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Claudia Keenan is an Atlanta resident who reared two sons in New York, Kansas and Virginia where she was active in the PTA, school foundations and local history groups. She holds a doctorate in the history of American education from New York University.What a strange situation: We know so much and we know so little. How is it possible that intelligent, deeply concerned DeKalb County residents are reduced to such dubious speculation about the future of their public schools? Running the schools with superb opacity, our elected officials and administrators share essential information only under duress. Documents appear and disappear at will, and the system’s financial accounting is routinely withheld or obscured. At least in the fairytale Hansel and Gretel, the crumbs dropped by the children led somewhere. In the dark labyrinth of the DeKalb …
When Lori Cristol was about the age of the sixth graders she now teaches, she hoped to become a journalist someday. “For my 18th birthday I received a subscription to The New York Times,” Cristol said recently. “And I’ve had one ever since.” Today, as a language arts teacher at Henderson Middle School, Cristol serves as co-sponsor of Paw Prints, the student newspaper which appears–alas!–just twice each year. The paper receives only enough funding from the school’s Parent-Teacher Student Association to produce December and May issues. But the school’s Newspaper Club meets weekly, every …
Atlanta is home to many landmarks of the civil rights movement – some well-known while others are buildings, parks and streets that we may pass every day without recognition. Medlock Elementary School is one of those landmarks. But for some adults who attended the school during the 1970s when it played a part in the desegregation of the DeKalb County School System, Medlock Elementary is alive with memory. The memories are particularly bittersweet because the school will close in May as part of the system’s redistricting plan. Perched on a rise on a quiet block in a postwar neighborhood where …
“The Language Line is an amazing endeavor,” said Sandra Nunez as she recently conducted a tour of the International Student Center. As director of the systemwide English Language Learners Program for the DeKalb County School System, Nunez is all about communication all the time. The Language Line, a telephone service that connects teachers and administrators to an interpreter within a scant 15 minutes, is indispensable as parents new to the district attempt to advocate for their children and understand schools’ expectations. There are 15,402 international students in the DeKalb County School …
When it’s time to change classes at the International Student Center, the air is a swirl of languages: Thai, Ethiopian dialects, Chin, Somali. Teacher Mariana Savvitt, a native Russian speaker, is lining up students from Iraq, Burma, Nepal and Eritrea (that’s a small African nation on the Red Sea between Somalia and Ethiopia). Combining traditional methods and software, Savvitt conducts classes in “intensive English.” Sweeping through the offices and classrooms of the student center is Sandra Nunez, super-enthusiastic director of the systemwide ELL (English Language Learners) Program. She …
It wasn’t a championship season, but you would never know it from observing the St. Pius debaters sitting around the classroom of their coach, Sean Hiland, after school one day in late March. Co-captain Keller Sheppard and his teammates Alison Denzer-King and Isaac Suarez-Nugent reminisced about a year of challenges and fun. Since last September, the three juniors and the rest of the team have participated in public forum debates on such topics as Wikileaks, deep water offshore drilling and the NATO presence in Afghanistan. “The competition is tough,” Coach Hiland said. “But this team is a …
One rainy Saturday morning, Taha Yarahmad, a physics instructor at Georgia Perimeter College, showed up to help students prepare for the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests [commonly knonwn as the CRCT] administered by the state department of education. “She loves math, but I have to bribe her to work on reading,” Yarahmad said of the precocious fifth-grader she tutors. “I tell her, ‘If you do the comprehension, I will answer any question you have about physics.’” Nineteen volunteers and 19 students–an unusually good ratio–sat down in the Sagamore Hills Elementary School's library at 10am …
While the invited guests found seats and leafed through information packets, Robert Thorpe sat down in his own office to discuss the challenges of middle school. As Shamrock Middle School principal since 2005, Thorpe has perspective on both the institution and the social and academic transformation of students as they progress from sixth to eighth grade. Chief among the themes in the middle school experience are parents’ anxiety, the adjustment to a bigger, more populous school and students’ shifting allegiance from adult authority to peer group influence. Along with these customary …
“It is not impossible to have a good large school; it is simply more difficult,” wrote the noted educator John I. Goodlad, who started his career as director of Emory University’s Division of Teacher Education after World War II. The optimal size of schools has been debated for decades by researchers and practitioners. In January, at various public meetings where DeKalb County parents responded to proposed redistricting plans, several new numbers were cited as long-term objectives for the system’s schools. Parents expressed confusion about where the numbers came from. Indeed, the following …
It’s a bit disconcerting that the word “education” does not appear anywhere in the eight actions the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools has required the DeKalb County School System to address by Oct. 31. Accreditation has long been a fact of life for American schools, but it has evolved from the scrutiny of classroom education to school district administrations' online reporting. In its earliest incarnation, the accreditation of public schools involved oversight by university professors. The University of Michigan initiated the first state accreditation plan in 1871, a brilliant …
Last year, Georgia leapt eagerly onto the latest education bandwagon, the Common Core Standards Initiative. The state-led program, “preparing America’s students for college & career,” hasn’t yet celebrated its first birthday. But 43 states and the District of Columbia have responded to the call for a more strenuous curriculum and the acquisition of advanced skills to use knowledge effectively in college and the workplace. The initiative opens with a question: “Why is this important?” There are two reasons, according to the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the …
The demand for a radical change in method and curriculum, so far as arithmetic is concerned, is of no narrow origin. It is as intensive as the combined expression of the mathematician, the psychologist, the representative business man and the high school teacher can make it. What year was this written? The answer is 1900. The author, Frank H. Hall, was an Illinois school superintendent who wrote math textbooks for students in elementary and secondary schools. The series was called The Werner Arithmetic, after its publisher. For several decades, The Werner Arithmetic competed with The Walsh-…
Horace Mann forecasted a bright future for school trustees. They would be “exemplars of values” and “aristocrats of character” wrote this famous reformer known as the father of American education in 1846. Frustrated by the partisanship among Massachusetts school committees–precursors of local school boards–Mann envisioned a lofty ideal, perhaps, but one that is certainly within reach. School trustees should be worthy of the public’s trust, responsible not only for educating young people but for improving society at large, Mann observed grandly: “In proportion to the fidelity and intelligence …
Jargon has long grown wild and free in the field of education. The term “educational adequacy” is particularly difficult to pin down, however. Remarkably, the phrase was in vogue by 1982 when several educators published papers about how to go about developing a working definition for it. Over time, educational adequacy has figured in legal action, in the allocation of funds and as a scale that measures the fit between school facilities and their educational purposes. Since 1990, “adequacy” lawsuits in more than 25 states have boosted funding in less wealthy communities to correct inequalities…
School board members constitute the largest group of elected officials in the United States with 100,000 trustees serving on nearly 14,000 boards. A truly American invention, the local school board has been revered as a cornerstone of representative democracy. But there have been cynics. “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards,” Mark Twain wrote in 1897. Of course that’s not entirely fair. At their best, school trustees are altruistic, characterized by the right motivation. At its worst, board membership is sought for selfish reasons, because it…
Arriving very early at the Shamrock Middle School workshop Jan. 19, I found an empty gymnasium full of round tables covered with white cloths. It reminded me of Constitution Hall in Philadelphia where I took my sons when they were young. Glancing at the hall filled with tables covered with green cloths and candlesticks, my 5-year old burst out, “Mom, can we eat dinner here tonight?” It was dinner time at the Shamrock convention, but everyone was focused on the redistricting and consolidation proposal. Not surprisingly, the hundreds of people present were largely residents of Super Cluster 2: …
I discussed the rise of the professional superintendent during the 20th century last week. Drawn largely from similar backgrounds–white, Protestant farm communities–these men constituted an educational trust that dominated public schools between 1900 and 1940. Few challenged their expertise. They held master’s degrees and doctorates from university departments and schools of education where they studied modern curriculum development, philosophy of education, history of education, applied psychology and more. But when these aspiring superintendents took charge of the schools they also brought …
There’s a wonderful scene in the children’s classic Stuart Little in which the mouse pulls his car over for a man seated glumly by the side of the road. “You’re worried about something, aren’t you?” Stuart says. The man responds yes. “It’s an impossible situation,” the man says. “I’m the superintendent of schools in this town.” “That’s not an impossible situation,” Stuart says. “It’s bad, but it’s not impossible.” Stuart Little was written 64 years ago. Today, being superintendent may still be an impossible situation, but so is the pursuit of a superintendent. And now, with searches ginning …
Last week's column on the highly successful Henderson Middle School PTSA prompted a few considerations of what such organizations may reasonably expect of parents struggling in a poor economy with little time and energy left after work and family duties. Since its peak in 1960, membership in the National PTA has diminished steadily. This trend largely signified the mass movement of women into the workplace, which coincided with the mid-1960s high school graduations of the very first baby boomers. The 1975 passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which guaranteed all …
It's easy to run a parent-teacher association in a wealthy, homogenous community where residents are generous with their time and checkbooks. At Henderson Middle School, the 1,325 students are 37 percent white, 33 percent black, 18 percent Hispanic, 9 percent Asian and 3 percent mixed. They range widely in socio-economic class. Seven elementary schools feed into Henderson Middle. Drawing parents, teachers and students together poses a challenge as enrollment grows and the school–just anointed best middle school in DeKalb County by Atlanta magazine–continues to set its sights high. "It's an …
