I don't disagree with your post at all @doomer. But until policies in JCPS are changed so that great teachers want to be at Iroquois and Shawnee just like they want to be at Male and Manual nothing will change. Why not offer incentives to great teachers to either transfer to or stay at underachieving schools? Why not stop spending millions on a failed 30+ year social experiment and put those millions back into the school itself? Why not cut some of the bloat in the administration of JCPS and reinvest that in the schools?

 

Get tough administration in those schools who won't take any guff from the students/parents and that back the teachers, along with pay incentives to work at those tougher schools. They can raise the pay all they want, but if the teachers don't feel safe, empowered and feel they have the backing of the administration when things go awry (and they will go awry), then very few if any good teachers are going to sign up to go to those schools.

Edited February 9, 20179 yr by mcpapa

Also, All Tell, I get what you are saying about the busing. I actually think that more effort should be made to equalize the elementary schools' circumstances and eliminate the busing for those very young students. I don't have a problem with middle and high schoolers being bused. I rode a TARC, for goodness sake. It took me over an hour and 2-3 buses to get to school.

What many people outside education don't know is that a major plank in evaluating schools is the percentage of proficient students. As has been pointed out attracting proficient students to your school doesn't make you a better school in reality but it does in the eyes of KDE. When growth is measured most often it is measured wrong. Take the act scores of a school for example. Year A the average act is 18 and year B the average act is 19. Growth right? Not really, you just tested a 2 different groups of kids in the 11th grade. The only way to measure real growth is to measure the same kids from one year to the next. Thats when you can tell if teaching and learning are going on. You can be at the lowest ranked school in the state right now, take your kids at 3rd grade reading level in August and have them at 5th grade by May 2 full years of growth in 1 year and nobody knows or cares because by proficiency standards its high school and they are supposed to be at 10th grade level for example. You are failing says the rankings. Little Johhny Overachiever enrolls at school across town as a freshman reading on 10th grade level in august and 10 grade level in May and your school is awesome says the rankings, because he is above 9th grade proficiency.

#NotADisaster: JCPS teachers respond to Bevin