This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Peter Downs served on the St. Louis school board for just a short time, in 2006-07, but what he saw gave him a pretty good picture of what he thinks is wrong with public education in general and the city schools in particular.
He’s put his thoughts down in a new book, “Schoolhouse Shams," that discusses situations familiar to anyone who has followed the fortunes of the city schools in recent years. But he also has views that may be surprising.
He takes on the civic leaders who he says talked about reforming education but instead supported actions that “resulted in a catastrophic failure of the school system.”
He dismisses the idea that the “golden age” of education in St. Louis came back in the 1950s and ‘60s, when the city’s schools and Superintendent William Kottmeyer may have attracted national attention but practiced a form of discrimination that finally was remedied through a long-running federal court battle.
And Downs says the biggest sham of all may come when supporters who want to change schools insist that their motivation is “all about the children.”
“People uncover stories every day about how private parties extract more money from schools and students, abuse the public trust and the public wealth in schools, cut quality, and close off opportunities,” he concludes. “Get them and share them. Follow the money trail.
“And the next time someone asks for public money ‘for the kids,’ think twice. Look carefully for independent evidence that what is proposed actually helps children and look to see where the money goes.”
Downs, who works as a freelance writer and editor, has two children in city magnet schools. He spoke with the Beacon about his experiences and his book. The interview is condensed and edited for clarity.
What do you think of the factors that have influenced the accreditation status of the city schools?
Downs: Both the denial of accreditation and the reinstatement of partial accreditation were driven by politics. In one case, the politics said the school board is failing and the district is failing and we need to have this alternative. Then political pressure said things are improving and we’re on the right track.
In the first case, it came outside the normal accreditation process. You had to change the rules for how to count what kids were going to college, for example, and that changed the way accreditation was given.
Then the commissioner first said I don’t think they’ve improved enough for provisional accreditation, that one year does not a trend make, so we need to have a number of years. Then she reversed herself and recommended provisional accreditation. In neither case was it as objective as it pretends to be. There is a lot of politics involved.
How has Mayor Francis Slay affected education in the city?
Downs: I think he definitely has set education back at least 10 years, in terms of his involvement in outsourcing management and focusing on teaching to the test and narrowing the curriculum. Those wiped out the gains made in the early part of this century.
I admit there is no way of knowing what would have happened if we didn’t have Slay jumping into the school board election in 2003. But we can say that things are worse than they were in 2003.
With testing, the emphasis on a standardized test without a clear direction about the body of knowledge to be tested has hurt the school district. There have always been tests. But it used to be that the important ones were the ones administered by the schools. Now, more emphasis has been placed on tests imposed on the schools.
Like a lot of parents, I fall in the middle on an issue like that. It’s entirely appropriate that tests determine whether kids are learning what they are supposed to learn, but they shouldn't do that without saying what kids are supposed to learn. That ends with teachers flailing around instead of focusing on what needs to be taught. There’s a difference between teaching to the test and gearing a test to measure what is being taught. It’s the cart before the horse kind of thing.
I’m not convinced that these annual tests are a good thing. I don’t think that really matches the way students learn. Kids’ interest in learning is not all the same.
What effect has the voluntary city-county desegregation plan had on schools in the city? One of the shams in the book is that deseg destroyed the city schools.
Downs: The real white flight from the city was in response to housing segregation. I think the real damage to St. Louis schools was happening before school desegregation, with the flight of middle-income people out of the city and the loss of businesses in the 1970s like Carter Carburetor.
That would have been a huge challenge for any school district to deal with, and then school desegregation came on top of all that. It didn’t make things any easier, but it doesn’t deserve all the blame for what happened at the St. Louis Public Schools.
Why do you say that schools are too often used as scapegoats for general social problems?
Downs: If teenagers are involved in killing someone, immediately the blame may go to schools. Sorry, it’s not the schools’ fault that teens killed someone. That’s ascribing more power to schools than they actually have.
A lot of the troubles that schools have involves the children coming into schools with all of the effects of poverty and high-crime neighborhoods and maybe homelessness and lack of medical care and abusive family situations. Those are hard to for schools to deal with, and at the same time it’s not helpful to say schools are to blame for that environment. The causes of those problems are more complicated.
In some ways, it’s a copout for politicians to say it’s the schools’ fault. Schools may have a role in it, but it’s not all their fault.
Your book diagnoses what you see are shams in public education. What can the public do to end them?
Downs: It’s more of an awareness issue. You have to be aware of all these choices where people can benefit economically. This is happening across the country, not just here. Up and down the line there are people who stand to get richer from one choice or another. Be aware of that, and look for more objective data than what you get from people who might benefit from it.
There’s a positive benefit from an elected board in terms of transparency and access to information. People who are interested and motivated to find out more and see what are the data to support decisions are more likely to get it from an elected board. Even an elected board is no magic wand. But it opens the door to more citizen involvement. An appointed board is not responsible to and doesn’t have to report to the citizens.
I will say that the schools have improved since the state decided to impose an unelected board, but a lot of the things done to improve the schools are the exact same things that the elected board was starting or planning. I actually think the unelected board delayed the improvement of the schools by a couple of years.