No shock in ‘failing’ schools report, but not much to cheer about, either
We would have been naively optimistic in the extreme to expect that no Muscogee County public schools would appear on the first “F” list submitted by the state under the new Chief Turnaround Officer.
We weren’t, and they did. As reported earlier this week by education writer Mark Rice, five Muscogee County School District schools were on the list of 104 “Turnaround Eligible” schools: Baker Middle, Rothschild Leadership Academy, and Brewer, Dorothy Height and Martin Luther King Jr. elementaries.
It’s a fact, if only a nominally positive one, that the number of MCSD schools on the state’s “chronically failing” list has dropped each year since the original ranking by the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement in 2015 — from 10 to eight, to seven this January, to the current five. One is too many; and the reduction in the number of underperforming schools is offset by the fact that while four schools that had been on the list improved enough to get off it — and that is to be celebrated — others, in this case Brewer and Rothschild, were added to it. Clearly there are some educational boats that the tide not only hasn’t lifted, but that are riding lower in the water than before.
Obviously the school district would like to remedy the situation without state intervention – or as Superintendent David Lewis put it in an email, “determine the destiny of all our schools.”
Under the terms of the First Priority Act, the legislation that created the Turnaround office, the administration of a school on the failing list must craft an “intensive” plan to improve student performance on the College and Career Ready Performance Index (CCRPI), the benchmark measurement of school achievement. If the standards of that plan aren’t met after three years, state intervention can include student transfers, involuntary personnel changes or even school operations turned over entirely to a private nonprofit.
Under those standards and on that timetable, a reduction in the number of failing schools in the MCSD needs not just to continue, but to accelerate.
Quiet departure
It wasn’t so long ago that the annual School of the Americas Watch protest at the main gate of Fort Benning was a major event — even after the School of the Americas was no longer the School of the Americas.
Each November thousands of protesters, including activist organizations, clerics, veterans, students, musicians, artists and the occasional celebrity, would come to town to demand the closing of what is now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
There was no doubting the conviction behind the protests, even if the choice of site and target was debatable.
Last year, only 33 people showed up; this year, according to Columbus Police Lt. Herman Miles, nobody involved in the protest originally organized by Father Roy Bourgeois has even sought a permit for what would have been the 27th annual vigil.
Sometimes what W.B. Yeats called “passionate intensity” just can’t be sustained.
This story was originally published November 8, 2017 at 5:55 PM with the headline "No shock in ‘failing’ schools report, but not much to cheer about, either."