New Focus

August 18, 2008 - From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, comes this story about the new leadership of the American Federation of Teachers, "Women plan new focus leading teacher unions."

The American Federation of Teachers has recently elected female candidates to all three national posts, a first for a major U.S. labor union.

And if the new leaders have their way, students, teachers and parents will see a difference in the way schools are run, owing in part to an understanding of the obligations many women have of juggling jobs, children and other tasks.

Randi Weingarten, the new union president, wants change.

She wants schools to focus more on teaching than testing and plans to prod local officials to look at "the whole child, what we should be doing to improve not just math and reading proficiency but to help improve a whole child.

""We need bottom-up, real solutions so kids in St. Louis and Kansas City have a level playing field," she said. That could include extending hours so high school students who have a job can attend classes at night, providing some health care services at school or offering classes for parents who need a GED.

At the local level, there is the St. Louis Teachers Union.

Mary J. Armstrong, president of the 2,100-member St. Louis Teachers Union, says the leadership changes are "historic" and send a clear message about the role of women. Armstrong has long pushed for much of what Weingarten is advocating, including taking into account socioeconomic, nutritional, home life and other aspects of a student's life.

She now hopes to gain momentum in St. Louis, including for her desire to examine — and reverse — a rising dropout rate among black male students.

In Missouri, the American Federation of Teachers has 6,000 members — two-thirds of them in St. Louis and Kansas City.
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TT -Interesting article but no mention of the fact that the St. Louis School District was taken over by the state in 2007 after the Missouri Board of Education stripped the district of accreditation for poor academic performance and malfeasance. Kansas City is facing the same scrutiny (again.) Entry

Kansas City previously lost their accreditation in 1999. Both districts have been academic disasters and financially mismanaged for decades. Taking Over Bad Schools Entry

Don't miss this article on how the international relief organization Feed the Children delivers school supplies to children in -- Kansas City and St. Louis. And compare that to how the Kansas City school district spends their money in "A money mess bites hard in KC classrooms."

legal fees are off the charts, five times the average per-student costs of other districts, reflecting a troubled district that has been “under siege,” attorney Maurice Watson said.

A lot of those fees have gone to fight succession movements from outlying districts that no longer want to be part of the Kansas City Public School system and the costs of a revolving door for school superintendents.

The St. Louis public school system's cumulative debt in 2006 was almost $25 million, according to the State Board of Education, and it had six superintendents since 2003.

Declining enrollment is a polite way of referring to the mass exodus from Kansas City schools. Schools in Kansas City and St. Louis are so badly run that they are the only districts in the state who are allowed to have charter schools. The Kansas City Star urged the district to "cut bloated management." (And transportation. And maintenance costs.)

Schools in St. Louis and Kansas City are miserable and costly failures. It is surreal and ludicrous to want to "look at the whole child" when public schools can't even provide basic education. And it certainly doesn't help when a major newspaper in the state pretends nothing is wrong that a little cheerleading can't fix.

The pity, the absolute tragedy, is that there are four generations of school children from those schools who have been denied a decent education and the opportunity to escape from a soul-destroying poverty pit where political patronage is the game and education is just the cash cow.

The best, the very best, they can hope for is a Katrina-like disaster that will allow them to abandon the city and find a less corrupt place to live.