Connie Van Brunt, public schools, and the "achievement gap"

Back in April I wrote a post suggesting that the best way to close the "achievement gap" is to take steps to close the income gap.  "Ameliorating poverty," I wrote, "will go a a long way toward creating the good schools that everyone demands."

A recent letter* to the Nation drives home the importance of dealing directly with poverty and other "non-academic" issues as we attempt to improve the quality of our public schools.  It reads in part:

"But no one [at a recent NCLB conference] said unequivocally what must be said: No program aimed at educational improvement that fails to address those nonacademic needs head-on, fully financed and with passionate support by the government can possibly achieve significant educational gain." ...

"The result [of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty], as psychologists Wendy Williams and Stephen Ceci reported, was that the gap in IQ and achievement test scores between blacks and whites was halved in fifteen years."

That brings me to Connie Van Brunt.  According to Renee Mitchell's column this morning, the newly hired head of the Portland Schools Foundation said this of the achievement gap: "...that's my passion."   Good for her, I say.  I wonder if she reads the Nation.

Mitchell also mentions my post about the hiring of Van Brunt.  Ms Van Brunt claims that I, along with the commenters on my blog, must have a "...solid misconception about me. Perhaps a personal conversation will help clear this up."

Right now, I don't speak well enough to have a conversation with anybody, so let me attempt to clear up a few misconceptions in writing. 

First, I have no doubt about Ms Van Brunt's passion for the poor kids from the projects in Chicago, nor do I question her educational bona fides.  I do, however, question her judgment if she truly believes that the "achievement gap" can be fixed by tweaking our existing educational programs.  I'm all for genuine school reform, but without addressing the "non-academic" societal issues mentioned above, dealing with disadvantaged students in the schools is a task of monumental proportion. 

Even for charter schools, which Ms Van Brunt seems to believe provide the answer to improving the learning --or test scores, anyway-- of disadvantaged kids.  If that is indeed what she believes, I ask her to read my post again, and then to read the research regarding both poverty and the performance of charter schools vis-a-vis traditional public schools.

As I suggested in my post, I doubt that Ms Van Brunt knows much about the educational culture of Portland.  Portland is not Chicago, not by a long shot.  Portland has a long history of excellent neighborhood schools.  Unlike Chicago, few of Portland's white middle class kids have fled the system.  What a sizable number of progressive Portlanders, including newly -elected school board member, Ruth Adkins,  are worried about is what they see as the gradual dismantling of the public neighborhood school system in a misguided attempt to keep those middle class kids and their families happy.   They worry that their neighborhood schools are under assault by the proliferation of school choice, by the threat of the charter school movement, by short-sighted school closures, by an inadequate tax base, and by the growing reliance on corporate and foundation money to keep school programs running.

In short, they worry about the creeping privatization  of a once proud public school system.

Ms Van Brunt claims to be adept at raising corporate and foundation money for schools.  It would be reassuring if she claimed a similar aptitude for convincing elected leaders to pony up tax dollars to fund the public schools, especially since she is from a city --Chicago-- that is well on its way to privatizing a good portion of its public school system. 

That's what has Portlanders like me worried.  That's why I said that hiring Connie Van Brunt may set a bad precedent in a city looking for a new school superintendent.

Maybe she'll prove me wrong.

(* July 9 issue, written by Milton Schwebel,  Emeritus Dean, Graduate School of Education, Rutgers University)

 

Comments

[marcia]

I agree with all you said, Terry. And I would also like to note that the Portland Schools Foundation has evolved into something it was never intended to be...When it started out, PSF's purpose was to raise money to return (buy) teachers and programs for schools that had lost funds due to continuous budget cuts. It has always operated in an inequitable manner, with the upper crust schools able to auction off trips to Paris or $500,000 houses, while the lower income schools were left to beg for the leftover crumbs. Many chose not to even beg for the crumbs, because the process was so arduous. PSF has become a monster that now thinks it can set educational policy.

[Himself]

What irks me the most about Mitchell's column is that she couldn't be bothered to lift a finger to follow up on what you were talking about—that Van Brunt advocates charter schools as a tonic for public schools achievement.

Mitchell typifies the "phone-it-in" style of too many Oregonian staffers. They can't seem to manage a simple Google search, much less a little bit of serious research.

She does manage to slip in a mention of Van Brunt's work with the (ahem) Chicago Charter School Foundation. But she completely fails to place this into any kind of context within the greater public schools reform debate.

Once again, the cult of personality wins out over any serious discussion of policy in the realm of Portland Public Schools.