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Home > Blogs > Springfield Schools News and Issues > Archives > 2008 > July > 30 > Entry
Another conversation on education
Gov. Ted Strickland hosted in Dayton last night one of the “Governor’s Conversation on Education.”
Since that forum ended I’ve been having some of my own conversations on education with local school officials.
Strickland has been presenting what he calls “missions and principles” at these meetings — essentially a more general idea than the actual reforms he will present by March of next year.
My education writing colleague Scott Elliott covered last night’s event and has a lot of the details on his blog.
I will post again later this afternoon on some of the specific reforms Strickland mentioned.
I talked to Northwestern board president Donna Myers, who is also very active with the Ohio School Boards Association, last night after the event. She said that this was actually a lot of the same information Strickland had given to education officials (teachers, board members, administrators, etc.) at the Governor’s Institute for Innovation and Creativity in Education.
Last night’s event in Dayton, which was by invitation only, seemed to have a lot of Dayton Public Schools employees, said Myers and many of the questions from the crowd also focused on a more “holistic” approach to education, with schools working with social services, etc. to address all of a child’s needs.
For the DPS crowd, and some others, that would be an important step in education… for some others in the crowd, not so much.
Urban school districts typically have much higher populations of low-income students. racial minorities and students with disabilities — sub-groups of students that typically do not perform as well as their counterparts on achievement indicators. Urban districts also typically have much higher numbers of students living in poverty (one of the measures used to determine the ‘urban’ district label).
Living in poverty is different from the economically disadvantaged label given to kids who are on free and reduced lunch. That programs extends to children from families who are making up to 185 percent of the poverty level (about $31,000 for a family of four). The poverty level is about $21,200 for a family of four.
In urban districts, schools tend to have more students struggling with a lot outside of reading and writing and arithmetic. I’ve been covering education in urban districts for going on two years and the teachers in those districts have told me stories of kids coming to school without coats or shoes, kids who don’t get to the doctor when they need to, kids who don’t get the proper nutrition at home, etc.
In suburban and rural districts, the schools typically aren’t dealing with those problems, and certainly not at the same levels. But those districts do have their own sets of struggles. Some of the bigger ones seem to be dealing with old facilities or educating students with disabilities with smaller staffs and fewer resources.
We tend to get focused on the urban systems because they are, traditionally, the larger school systems although that is changing in the last few years. For example, the Butler-Warren County area I worked in before coming to Springfield has two urban school systems, Middletown and Hamilton, but the largest districts in those counties are Lakota, Mason and Fairfield. Lakota is the largest district in the Miami Valley area, about 1,000 students larger than Dayton.
The urban districts also get a lot of focus because they are the center of the area. People in Dayton suburbs care about what’s happening in the Dayton city limits because ,as the major metro in the area, that reflects a lot of how the area is seen by outsiders. The same with Clark County as Springfield is probably the most well-known city/area in Clark to outsiders.
This morphs into the problem that Myers pointed out about last night’s event. As a very large and troubled school system, Dayton-centric problems took a lot of the focus.
If you combine the enrollment of all the suburban districts in Clark County, they are larger than Springfield schools. The same goes for most areas — a little more than 330,000 of the 1.7 million students in the state attend urban schools.
There are some problems that all districts face, like funding. And pretty much every district in the state is dealing with some problem and in most cases, similar districts will be struggling with the same type of issue.
But very few districts are dealing with the same issues as Dayton, Columbus, Cincinnati or even the smaller urban systems, Springfield, Middletown, Mansfield, etc.
And nearly all of Strickland’s scheduled conversations on education are in a major urban area: Columbus, Akron, Dayton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Zanesville, Chillicothe, Lima, Marietta, Toledo, Youngstown and Mansfield.
Myers said that the three-day institute she attended in June was more balanced; hopefully some of the other stops will be as well so Strickland, who has said he is looking for feedback, can get input from all arenas of Ohio’s very diverse education community.
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