Education Group - April 29

A City That Works - April 29
Education Discussion Group at St. Gabriel's

Eight people – mostly people who graduated from or taught in Philly public schools at some point.  A lively, opinionated group – but one that struggled with the notion of pinning down their aspirations and ideas in the form of measurable standards. But in the end, they got there with some innovative ideas.

What does this goal mean to you?

• When people tell the success stories out of the schools, to counteract the stereotypes.

• People feel pride in the school district and want to send their kids there.

• We teach every child to read; there’s an underclass that needs saving and we can’t save them if they can’t read.  We need to reach them wherever they are. If they’re 35 and they still can’t read, we still need to reach them.

• Focus on teenagers; make sure they are still meeting their measures of quarterly success.

• Are kids graduating?  Do kids in school really believe they have choices about what to do in life that depend on them graduating?  We need to connect education to the images of success that matter to kids.  E.g. explain to them that Tupac was a very literate, well-educated man, that his music was based on poetry.

• Improving the dropout rate and the attribution rate for teachers, which are both unacceptable.

• That we improve the percentage of students who are literate, who meet standards, and that more kids actually value meeting standards, that it means something to them.

Performance measures

• We need to get inside the dropout problem.  Measuring it by failure in high school is too late. What goes on in middle school?  We need to identify what the warning signs are in middle school for kids who are on path to dropout, and measure those.

• What percentage of schools have quality arts and sports programs?  These are the things that connect to the whole person, that lead to postsecondary success, and that keep kids in school.  We need that glue that creates pride in the school and in the self.

• Parental involvement is an important thing but hard to measure. Perhaps:

• Number of home visits by school personnel

• Percentage of parents, by school, who are in PTA or home-school associations.

• Percentage of eligible kids who are in afterschool programs.  It’s the uninvolved parents who put their kids in bad situations after school, and that don’t take advantage of afterschool slots. So we need to measure how much outreach the schools do to these parents.

• Teacher retention rates are vital. We need a standard for how much they should improve year over year.

• Every nonprofit, company or agency that gets contracts from the city or school district relating to education should be required to do x amount of “strategic mentoring” in schools, helping kids see what jobs and career paths are open to them.

• Truancy rates – standard should be that they shrink each year until you reach the average attendance rate in suburban schools, then stay there.

• Percentage of kids receiving training in job search skills.

• Percentage of teachers who have done continuing ed in how to give kids career mentoring.

• Why not measure the success this all supposed to be about: Every year, measure which percentage of the previous year’s “potential graduating class” (i.e. including dropouts) ha a job, or is in postsecondary education, the armed forces or (if a dropout) a GED program.
 

Customer Service Standards

This group, which wanted to spend a long time talking about how dropouts are formed in middle school and about the importance of arts and sports, did not get to the stage of discussing customer-service expectations.