Revisionist Thinking

(Reprinted with permission from Folio Weekly)

Sparks flew at the Dec. 17 Charter Revision Commission meeting when Duval County School Board Member Tommy Hazouri leaked the results of a mayoral campaign poll: 84 percent of Jacksonville voters oppose replacing their elected school board with an appointed one.
When Hazouri implied that further discussion of the matter would be a “waste of time,” Commission Chairman Wyman Duggan interrupted him, saying tersely that he did not apologize for the work of his commission in fully exploring the proposal to appoint the School Board.

Ultimately, if the City Council likes the idea, we voters would decide whether to relinquish our electoral connections to our school board -- connections forged at PTA and SAC meetings, on the telephone, in the grocery store. We’d decide either by local referendum or by a state constitutional amendment referendum, depending on whom you ask. Those who advocate changing to an appointed board believe that Article VIII, Section 1(d) of the Florida Constitution permits county voters to change the way they put certain constitutional officers -- like the tax collector -- into office. The section doesn’t specifically mention school board members, however, and those who favor keeping the elected board point to a different section. Article IX is dedicated specifically to public school issues, and requires that school board members be chosen by a “vote of the electors.”
The “Article Niners” say such a change would require a state constitutional alteration, not a mere referendum. But we can’t take either side’s word on it. The final decision will rest with a state court judge or the First DCA or the Florida Supreme Court, after what could turn out to be a long and costly legal brouhaha. At the end of said brouhaha, both sides will know whether to hold a local or state referendum on the issue, at which point more time, talent and treasure will be put into both sides of that referendum campaign.
Or we can try to settle the debate here and now, which would require us to turn our attention to the most important question that emerged during the Dec. 17 Charter Revision Commission meeting. Commissioner Jeanne Miller posed it, to both Duval Schools’ Superintendent Ed Pratt-Dannals and Board Chairman Brenda Priestly Jackson, after they completed lengthy presentations in favor of maintaining an elected board. Miller opened her question by citing Duval’s 69.6 percent graduation rate as evidence of poor performance. (Florida’s graduation rate is 78.9 percent by the same measure.) “What would be the harm,” she asked in light of these figures, “of a 10-year experiment [with an appointed board]?”

Answering Miller’s question entails tackling that question’s parameters, and Priestly Jackson took the commission to task for presenting graduation data absent accompanying socioeconomic data. Forty-eight percent of Duval students are eligible for free or reduced lunch, and as any University of North Florida education major can tell you, socio-economic status has a high positive correlation with academic performance. That doesn’t mean we lower standards—that means we as a community must dig a little deeper to serve all our students.

Jacksonville’s history and its population distinguish it from the bedroom communities of St. Johns County, for example. We in Duval have the largest minority population in Florida -- not Hillsborough, not Miami-Dade. When we talk about problems in public education in Jacksonville, we’re talking largely about poor and/or minority students -- not the children of highly educated exurban dwellers.

Comparisons that ignore these demographics are reminiscent of former Gov. Bush’s “private schools are better” argument. Sure they are -- until you control for the socioeconomic status of those schools’ students. When that data is factored in, private schools fare no better than public schools.
For years, national and state political leaders have decried the fact that “poor children” are “trapped” in “failing” public schools. Taxpayer- subsidized “choices,” private school vouchers, were peddled as the panacea. But in Florida, after a seven-year experiment with corporate tax vouchers, there is data that shows low-income voucher students performing no better in private-school settings than their income-level peers in public schools.

The problem isn’t that public education is inferior to private--it’s not. The problem is the flipside of our greatest aspirations as a democratic society: We want to educate everyone, and that’s resource intensive. With great vigor and honorable ideals, we’ve chosen the Mount Everest of goals. But instead of empowering educators to dig in and make the climb, we elect politicians who claim they have the secret to how to scale the summit without breaking a sweat. Instead of investing confidence in our highly trained professional teaching force, we take the advice of policymakers who (after all) went to school once. We micromanage, we demoralize and then we cut funding. And when, after all the attacks and decimation, it still doesn’t work right, we’re primed for the next politician’s silver bullet idea for reforming public education -- like appointed school boards.

The “harm” in switching from an elected to an appointed school board, Chairman Priestly Jackson told the Charter Revision Commission, is that it would dissolve the very bonds that we should be working to strengthen, the bonds between government and those who stand to lose -- or gain -- the most from public education policy: poor people and minorities. Ironically, some say that those bonds were strained to fragility by the original charter, the very process of city/county consolidation itself back in 1968. Many African-American voters viewed consolidation as a means, intentional or not, of diluting black political power in Jacksonville.

Add to the mix the historical impact of white flight from the city’s core; the traceable line of economic deterioration on Jacksonville’s Northside since at least the 1960s; the uneven busing practices for desegregation that had elementary-school-age black children boarding buses to cross the river to go to school, while white kids on the Southside weren’t required to board those buses until sixth or seventh grade. This history left a generation of Jacksonville’s African-American parents with no institutional memory of their own neighborhood’s core -- the elementary school.
These facts aren’t offered make excuses, or to transform a civic debate into a racial one, but to remind us who we are. We’re a city with a history of political and economic alienation that can’t afford to leave any stakeholders behind. In Jacksonville, the ropes between elected and electorate keep us all on the same climb.
And we now have a large web of stakeholders in place, coordinating to offer help, all at once. Just two years ago and for the first time ever, Jacksonville’s business and philanthropic leaders sat down with our homegrown Superintendent and our talented school board to produce a strategic plan for the public schools. Now we have benchmarks built on broad-based consensus. Notably, we also have a young, citizen-driven process that has begun to discern the city’s role in enhancing public education, the Jacksonville Journey.

Jacksonville has finally created an appropriately large table where stakeholders are already convening with rolled-up sleeves to tackle the challenges within our public schools. The question is not whether the city should upend this table and commandeer a new one in the form of an appointed board. The question is: What can the city bring to the table to help with the enormous workload?

Tags: Charter Revision Commission; public schools; elected school board; appointed school board

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 3:02 PM and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.