NEW SCHOOL FOR NO STUDENTS

We reported last year on the insanity of the Grand Rapids Public School District's desire to spend millions on a new elementary school on the Northeast side of town where existing schools are closing because students are fleeing to suburban, parochial, and charter schools -- 500 in just the past decade.  North of Knapp Street alone there were once six elementary schools:  Huff, Aberdeen, Riverside, Crestview, Wellerwood, and North Park.  Now there are only two, Aberdeen and North Park, which are under-used.  However, the school district has $8 million burning a hole in its pocket for new construction on the Northeast side, and so the money's gotta be spent.  (Apparently the idea of returning unneeded construction funds to the taxpayers isn't within the comprehension of school bureaucrats.)

So now the new school superintendent Bernard Taylor needs to come up with a plan to shuffle around the kids on the Northeast side of town (and also the Southeast side which has lost even more kids, 800, during the past decade).  It seems that one of the favored options is to close down Eastern Elementary.  However, Eastern is the one school on the Northeast side at full capacity that has a good community base.  But the school district says that the building needs renovation and renovated buildings don't draw new students, only new buildings do.  As evidence of this, the district points to Coit School which was renovated a few years ago and is only half-full, whereas the three new buildings the district opened this fall (elsewhere in the district) were packed.

What a load of rubbish.  First of all, those new buildings did not draw new students INTO the Grand Rapids district.  They pulled in existing students from other parts of the districts.  The task on the Northeast side isn't to re-shuffle existing students, but to attract students currently attending non-district schools.  There is no evidence that new construction does this.  Second, the renovation of Coit School failed to draw new students, because they aren't enough students in the area with East Leonard and Eastern so close to it.  The renovation was a stupid idea based on emotion and misguided notions of historic preservation.  Third, renovated or not Eastern is succeeding.  That is testament to the disconnect between bricks-and-mortar and community.  One does not necessarily follow the other.

Fourth, and most important, the Grand Rapids public schools are failing because their communities are dysfunctional or non-existent.  Granted a sense of community more readily develops around a school that serves an immediate neighborhood.  Geography does play an important role that is difficult to exploit when city schools must be consolidated to cope with the massive outflow of students to other schools.  But then that begs the question of why Grand Rapids public schools are losing students in the first place.  No doubt the teachers' union is a primary culprit as the government school bureaucracy was perverted from educating students to serving educators.  Of course, that didn't happen without the acquiescence of supine school superintendents.  In turn, past school boards deserve their share of blame for hiring careerist hacks for the top job rather than innovative outsiders.  But then we the voters elected those school boards, didn't we?

We also voted another way.  We voted with our feet and sent our kids to suburban, parochial, and charter schools instead of city schools.  And this brings us back to the same question:  Why are the city schools losing students?  Why has the trickle become a torrent?  The increasing lack of discipline in those schools, even the elementary schools.  The community necessary for a successful school will not develop where mayhem, intimidation, and violence reign.  The pathetic response of Superintendent Taylor to this is that the principals and teachers of the Grand Rapids public schools are not sensitive to the culture of their students.  Translation:  White educators don't understand black and brown students.

Again, what a load of rubbish.  If Taylor wanted to argue that careerist educators are too busy ticking off the days to collecting that pension check and so are too lazy to mete out the discipline kids from unruly and broken households need to get a good education, that would be one thing.  But it is another thing to argue that a kid's skin color makes him incapable of understanding the normal and ordinary demands of discipline needed in a classroom.  All kids thrive on those demands.  To deny it to them is cruel.  If they don't get it from home, then they must get in school.  If they aren't getting discipline in school, because the teachers and principals won't provide it, then Taylor needs to get his cattle prod out.  However, if it is because the teachers and principals can't provide it, because they are hamstrung by the district's bureaucracy, then Taylor needs to bust through the bureaucracy and clearly establish discipline as part of the school district's mission.

The problem with the lack of discipline is that it is both "won't" and "can't", which leaves everyone collecting a paycheck from the Grand Rapids Public school district in the happy position of pointing fingers at each other as an excuse to do nothing.  Meanwhile, the students in our city schools remain ill-served, the remaining communities supporting those schools continue to break up, and the blueprints get drawn up for a new school for no students.

Comments

[Brandon]

The importance of discipline (i.e., the shocking lack of it in the GRPS) in your analysis of this subject cannot be understated. As both a long-time city resident and a product of its public school system, I struggled greatly with where to send my own child as he came of age. Call it pie-in-the-sky liberalism if you wish, but I had always believed public education to indeed be the great equalizer; it did right by me and the majority of my peers, and up until a few years ago, I suppose I felt like I owed an obligation to that tradition by supporting it with my own child's participation in it. But no longer.

I've seen firsthand the violence and general mayhem that takes place on any given day when school 'X' lets out in the afternoon; I've spoken with neighborhood kids who attend school 'X' and I've listened to their reports of the fear and intimidation that permeates the classroom atmosphere. It's all but impossible to achieve academic parity -- never mind excellence -- when one's mental energy is spent figuring out how to avoid being the target of some delinquent thug's nefarious intentions each day.

Not my child, not in this lifetime. He goes to 'XYZ' parochial school, and while the tuition I pay shares a frightening similarity with the amount of my mortgage payment, I'll dig ditches and go bankrupt to keep him there. That's a sad, stark and melodramatic statement, but it's one I'll stand by until I see someone treat the decay of our public school system with the seriousness it so obviously deserves.

[The Executive Director]

Hi, Brandon.

Although I tend to a libertarian view for the provision of public services, I too found the same value in attending public schools. Our kids deserve to receive that value too, but the GRPS no longer provides it. Of course, it is inexcusable that children, even kids in elementary school, must face the threat of violence and intimidation on a daily basis in the classroom and on the playground.

So you (and so many parents like you) did not give up on the public schools. They gave up on you and your son. (I had a similar experience in pulling a couple of kids out of Beckwith Elementary some years ago.) Of course, the GRPS still takes your tax dollars and makes sure everyone gets paid well, while you have to struggle to pay for a safe environment for your kid to learn in. The educrats give a lot of lip service to what they've got to change, but nothing happens except that the situation in the schools gets worse. Exhibit A: Union High School.

Unfortunately, I think the public school system is like Humpty Dumpty. It's broken and the pieces cannot be put back together again. That's not to say there are not a lot of good and dedicated people in the GRPS, but they are shackled by a system whose highest priority is the maintenance of its own existence. Fortunately, I think parents, teachers, and others are creative and will find that value that public schools used to provide by other means. New communities will form -- indeed, are forming -- and new and better ideas for education will come from that. That's good, if painful at the moment.

I expect that in this country K-12 education will remain universal, compulsory, and taxpayer-funded, but a decade or two from now I have serious doubts that the old public school bureaucracy will exist to implement those principles. That monolithic structure will collapse under its own weight, as is starting to happen with the city schools. I think we will see a lot more variety in options for educating our children.

In the meantime, parents like you are forced to make costly decisions to safeguard your children.

Regards, Bill