Reply to WAPO article on Prince George's County Schools

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[quote=Anonymous]I agree 12:01 that there needs to be participation and pressure put on by stakeholders, not just the school board. I think maybe we are seeing this a little bit now, though I'm skeptical that the Baker move will do much of anything. UMD getting involved with the new charter is a big deal. I'd love to see them coordinate with PGCPS to do a true lab school, but this is a good first step. The University has a huge interest in turning the schools around because they lose out on faculty (both in hiring and retention) because the schools have such a bad reputation. A lot of profs WANT to live in a college town, want to walk to campus, want to be part of the community, but that doesn't happen much at UMD and it is almost entirely due to the schools. UMD hasn't done much historically to get involved but maybe they are finally realizing they should have a dog in this fight. If the new charter is successful, maybe that paves the way for more collaboration.

I think residents, even those with kids in private, could get more organized and exert a bit of pressure too. The perception that the schools are terrible drives down everyone's property values. That ends up impacting the schools too. Better schools = higher tax revenues. I can't imagine that PGCPS wants to keep the schools in a bad state because there are seriously diminishing returns with that model. Home values go down instead of up. Tax revenues go down, so funding does take a hit eventually I think.

The other problem is the superintendent job is sort of an administrative death sentence. Experienced people aren't going to want to come in to a totally dysfunctional system and then have that failure on their record, so the people targeting the job tend to be people promoting up from a non-super job (unproven) or people coming from a super job in a much much smaller district who have no experience with the sort of issues PGCPS faces, at least not on that scale. I'm not sure what the solution is there either, but it isn't good that the job has turned into a revolving door. [/quote]

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