In a recent NY Times op-ed piece Nicholas Krustof calls public education funding Our greatest national shame 15 Feb.
Education is critical. Without it people have no chance in the modern world. Without it the modern world has no chance. Yet in the city of St. Louis we have a public educational system is at its best shameful.
One Friday in February our Leadership St. Louis class focused on the St. Louis city public schools. Starting with a visit to Vashon High School, housed in beautiful new building which in 2002 replaced it’s dilapidated previous location.
I had not been in a public high school for many years, though I remember mine quite vividly. An two story plain rectangle of a building. Long strait halls lined with lockers. Between classes there was crowded seemingly chaotic activity in the halls, slamming lockers, and a general hubbub. During classes there were full rooms and the purposeful murmur of activity behind each door. Vashon was quite different - cool architecture, small classes, and very quiet. The later was particularly notable. Class changes were almost eerily quiet with few students in the halls. No banging lockers. No horseplay. No masses of students in the halls. Classes were very small though, even then, there were students that were not engaged or even attending to the instructor.
(It was interesting for me to see one of the students in class texting. This form of partial attention is clearly a poor idea wen trying to learn. However, I had had a conversation a couple of weeks earlier with a woman training medical students at SLU. She to was lamenting the fact that SLU medical students engaged in the same behaviors during their classes.)
Part of the difference was size. My high school class was larger than the whole student body at Vashon. But I later found out that, in addition to being relatively small, the school has about a 40% absence rate - so the school and classes were empty because few of the enrolled students were actually present.
The principle, teachers, and students we met were justifiably proud of the advances the school has made. It has a history of problems and of being in the paper because of violence and other school problems. The students with whom we spoke were focused on getting out of school and getting into college. They had applied to, and been accepted by, multiple colleges and reported that they were going to be able to get funds to attend.
The student leaders we met with were all women. When asked, they quickly volunteered that there was also a male leader and there was hope that, this year for the first time in many years, they would have a male class valedictorian.
Our tour of the school was lead by a teacher and 5 ROTC students. I am not exactly sure why we needed 5 students to take time from their classes to lead us around the building. They were polite and would answer direct questions but for the most part kept pretty quiet. We saw neatly kept classrooms (all behind locked doors) and spent a very few minutes in classes with real teachers and students. We visited the well appointed day care center (for the young children of students and staff). Saw the gym, which held the most life in the school, and a dry swimming pool (for the lack of an instructor).
In addition to our school experience we met with the new superintendent and one of the special board members - since the district has been taken over by the state because of its loss of accreditation.
At the end of the day I walked away feeling a little sad and believing that, while the presentations put the best possible face on the situation and that there are positive stories and educated students coming out of these schools, for a much to large proportion of students we are failing. We are failing and that will drag down both these individual students and our society.