It seems that the big picture is often lost in a constant political debate over public education in Kansas City.
Accordingly . . .
- Given that Mayor Sly is calling on State politicos to change the school transfer law that was upheld today by the Missouri Supreme Court . . .
- Given that Superintendent Dr. Stephen Green says that he doesn't expect many transfers ...
- Also consider that Dr. Green doesn't even live in the district or Kansas City for that matter and Mayor Sly mostly sent his children to pricey private schools . . .
Knowing all this . . . Considering the current hot mess and even "stabilization" that has been touted . . .
The question is:
WOULD YOU SEND YOUR KIDS TO KANSAS CITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS?!?
Like it or not, and acknowledging there are other facets to this debate we need to explore, the answer to this one is the real measure of progress and even a cursory glance at enrollment numbers reveal that a great many people have responded "NO" to this question with their feet and not words.
More in a bit...
TKC, you got it wrong. We are talking about scholors and not students.
ReplyDeleteANSWER: FUCK NO!
ReplyDeleteWe don't want you.
DeleteHell NO.
ReplyDeleteWe don't want you.
DeleteHell no, man that was a stupid question.
ReplyDeleteWe don't want you.
DeleteSly James is forever trying to force people into doing something not even he is willing to do. Somebody has to ask the tough questions. What passes for leadership in Kansas City is NOT Sly James.
ReplyDelete'Only a fool would let their enemy educate their children.'
ReplyDelete-- Malcolm X
Wow…really. Quoting Malcolm X white boy. Bold and stupid.
DeleteNot bold, just stupid. And I guess his "enemies" are white teachers who live in the suburbs, as that is the majority makeup of the teachers in KCPS. Idiot.
DeleteNot sending my kids to any school in any town or city where the mayor refers to citizens as Joe Blow on the street and doesn't even know how many homicides have been committed in his own city.
ReplyDeleteSorry
We don't want your kind in our schools anyway. Stay away please.
Delete6:51 PM Profound and on point. Malcom was a smart man.
ReplyDeleteI teach in KCMSD and the most of the kids that want to transfer out...are problem students. They think their academic problems are because of bad teachers and not because of their misbehavior, suspensions, and general "I'm not going to do the assignment because I don't feel like it" attitude.
ReplyDeleteI have a sneaking suspicion that once they transfer out...KCPS scores will go up and the scores in districts that receive these kids will go down.
The students that are working hard, behaving, and learning...are not the ones talking about "I want to leave this district.."
An interesting comment. Thanks.
DeleteAgreed. Thank you for serving our children.
DeleteKCPS does have some really good schools. One thing I've wondered about is how districts like Blue Springs and Grandview can have quite a few schools that are designated as having high poverty but still be top notch schools. There has to be something different with the curriculums and the instruction.
ReplyDeleteA letter from a Baltimore teacher two months ago. The newspaper blamed poor schools for the crime rate in Baltimore.
ReplyDelete""I have taught in the Baltimore public school system for the past two decades. What we need is better students. We have many excellent teachers. I cannot count the number of students who have physically destroyed property in the schools.
"They have trashed brand new computers, destroyed exit signs, set multiple fires, destroyed many, many lockers, stolen teachers' school supplies, written their filth on the tops of classroom desks, defecated in the bathrooms and stairwells, assaulted teachers (beyond constantly telling them to perform certain impossible acts upon themselves) and refused to do any homework or class work.
"Need I go any further? I won't even bother addressing the other 'causes' you listed. Too inane. In summary, the problem seems to be a total disregard for life that exists not only in our crime-ridden city, but also in all of the major cities throughout the United States.
@7:02 has the best comment.
ReplyDeleteIt ain't money, it is the culture.
ReplyDeleteHow can a lack of money explain our declining test scores when America continues to spend more per capita on education than almost any other country? Yet, the more we spend, the lower the test scores we get back in global competition?
Some insist the persistence of poverty in an affluent America is the cause of these declining test scores.
Yet, have we not fought a 50-year war on poverty since LBJ’s Great Society? And not only have countless trillions of dollars been spent, the poor in America receive benefits of which the world’s poor could only dream.
America’s poor receive free food, free health care and free education for their children from Head Start to K-12. The poor get subsidized housing and subsidized incomes. They are exempt from federal income taxes. State programs and private charities pick up where the feds leave off.
Yet, if poverty explains the dismal performance of America’s students, why are they being lapped by Vietnamese 15-year-olds?
Do the Vietnamese have a higher per capita income than we?
Is there less poverty and more emphasis on education in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City than New York City and Washington, D.C.?
Is home environment behind the disparity in test scores?
Forty percent of American children are born out of wedlock, but for Hispanics it is 53 percent and for African-Americans 73 percent.
Looking again at those PISA test scores, other than East Asia — China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam — hardly any other nation of Southeast or South Asia, the Arab or Muslim world, Africa or Latin America, is in the top forty in academic performance.
And, in these test scores from a diverse world, we can see mirrored the academic performance within our own diverse nation.
Just as East Asians and Europeans excel in the PISA tests, so, too, do Americans of East Asian and European descent dominate test scores and excel in educational achievement, while our Hispanic and African-American students trail.
What a stupid fucking question.
ReplyDeleteOf course most of the neanderthals who read this crap blog are going to talk shit and issue a resounding "no." It is what they do, talk shit because they are protected by anonymity lol.
ReplyDeleteAmen
DeleteI think 7:02 is wrong. It will be the good students that are stuck in the bad non-signature schools that will transfer out because their families give a crap.
ReplyDeleteHELL NO!
ReplyDeleteWe don't want you.
DeleteYou couldnt even pay me enough money to send one of my own into that kind of environment.
ReplyDeleteNot even $100,000 per year would do it.
Dude just say you won't send your kids to school with blacks…
DeleteExactly 7:46. And we don't want you 7:24.
DeleteExactly 7:46. And we don't want you 7:24.
DeleteThe only schools I would even consider sending my kids to would be Border Star and Lincoln. I guarantee that the majority of parents in those schools would transfer out of the district if for some reason their child could no longer attend.
ReplyDeleteWe need some labor camps for the dropouts to go to. If you drop out of school then under a court order off you go. There they will learn how to do construction work for the people.
ReplyDeleteAfghanistan? Sure. Somalia? Sure. KCPS? No thanks.
ReplyDeleteOkay you just sound stupid
DeleteGet a Realtor 'cause those schools are gonna empty out pretty fast
ReplyDeleteSuperintendent Green must be smoking pot with Gunnar Hand if he thinks there won't be many transfers.
ReplyDelete7:02 Is right on it....it is complex to know exactly what goes on inside a classroom until you have been in one, day in an day out... so much of it boils down to disruptive students who no one can control and administrators who don't have the sense to know what to do with them, so they micromanage the classrooms because they don't want to do the hard work of managing troubled "non-learners."
ReplyDeleteWho the hell is having kids nowadays? What the fuck for?
ReplyDeleteAnd the correct answer is......Tony already cleverly answered the question when he astutely observed the facts that Dr. Green does NOT live in the KCPS district, not even in Missouri, and KCMO Mayor James sent his children to private schools.
ReplyDeleteDO AS I SAY, NOT AS I DO!
This next analogy is very IMPORTANT, so pay attention, and remember this one:
Think of KCMO as a prostitute. Not a high-class prostitute, but a common street walker.
The business interests that largely control the political scene in town, treat the city, as the cheating married husband regards the street walking prostitute. The business interests are looking to take advantage of the city's finances and power of control, as the cheating spouse seeks to take advantage of the impoverished prostitute for cheap sex. Neither the business leaders nor the cheating spouse hold their counterpart with any respect, it's simply about using your power to extract what you want from another.
Sorry KCMO, but the civic leaders in town think of you as a whore to be used for servicing their needs.
mayor James put his kids in private school didn't he? hypocrite
ReplyDeleteKCSD can not be fixed. It will take an appointed administrator that is not bound by politics, AFT, social brainiacs or grafting ignorant school board folks like airwick.
ReplyDeleteUntil the school is turned over to an appointed true educator that has the only goal of teaching children and is unimpeded by all the fugwads that have ruined KCSD there will be no real change.
I believe that the majority of students and teachers in the KCPS District are fine. The problem is that teachers must spend 95% of their time managing one or two students in their classes who are disrespectful, disruptive, and out of control.
ReplyDeleteIn the "olden days" children did not behave that way because that behavior was not allowed in school. Students with severe behavior problems or who act out just could not attend school with "the rest of us".
Unfair? You bet, because I know that many of these students turned out OK in the end. But at what cost? Well, I will tell you that it is at a tremendous cost to the other students, who lost out on their educations because of the behavior of a few bad apples.
I hate to label children, but I think a case can be made for these students to be "relocated" to a school where they can all be together and not learn. I know that some parents will object, but too bad. They are hurting every student in that classroom.
I have all three of my school aged children enrolled in KCPS; two of them are at Lincoln, one of the 100 best public high schools in the country.
ReplyDeleteThe only problems we've experienced is that there have been three different superintendents with different goals in the past seven years, and violence our sexual harassment NEAR school property during school hours, which speaks more to the city's inability to address crime than the school district's ability to educate children.
The problem that many of these children face comes from home, and busing them to another district that isn't going to feed them three meals a day, deal with the language barriers, or have the counselors qualified to deal with some of the neglect issues that affect them is NOT going to improve their test scores... it's just going to delude their under-performance into a larger pool of testers.
Can we stop running from our problems and deal with them, please?
7:16 is wrong and probably has no experience or first hand knowledge of what actually happens in KCPS.
ReplyDelete7:27; James, Carver, Gladstone, and Foreign Language Academy are all quality schools. Two of them are K-8, the other two are K-6.
Hale Cook is also an interesting new experiment that I have high hopes for.
The Paseo is a decent high school, but unfortunately, their music program has struggled in the past decade. Their visual arts and dance instruction are still quality, however.
Without a doubt, Lincoln and Border Star are two of the top performing schools in the district, but much of that has to do with the fact that those two schools don't "scare off" the families who have the ability to put their kids in another district.
If we could promote these other schools, and continue to diagnose, isolate, and improve the problems that some of the other schools are having, the only real problem that KCPS would have is attracting new families back into the district.
Anonymous Anonymous said...
ReplyDeleteDude just say you won't send your kids to school with blacks…
12/10/13, 7:46 PM
Ok, I won't send my kids to school with niggers! How's that?
OMG! OMG ! You said nigger, wow. You told me. Another failed attemt. Keep trying…Black population 40,808, 825. White population 225,624,923 It's rough being white. Please forgive me that I don't acknowledge your struggle.
DeleteBryan- I'm a graduate and both parents retired as teachers from KCPS. Plenty of my friends are just waiting to leave the district. Many of them said (on my fb page when I posted the article ) they were trying to get through this morning to see what steps they need to take.
ReplyDeleteReopening SW High was the worst thing to happen to Brookside. Nearly every day we can hear fire trucks and police sirens going to the school.
ReplyDelete8:05; I would argue that your friends who are looking at the steps to leave the district are part of the problem, then.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they're not receiving the education they'd like, but I'm not convinced they're going to get that in another district. I went to both KCMSD (KCPS) and NKCSD, and while the extra-curricular activities had more funding in the Northland, there were just as many problems with fighting, drugs, questionable teachers and administrators, and cruddy parents as there were in KCPS, just a larger pool of students to delude the results.
Education is just another racket. We spend enough money on your precious darlings.
ReplyDeleteEliminate the crazy expense accounts for luxury travel and attending useless meetings. Nothing more than shopping trips. We know who you are, so don't write in to justify your perks.
9:47pm is unfortunately exactly right about the ATM machine that is KCMO city hall being a prostitute for the civic elite.
ReplyDeleteEven sadder is the fact that the people who get elected and re-elected to the council and mayor's jobs are the johns.
And the same kind of people keep get elected year after year.