The New York Times ran a story last week illustrating tensions surrounding efforts to implement the recent Missouri State Supreme Court’s decision empowering students living in a failing unaccredited school district to instead attend a school in a higher-performing accredited district. As a former Missourian, I was pleased to see this potentially life-altering decision recognized by a major national news outlet for 2 reasons: urgency for social justice and scale implications.
First, if a school district has lost its accreditation due to low performance scores, students in that district’s schools can’t afford to wait a day longer to gain access to a higher-performing school. The failure of unaccredited districts, coupled with the reluctance of receiving districts to welcome transferring students, presents a social injustice that must be corrected immediately.
According to the NYT’s article, in Missouri’s unaccredited districts of Normandy and Riverview Gardens there is already high demand from families to transfer. Case in point: if given the choice, these parents would have their tax dollars spent differently, giving their children a better shot at a great education. Shameful rumors of arbitrary hourly deadlines for submitting transfer requests and needlessly invasive residency investigations abound abound. Since when is it acceptable to deny legal efforts to get a great public education? I thought we needed more parental involvement in our failing schools? It also certainly doesn’t sound like these actions have the best interest of children at heart.
Second, the Supreme Court’s decision has scale implications for children across the entire state of Missouri and not just urban areas, putting to rest the pervasive (and thinly veiled racist) myth that the “problems” in public education are limited to cities. The process by which accreditation status is determined by the State’s Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is called the “Missouri School Improvement Program,” or MSIP. Started in 1990, MSIP is now entering its fifth cycle, revised to increase attention on academic achievement within individual schools, as well as the achievement gap within schools.
With more of the accreditation award focused on student achievement than ever before, many districts that have easily earned high status in the past may not going forward. As such, while the three currently unaccredited districts are in the state’s two urban centers, it is likely, and expected, that the list of districts facing transfer options will include suburban and rural areas in future years. If districts don’t want to risk transfers in their areas, shelling out per pupil dollars to neighboring districts, then it’s time to prioritize a higher standard of learning for all children.
Kudos to outspoken and consistently vocal public leaders like Democratic Mayor Francis Slay of St. Louis, the Children’s Education Alliance of Missouri, the Kauffman Foundation, Democratic State Representative Steve Webb and State Senator Jamilah Nasheed for demanding more for their cities and state’s students. Shame on those who continue to make excuses, point fingers and seek to delay that which all children deserve: a great education.
Lea Crusey joined DFER as Deputy Director in July 2013 after serving as State Director at the education reform organization StudentsFirst, managing state-level activity in Missouri, Iowa and Nevada. She started her career as a middle school teacher in East Palo Alto, California, where she worked with high-needs kids and spent the next 8 years working in the public, private and non-profit sectors serving in a range of roles that included project management at the Chicago Transit Authority, financial operations management for LAZ Parking and advocacy at StudentsFirst. Read more about Lea here.