Hoco Redistricting
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Anonymous
Which is why people hate it. Redistricting disrupts families. There are real issues beyond concerns about being just a "token," as if that were the top of anybody's concerns. |
Anonymous
Sounds like you think you know what is best for families than those families actually impacted by redistricting decisions. |
Anonymous
Or you might be a parent who just doesn't understand that kids will be moved, have to be moved, and will continue to be moved to accommodate increasing building and new subdivisions, a whole bunch of equity and racial/ethnic disparities issues in this county, and for adequate staffing and services. Where a kid goes for daycare probably will not factor in. I understand today that 250 teachers, so far, signed up for a retirement seminar. Teachers have reached crisis levels of stress. I 've always felt that the way to deal with these issues is to work entirely by random lottery, that no neighborhood is tied to any one school. |
Anonymous
Okay - enough with the "250 teachers, so far, signed up for a retirement seminar" This is a union talking point which is trying to gain steam. First, the association itself is running the seminar and is trying to get traction on how unhappy teachers are. Unless it says that 250+ teachers are actively retiring, it's simply them getting RSVPs from members which can, in turn, be used to sound alarm bells in emotional facebook posts for members themselves. Second, are 250+ teachers of retirement age? If they are, then the county should be following that regardless. Finally, if I'm running a workshop and 250+ people are interested in how to set themselves up for retirement, I'm considering that a win because my staff is responsible and planning for retirement. I don't think it's a sign that the company is suddenly going to have a mass exodus. --the firedrills trying to revv people up about how there will be no teachers because the pandemic has been stressful is getting old. Every career field, every person on the planet has had a stressful 2 years. Most of us didn't get to work virtual either. Some of us were watching kids in person the entire time. --From a person who runs an afterschool program which went fulltime while teachers were home. |
Anonymous
Probably more than 250+ teachers would sign up for a workshop on how to better use their HSA medical plans but that isn't a correlation to how many teachers have major medical issues right now. I am a teacher and I know my job has guaranteed summers off, a schedule that matches my school aged kids and most snow days are paid for. My husband who is a fed contractor does not have that same luxury. |
Anonymous
Great points. Also, to the earlier poster, what does teacher retirement have to do with redistricting? Family logistical challenges involving redistricting aren't just about daycare, but about having kids in different schools, such as two kids in different high schools, or having kids have to change high schools sophomore or junior year. There are no "lower resourced districts" in Howard County. Was there elititism, some of it vulgar in the last round of redistricting? Absolutely. But it's not just the super-wealthy who would prefer to not have their family split between at two different middle or high schools, or see their kids' current friendships and activities disrupted midway through a level of school due to adult failings and lack of planning. |
Anonymous
I think that random lottery and bussing children around the county is a terrible idea. What I think is a better decision is to stop with the "equitable" distribution of resources to every school. Schools should be allocated resources based on which schools need additional assistance. Schools with higher FARMs percentages, schools with lower standardized test scores, schools with fewer in-house resources, should be granted more funds. Rather than spend a fortune in hiring additional bus drives and paying them premium rates to drive kids 20 minutes away to other schools, the school system should invest in hiring additional staff in the lower performing schools to lower the student:teacher ratio so teachers can provide more individual attention. They should provide more equipment for the lower performing schools to ensure that children have good quality education. Invest money in the schools with the greater needs. The idea of bussing students to further away schools just to balance out the socio-economic balance of the schools only creates cliques and niches and doesn't really help the students. The poor students bussed to wealthy areas end up segregated in the schools and don't get the same benefits as the wealthy. Likewise it is only the small majority of those kids who are bussed who have access to the better school. What about the 95% of the community that did not change school from the lower performing school? What you want to do is invest more money into the schools in poorer areas so that they get equivalent opportunities and standards within their own communities. You want to raise up the entire local school, not just the handful of children you elect to bus to the further wealthy school. |
Anonymous
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Howard County is very confusing. We all pay the same tax rate and we pretend we are all in it together resource wise but at the same time people fight to keep people out of their schools. This is precisely what happened last time. You guys are talking about people who don't want to leave. There were more voices preventing kids from coming to their schools. They spoke about the kids lack of resources, not being able to participate in events, kids not getting extra resources or being able to compete academically. Trust me, these were the good comments. Some spoke about how their property values would be lower or that they moved to be in the number one school and redistricting was costing them $50k in property value. If the survey results are still out there the rest were just pure racism and spoke about the kid in horrible way.
Howard County also states that they fund schools based on programs but no one ever produces individual school budgets. If you fund by programming it is very possible that the more elite schools are better funded because they have more kids receiving GT services, etc. |
Anonymous
From what I saw and heard you got it the other way around. The majority of families from the higher rated schools were largely indifferent about accepting students from the lower rated schools. But they dreaded being shipped out to the lower rated schools themselves and fought vehemently against it. Like if they could expand River Hill to accommodate the new students most RH families would be fine with that compared to redistricting. You also need to acknowledge that many families from the lower rated schools didn't want to be redistricted to the higher rated schools either. This is not just a rich vs poor thing. |
Anonymous
Well, here's the problem with the idea of more resources in lower performing schools. They have teachers, resources, etc. Kids are not performing lower on tests because they don't have enough teachers or materials. Pick out any lower income school, let's say elementary school, and there are literally 19 different personnel in resouce teaching- reading, math, etc. Here's what people don't understand. Tests scores have little to do with what the school is doing or even not doing. Children from poverty are transient, they might be there a few years, 6 years, or 5 months. They come with great needs. Every spring , March, a score is generated from whatever happens from September to mid March, and that score has nothing to do with who was teaching in that school for only that 6 months. A sixth grader, in middle school, might not be reading on grade level or at all- but the school didn't fail to instruct him. He's in resource, reading intervention, speech therapy, ESOL, after school intervention, counseling, you name it, but if we keep comparing scores - his, to every other student, including all the students who tested in HCPSS, all we keep seeing is all the kids who read below level in one place. Those scores are laid out on a spreadsheet, in categories defined by race, by FARMS, by, Spec Ed, ESOL.Many of those kids are the same kids in every category (!) BUT there is no information about the kid (s). The school didn't fail this child. He was likely born into poverty, had poor nutrition, poor parenting, or just came here from Guatemala or El Salvador or Baltimore City. Why are we comparing him to the child at Mount View Middle who has been in HCPSS schools for 7 years, was born into a upper middle class environment with medical care, an actual family, appropriate language development since birth, preschool, enough food, and a safe environment? Of course those kids will always score as a group higher..that school isn't doing anything differently. Everyone thinks if only the school was doing a better job, but those teachers in lower income schools are doing a herculean job, every minute of every day. That child may in the system a couple of months only, or 1 year or 3 years, or even 12 years- but why aren't we comparing each child's progress to their own baseline and not the county baseline, a very affluent county? That would show progress, not how he is doing compared to everyone else. If he scores very low in grade 6, it's not because, in the last six months, those teachers failed to use resources to teach him. Even if he came from an ES, with those 19 different personnel, his progress will likely still trail others who live in privilege, but it would be worth it to see how much progress he's made, not compare to the Mt. View Middle kid. Do we judge an endocrinologist on how many diabetic patients she has that lose a limb, go blind, or die? No, because every patient comes in with their own lifestyle compliance, comorbidity, and progression of the disease, not to mention how long they have received medical care. So, how does this affect communities, and schools? Those scores become real estate tools only...they tell us that School A has a large amount of lower performing students, while School B has a high amount of higher performing students. School B isn't better. The kids come from a place of privilege, have likely been in the school system for their whole school career, and will continue to be. School A has kids that leave after a year, with new students coming in every few months. Since scores are deflated at School A, propery values decline. Declining values mean more rentals , transient movement, more Section 8. That means School A will continue to serve a population with transient, lower performing, and children in need. Schools with high scores will increase property values, and then only those with great resources will be able to move there. There are no rentals, mixed use housing, and you can bet with zoning and money to keep it that way. So, children from lower income families will stay in lower income areas, fueled and supported by those test scores, while the wealthy prevail. What about the middle level schools...brings in a mixture of all types of socioeconomic situations, needs? There are several here in HOCO, but until we establish and decinstruct the polar ends, it will always be about real estate, not schools. My house went up 80k this year. Houses in certain districts went up hundreds, and certain areas remained flat. All predictable. A lottery, where not one house is dependent on anything having to do with a school or its scores can provide true balance. We all love the idea of neighborhood schools, but that ship has sailed in the 1980s. Too much building, too many restrictions in zoning to protect areas, too many people with $$ literally redlining this county. |
Anonymous
Given what you said about non-school related factors that contribute to low test scores, how will shifting students from a higher income school to a lower income school help the lower income students? It sounds as if you want to make sure that higher income students don't get further ahead while lower-income students continue to struggle due to the host of family and societal factors that are barriers to their success. If that is the case, be honest about your philosophy that closing the gap is less about making things better for students from lower-income families than about preventing students from higher-income families from getting ahead. IF so students have to struggle, we should have as many students as possible struggling alongside them to promote equity. |
Anonymous
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I won't bother to use the quote feature since I will paint the page blue, so I will just answer your question here.
Why is there an assumption that kids with high needs will drag your higher performing kids down? If we balance the socioeconomic playing field in each school and depolarize, we have a mixture of everything. If you assume a high achieving child will continue to achieve and achieve in a school of only high performing and privileged children, by example or expectation, we then have to assume that the low performing child in a low resourced environment of similar students will continue to flat line or worse by exampleand expectation. And that's seems to be ok? Secondly, if you reread the part about how schools with low test scores inform a community, you will understand how this practice creates redlined areas where there is never a generous heterogeneous mix of ethnicities, races, incomes. A child with academic and or social needs can be serviced in the toney school too, with the same resource personnel we have in every school. How does that negatively impact your child? Your child isn't being kept from taking Trigonometry or AP History. Every school has resources for GT, for enrichment, and for remedial resource. The schools also all have music, art, physical education ( sports), humanities, languages,dance, theater, technological offerings, various clubs and groups during the day and extra curricularly. These are areas that meet children no matter who they are, and there is no social strata to obsess over. What are people afraid of? Is it that there will be a different metric optic on some of the Spring standardized test category (ies) with areas that have dropped and additional population percentages of children of color? How does that affect your child? It doesn't. It only affects your house value. There is no information of any use from aggregating standardized test scores with absurd comparisons other than redlining communities. |
Anonymous
I would also like to add that not all children living in lower income communities underperform. However, their entire school career shouldn't be restricted to three, or however many schools they attend, with a homogeneous population due to their particular income circumstance. |
Anonymous
I don't care about test scores and actually live in an area that is racially and economically diverse. I chose that for my family, and I'm not concerned about my personal interest. I am concerned about removing barriers for student achievement and am not sold on the idea that involuntary school reassignment based on socio-economic status will solve the problems redistricting proponents claim. Have you seen any studies showing that forced school reassignment of higher income students increases education outcomes for lower income students? Where is that study? Are there studies showing that random assignment of school attendance areas based on something other than where kids live (like a lottery) will actually improve each school? I'd love to see them. I agree that residential diversity will lead to diverse schools that are less impacted by the problems associated with poverty. Will the same be true of the people attending the school aren't living near each other, or growing up attending school together? The Montgomery County study that is regularly cited involved students who are living in the same area. In other words, residential diversity leads to diverse schools which in a small study of young children demonstrated improved outcomes versus students that continued living in high poverty areas. The only answer you gave to my question is that you want to eliminate the redlining effect that test scores have on real estate prices. Couldn't the same thing be accomplished by offering special programs at certain schools and encouraging integration by choices? Is that the main goal of redistricting? Do you realize that school mobility is a factor in lower educational outcomes for all students, including those students who aren't moved? Mobility causes harms that undercut many of the benefits claimed to be associated with redistricting by creating discontinuation in learning environments, weakening family connections with the schools, and harming peer relationships. Proponents for redistricting for socioeconomic diversity cite the benefits of increased parental involvement and contributions with a larger population of higher-income families, yet reassign students in a way that forces families to have siblings at different schools, making which reduces time and resources available to families. You can't have it both ways. I don't believe that continuously reassigning kids to different schools every few years is good for anyone. I would like to see a study that shows otherwise. Instead of asking what I'm worried about giving up, why not explain affirmatively why randomly assigning students to schools will improve student outcomes? And if every school has the same offerings, why make changes at all? |
Anonymous