As an (unsuccessful) candidate for DeKalb County Board of Education, I had a wonderful past five weeks. You too might run for board of education and feel the passion! Many strangers will take the time to have amazing conversations with you about education. It has been a special time. It was a youthful feeling, like the exhilaration of starting a new job in my 20’s, trying to drink from a fire hose of new information while seeking to organize it in my mind.
I remain amazed at the incredible, wonderful people who work with our students each day and wish I could unleash their creativity to inspire our students.
However, in the final week, my understanding took a darker turn, as I realized the answers are widely known, but organizationally the school system structure to implement the answers is not working.
My conclusion – DeKalb education results will get more awful, before the pressure to change overcomes institutional constraints, so it can get better. In my experience, people do not change until the pain gets too great, and the pain is not yet great enough. Let me illustrate the current DeKalb County School District (DCSD) establishment mindset through two hot topics.
First example, the Student Assignment Program (SAP) identified empty seats in DeKalb elementary schools and overcrowding in “North” DeKalb high schools. This problem has been unresolved without action for a decade. A nimble school system could have quickly resolved this for the “North” DeKalb elementary schools, while simultaneously developing a longer-term school facilities plan.
How? Move sixth graders from “north” middle schools to elementary schools to fill those empty spaces, and move ninth graders from the overcrowded high schools with trailer classrooms to middle schools. Though this is a short-term solution, not taking action illustrates the rigidity which DCSD has become.
Second example, years ago, DCSD decided that elementary schools of about 1,000 students are the solution to replace the 60-year-old elementary schools built for 500 or fewer students. This recently resulted in community uproar as SAP proposed closing half the older elementary schools in North DeKalb and tearing down the remaining aging elementary schools to build supersized replacements.
Like much DCSD decision making, this is choosing short-term benefits over long-term goals. DCSD chose this solution, combining elementary schools, to eliminate at least one principal, six teachers (via larger average classroom sizes), and a security person, to potentially save as much as $1,000 per year per elementary student. Probably someone was praised for this money-saving solution, or should I say: the illusion of saving money.
If we hired management consultants, how could they possibly recommend such a plan? Supersized schools with 1,000 students, led by a principal and two assistants, to manage about 60 classroom teachers, plus 20 other support staff. Where is the staff and time to relieve teachers’ burdens and distractions of unruly students and overbearing parents? When teachers attempt, without adequate backup, to deal with those issues, education for the rest of the class stops, and students learn less.
With the 1,000-student elementary school, by burdening teachers to “save” money, DCSD has built a teacher burnout model. The best teachers will leave for another line of work, or a different school system, and DCSD will get lower-quality people to fill its classroom teacher quota. Student report cards will measure only the quantity of hours that students were in class, not the quality of education. Once the shiny new schools have some wear and tear on them, as well as the (remaining) teachers, we will see systematic failure revealed by lower student achievement and lower test scores.
And this does not include other “immeasurable” results. For example, the community value of teachers, students and parents who all know each another, as is possible in 400 or so student schools, which resulted in immediate notice and action when a student has a problem, such as loss of family income, or a bully, or neglect.
Supersized elementary schools are the current wave of education in the United States. DeKalb County, currently lags behind Cobb and Gwinnett in school quality perception, yet DCSD could seize this opportunity to retain community schools, and become more attractive to prospective residents, than other counties which are chasing the wave to supersize.
For that to happen, DCSD must place the needs of the students and DeKalb County above short-term institutional measures. This will be tough as the entire system has been dysfunctional for so long, that no one there remembers what a functional system is like. To change DCSD to better educate students will require new, strong, visionary leadership and community engagement.
