targets (Gary Roosevelt and Arlington come to mind) remains to be seen.
See ‘ya next week.
You can e-mail comments to Amos Brown at acbrown@aol.com.
