Thursday, July 13, 2006
Calls to Action for Pittsburgh Schools Reach 100
A prominent civic leader in Pittsburgh responding to a RAND study that shows the City’s high school drop rate is 35 percent said “.. very few of our children are really achieving to their maximum potential. I pray this is a call to action for the adults in the Greater Pittsburgh area.” Responding to the same report, some school board members chose to bury their heads in the sand and complained that the report is not accurate.
The latest call to action is another in a long list going back several decades. And there have been billions of dollars worth of actions taken. The result; academic performance continues to be abysmal in most City high schools. Rather than questioning studies that show high drop out rates and low graduation rates, the school board members should question how it is that Westinghouse High can have graduation rate of 61 percent when only 16 percent of 11th graders are proficient in reading and 9 percent are proficient in math.
The fact is that Pittsburgh schools have been academically underperforming for decades and hand wringing by public officials and civic leaders have marked every new piece of evidence of how bad things are. Thus it is that Pittsburgh schools have an operating budget that spends almost $17,000 per student, one of the highest in Pennsylvania if not the highest. And real improvement seems as far away as ever. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of children are having their lives ruined in terms of getting an education that can offer them a reasonable shot at becoming productive adults.
If the adults in Pittsburgh and on the school board were not so wedded to their statist mind set and were willing to try some really different approaches there might be some hope. But the citizens of the City and its school board representatives are stuck in the 1930s and are completely unwilling to consider vouchers or other competition inducing steps.
The latest call to action is another in a long list going back several decades. And there have been billions of dollars worth of actions taken. The result; academic performance continues to be abysmal in most City high schools. Rather than questioning studies that show high drop out rates and low graduation rates, the school board members should question how it is that Westinghouse High can have graduation rate of 61 percent when only 16 percent of 11th graders are proficient in reading and 9 percent are proficient in math.
The fact is that Pittsburgh schools have been academically underperforming for decades and hand wringing by public officials and civic leaders have marked every new piece of evidence of how bad things are. Thus it is that Pittsburgh schools have an operating budget that spends almost $17,000 per student, one of the highest in Pennsylvania if not the highest. And real improvement seems as far away as ever. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of children are having their lives ruined in terms of getting an education that can offer them a reasonable shot at becoming productive adults.
If the adults in Pittsburgh and on the school board were not so wedded to their statist mind set and were willing to try some really different approaches there might be some hope. But the citizens of the City and its school board representatives are stuck in the 1930s and are completely unwilling to consider vouchers or other competition inducing steps.
