That the word “factories” is alliterative with “failure” probably explains why the Tampa Bay Times tied them together for a front-page Sunday education story that is drawing state and national attention. But it may unwittingly express part of what is going dramatically wrong with five public elementary schools in a predominantly black neighborhood in St. Petersburg, Fla.
No one disputes the path by which enrollment in these schools has shifted from an economically and racially diverse student body to one that is almost entirely poor and black. But the resegregation is only part of the tragedy here.
Those of us who fought the Pinellas County School Board’s decision to retreat from court-ordered desegregation now know that the racial quotas we supported were often masking a racial achievement gap within schools themselves. Indeed, the Times, with the benefit of state-required test data disaggregated by race, has previously reported that Pinellas black students score lower than black students in any of the state’s other big urban school districts – and that poverty alone isn’t to blame.
In other words, the struggles of these students in St. Petersburg did not begin with resegregation, though gathering all these students into five schools helped reveal a longstanding problem, and likely exacerbated it.
Having spent much of my professional career editorializing on Pinellas public schools and a good stretch of my adulthood volunteering in them to support my two daughters’ education, I hesitate to point fingers. After all, teaching children who are burdened by poverty at home is one of the greatest challenges public education faces. But the term “factory” may indeed hint at how these schools went off the rails.
Operationally speaking, Pinellas was running these schools in roughly the same manner as any of the district’s 68 traditional elementaries – in effect running Melrose Elementary like Bauder. At Melrose, more than 80 percent of the students are on free or reduced-price lunch and more than 90 percent are minorities. At Bauder, less than 30 percent qualify for the lunch program reduced lunch and 14 percent are minorities. Students at a school like Melrose may need emotional support, or additional time for reading instruction. Above all, though, they need to be surrounded by adults who can relate to them and recognize their potential. They need institutions that are tailored to their needs.
The announcement on Monday that Pinellas schools superintendent Mike Grego intends to convert three of the schools to magnets at least acknowledges that the factory approach wasn’t working. But it also begs for more detail. Magnet programs have been successful in Pinellas, and elsewhere, but are rooted historically in attempts to draw white students to schools in black neighborhoods. Maybe that will help to spur educational improvement, but it could just as easily hide the problem, by redistributing students whose needs have long gone unmet.
The truth is that many school districts in Florida have found innovative and aggressive ways to help students succeed in high-poverty schools, which is partly why both Miami-Dade and Orange have been awarded the prestigious national Broad Prize for urban education over the past three years. Orange was able to increase the number of low-income students achieving at the highest level in middle school reading by 6 percentage points over just a two-year time frame.
Some of the national leaders in this field, such as KIPP, and state leaders, such as Academy Prep in St. Petersburg and Tampa, have used six-day school weeks to give their underprivileged students more time to blossom. Duval worked to bring a KIPP school to its county, and, along with Broward and Miami-Dade, competed for and won state grants earlier this year to bring similar programs to disadvantaged neighborhoods. Pinellas, notably, never applied.
Goliath Davis, a former police chief and deputy mayor for St. Petersburg, was characteristically blunt about the role of district school officials. “Every point that you brought up in that article, none of them should have been news to them,” Davis told the Times. “There’s nothing in that article that they don’t know about or haven’t heard anything about.”
Davis is right, and the district can’t ignore the broken trust with the black community in South St. Petersburg. Any genuine and enduring solution will involve rebuilding that relationship and involving the community as a partner.
“Failure Factories” is a particularly loaded and provocative title for the Times work, but one that is – along with powerful reporting – serving to draw attention to learning environments that no one should tolerate. The regrettable reality is that our political system, in Pinellas and beyond, has never been well-attuned to the cries of the less advantaged. Let’s hope the force of this swift kick leaves its mark.
Thank you for your thoughtful opinion piece. I hope you are right. If not, as a first steip I suggest forming a representative group of concerned citizens to talk over the problem(s) and hopefully suggest improvements.