Now some educated rationale to the whole situation. "need civic leaders who can mix brutal, clear-headed honesty about current problems with a willingness to explore (and put significant resources behind) big ideas that challenge longstanding assumptions." This is what this city needs! Period. Not the status quo who has taken our system into a sinking tank.
"A bad idea doesn’t become a good idea just because those who think it’s a bad idea don’t realize it or say so until late in the game." Can the plan at least be given a chance? What has been done is not working and to take a last minute ditch effort to get one board members way is just not right.

The notion of secondary education as job training is for other people’s kids.

Exactly. Is this why Hillwood touts an International Baccalaureate program and Pearl-Cohn a business magnet? If we send extra money to P-C, does that ensure the students will receive an "equal education"?

Excellent and clear statements about the obvious. It seems to me those who think reconcentrating poverty will recover a complex urban system are the ostrichs or as mentioned in Item 3, business men with a few business women:

"...Why do you think most of the business leaders and politicians who dominate conversations about public education don’t send their own kids to public schools? The notion of secondary education as job training is for other people’s kids."

Bruce:

You fail to mention WHY resegregation is a problem in many urban school districts, including Nashville's: The fact that middle class parents have lost confidence in the public schools' ability to deliver a good, well-rounded education.

Telling them they are wrong, that they are racist, and that they have a public duty to support public schools isn't going to change the fact that, when parents who care about education for its own sake are trying to decide where to send their kids to school, academic performance is going to be the deciding factor.

I have a friend who has chosen private school (USN) for her entering high school freshman this year because her public school option is Hillwood, and she does not want to send her child there because (1) she thinks the principal does a poor job of managing the school and that he came to Hillwood having done a poor job at the school (Stratford, I think) where he was before, (2) Hillwood has a problem with gangs, and (3) the level of parental involvement needed at Hillwood is daunting, and she doesn't have the time, energy or stomach for it, because it's hard to be one of a few involved parents at a school where the needs are so great they seem overwhelming.

Yes, this parent is white.

No, this parent is not rich.

Yes, this parent and her child applied to magnet schools, and no, they didn't win a slot. Had they won a slot at Hume-Fogg or MLK, they would very likely remain in the public system. They deemed Hillwood an unacceptable option.

You, Jeff Woods and Matt Pulle can claim this person is racially motivated, but I can testify that diversity is one of the big reasons why this parent -- and my husband and I -- want to support public schools. When my child attended a Catholic school in Nashville, we were the diversity because we were Protestant -- and we didn't view that as a positive.

However, there are a lot of us out here who aren't willing to compromise the quality of our children's education, and for whom the presence of gangs is enough to rule out a public high school.

Finally, it's almost impossible for kids to receive an "equal education" if they aren't receiving equal support from parents and other mentors.

This discussion has left me utterly discouraged about the ultimate fate of the public schools. Although the state of Tennessee acknowledges that academic performance is an issue in public schools, the Scene's commentators have said, in the course of this discussion, that quality is a relative term, and that poor academic performance is a convenient excuse for white people who don't want to attend public schools to use as a cover for their racism.

If we can't even acknowledge that academic performance - which also encompasses class size, curriculum (it's a big issue to some middle class parents of all races that Metro has decided to prohibit 7th grade algebra despite the fact that some kids at MLK are ready for it), teacher qualifications and performance, facilities and language options - is the root of the problem and the real reason why the middle class has abandoned the public schools in droves, and then take steps to address that, the middle class will continue to abandon the public schools and the problems they face will become even more insurmountable.

And, as long as those of us who are white, middle class and absolutely committed to public education, but only if academic quality is paramount and emphasized over any other goal INCLUDING diversity, are branded as racist because we want schools that deliver a good education first and foremost, most of us are not going to reveal our actual identities in a forum like this.

Did anyone catch the following from the report Bruce linked? Very interesting:

"The schools are not only becoming less white but also have a rising proportion of poor
children. The percentage of school children poor enough to receive subsidized lunches
has grown dramatically. This is not because white middle class students have produced a
surge in private school enrollment; private schools serve a smaller share of students than
a half century ago and are less white. The reality is that the next generation is much less
white because of the aging and small family sizes of white families and the trend is
deeply affected by immigration from Latin American and Asia. Huge numbers of
children growing up in families with very limited resources, and face an economy with
deepening inequality of income distribution, where only those with higher education are
securely in the middle class"

So...what do we do then? BB - "We will not rescue the system by pinching pennies, swapping principals, forming task forces, and tinkering with zone lines. Big cities with troubled school systems (which is to say just about every city) need civic leaders who can mix brutal, clear-headed honesty about current problems with a willingness to explore (and put significant resources behind) big ideas that challenge longstanding assumptions." Okay. What are those big ideas that challenge the long standing assumptions? Charter schools? Return to busing? Complete school choice? What? I'm not being snarky (truly I'm not). For all the people who are against the zone change plans - and I completely respect their reasons for being so - I haven't heard what their ideas are to make the entire school system better for everyone (and I'm not suggesting that the new zone changes accomplish that, I have my own misgivings about it). BB - I look to you as an intellectual leader in this community, what are your ideas on how to improve our public schools?

For all of you who ask what can we do, it's a hard conversion but we can change to a system like Wake County(Raleigh), NC has been implementing and adjusting for 30+ years:

http://www.wcpss.net/history/index.html

The SCENE appears to oppose Bell Bend. Yet money is needed for schools and all the rest, so tax money needs to come from somewhere. This is an obvious inconsistency based on the confused idea that these
rich land/home owners do not wish to feel the effects of urban development in urban Davidson county and have their view/life syle obstructed, Opposition by the SCENE to Bells Bend does not fit well in these messages. But, not having a dog in this fight leads me to my reasonable position... why should I pay more.

Are we sure that the MTC will really increase tax revenues?

Well, I don't know, but the idyllic rural life as lived in Scottsboro won't produce a lot either.

It would seem like if developing every last parcel of your green space was the route to a better public education, the Miami-Dade school system would be producing Rhodes scholars by the busload.

The SCENE appears to oppose Bell Bend. Yet money is needed for schools and all the rest, so tax money needs to come from somewhere. This is an obvious inconsistency based on the confused idea that these
rich land/home owners do not wish to feel the effects of urban development in urban Davidson county and have their view/life syle obstructed

Riiiiight. I'm sure May Town Center will make no demands whatsoever, directly or indirectly, on our tax money.

"as long as those of us who are white, middle class and absolutely committed to public education, but only if academic quality is paramount and emphasized over any other goal INCLUDING diversity, are branded as racist"

Straw men have been popping up all over the place in recent posts about the school plan, but this one seems to be the most commonly recurring. Look, it's one thing to say that a plan has consequences related to race. It is another thing entirely to say that every single person who supports the plan must be a racist. It's pretty clear that the former is true. However, I have not seen anyone-- and certainly none of the Scene columnists-- suggest that the latter is true.

So, let's focus: does this plan have consequences for equality and diversity in Nashville? Are those consequences harmful, not just for black children, but for the city as a whole? Is that really what we want?

Taking a long, hard, honest look at the results that seem likely to flow from a given action is not the same thing as automatically branding everyone who favors that action as racist. Don't get me wrong, it does matter(both legally and morally) whether the school board members, in particular, were racially motivated. But that's not the only issue: everyone involved could have had the purest motives in the world, but if the consequences are bad, then we still have a problem. These are two distinct issues, and should not be muddled together.

Has the average black family been asked about this?
Let's see if they prefer neighborhood schools, even all black. I'm not, BTW, suggesting asking the NAACP or Ed Kindall, please.

Maybe mr. pink can come up with some good ideas for increasing the tax base.

Am I wrong, or has the SCENE stopped using the word "bizpig" to describe the harder working segment of our population?

While you are asking, ask if they would like to go to a small private school if given transportation and a scholarship?

Heh, heh, Anon, you can go to a magnet but the transportation is something you must workout for yourself. Well, too, there's the drawing.

Cici, you are wrong on one point - the Scene columnists have made comments referring to those who support the plan as being in league "with the segregationists" and have repeatedly referred to supporters as segregations. You don't think that's branding the supporters as racist?

Parent: I don't discount your assertion but could you site specific references?

Looking back at older posts, perhaps I should have said Jeff Woods, rather than plural columnists. One example: "There is, in fact, an indication in one of Pedro Garcia’s memos that the mayor was in cahoots with the resegregationists to ram through the rezoning plan," from his post "Silence of the Lambs." Another: the overall theme of his post "The Triumph of Casey Jenkins."

Maybe mr. pink can come up with some good ideas for increasing the tax base.

No, yours is just fine. Move in a bunch of people, have them piggyback on Nashville's tax-funded infrastructure, and tax the hell out of them. Solid conservative thinking.

Going back to Bruce Barry's original post:

Bruce seems to miss a crucial part of the argument when he suggests that those who pointed out the already high (88%) proportion of black students at Pearl-Cohn think either that segregation is no big deal or being "overblown." I would agree that it's pretty shocking that a high school in a city that had been under a court order for so many years would have a high school that is 88% black. What is overblown, however, is the claim that the rezoning plan (under which Pearl-Cohn would become 93% black in the unlikely event that none of the kids zoned for it exercise their option to stay at Hillwood) somehow represents an outrageous "resegregation" of a school that was so heavily segregated to begin with. Where was the outrage earlier? How does this plan represent some sudden and sinister shift (perpetrated by the white power elite in the Chamber of Commerce)? Why weren't Jerry Maynard and the NAACP decrying the status quo at Pearl-Cohn instead of trying to preserve it? Would our schools be classified as "desegregated" if the zoning plan were overturned and Pearl-Cohn went back to being "only" 88% black? Is no one else bothered that at least two of our other high schools are over 80% black, and some of the elementary schools in the Pearl-Cohn cluster were 95-100% black under the old arrangement?

I for one think that such involuntary segregation as we had under the current system represents a failure. (More on that in a moment.) But don't try to tell me that the rezoning plan somehow involves "resegregation" when it significantly changes the percentage of black/white enrollment at only one high school and actually INCREASES the percentage of black students at a high school (Hillsboro) in an even more affluent and white neighborhood. That falls under the category of pissing on my leg and trying to tell me it's raining.

Mr. Barry notes that American schools are becoming more segregated, according to research, leading to increased isolation of those left in the increasingly segregated schools. What he fails to note, however, is that this trend has been occurring in MNPS over the past five years on its own, without any help from the school board or chamber of commerce. As I noted elsewhere, every single high school in MNPS, even the magnets, have a higher percentage of black enrollment than four years ago. Where are the white kids going? Increasingly, they're leaving for private schools or moving out of the county. Does this reflect some heightened segregationist impulse in the city? Or does it reflect the fact that more parents are opting their kids out of the system because they just don't want to take the chance of sending their kids to a failing (or, in better cases, "transitioning") schools, especially ones like Hillwood where they're justifiably afraid of gangs. So we have a district with demographics that make the whole system segregated by socioeconomic status (70% qualify for Title I) and with a majority of kids who are part of a racial minority in the larger city. Thus, if the task force had made student assignments in which every school reflected the composition of the district (48% black, 14% Hispanic, 34% white), then every school would be segregated in the sense that blacks and Hispanics together made up the majority.

The only ways I can see offhand to change that balance are:
(1) implement some kind of voucher scheme that (unlike others I have seen) would actually pay enough to make private schools a viable option for about 6,000 black kids. This would roughly equalize the numbers of black and white kids in MNPS, assuming the number of white kids remained about the same as now;
(2) annex Williamson County by force of arms;
(3) attract more white kids in Davidson County back into the public schools.

While I am not opposed to vouchers in theory, I'm highly dubious that they could significantly change the dynamics of our system here. Given those limitations, it's perfectly understandable why so many folks, including a growing number on the post-Pedro board, see the third option as an important one to pursue. Yet Garcia and other "leaders" regularly dismissed anyone who favored this strategy with thinly veiled hints that they were pushing classism and even racism. If diversity is a laudable goal, how can doing nothing to change the composition of a system that is 70% low-income be a virtue?

Mr. Barry and other Scene commentators have chastised the board and task force for not coming up with creative solutions, without bothering to offer any of their own. I'm certainly no fan of this board overall. I saw enough of how their thought processes work during the SSA debacle to have lost any illusions that this bunch could think in grand strategic ways. They had been getting pressure to do something about facilities usage, and this plan is the result of their work on that narrow task. But a new director of schools needs to be part of the grand strategizing that will be required here, and so will the mayor. You could convince me that the board should have postponed implementation of the rezoning plan until it could have been tied to some broader strategic vision. But voting when they did, based on the unanimous recommendation of a task force they had appointed themselves, hardly makes the board majority a pack of resegregationists.

Of course, it's easy to say we need "creative ideas" when you don't offer any of your own. It ain't as simple as clicking your heels together 3 times while saying "There's no place like home." That's particularly true when a lot of the most promising innovations out there involve bringing concentrated resources to the most disadvantaged kids, not integrating them somewhere else. As has been noted elsewhere, the KIPP program doesn't involve any steps toward desegegration. If we somehow came up with the resources to create 5 new KIPP academies in the Pearl-Cohn, Maplewood and White Creek clusters, wouldn't that be seen as resegregation? Yet it might be the very best thing we could do -- if we had the resources. Another high successful model involves public charter schools that operate like boarding schools, taking disadvantaged kids out of their neighborhoods. But these schools are overwhelmingly black.

Here's my creative idea. Hire a great superintendent. Pay whatever it takes to steal Michelle Rhee from Washington DC. If you boys at the Scene want to do a story on what school reform can look like, instead of just bitching about the Chamber, send somebody to DC to take a look around. In the likely event that we can't steal Rhee, hire whoever she recommends.

In spite of itself, this board has actually done a few things right. The career academies and 9th grade academies are decent ideas that have some research and track record behind them. But the best thing we could do is hire a great superintendent who would have the full support of the mayor.

The point about "involuntary" and "voluntary" segregation I forgot to make as promised:

One idea tossed around now and again (though perhaps not in Nashville) is to offer complete school choice within the confines of the public system. If you're zoned for Maplewood but want to go to Hillsboro, you could -- provided you declared your intention within a reasonable period so the schools could get an accurate head count and plan accordingly. Under such a plan, it seems to me that no one could legitimately complain they were forced to attend segregated schools. Then again, what if 90% of those zoned for Pearl Cohn decided to attend Pearl Cohn? If segregation were voluntary, would it still be as bad?

One last thing:

I don't expect a paper that used to rail against the "bizpigs" (though not infrequently embracing them) to view the Chamber of Commerce as a bunch of heroic visionaries. (Which they're not.) But I am genuinely flummoxed by Bruce Barry's offhand comment that they are not interested in "genuine reform."

The nub, I guess, is what you mean by "genuine reform." Seems to me that improving the zoned schools to the point that most Nashvillians would feel good about attending them would be a genuine reform. Considering the direction in which our schools have been headed, any significant improvement would be genuine reform. Getting more socioeconomic diversity (a politically correct way of saying "getting more white kids back into MNPS") would also be a reform, yes?

The Chamber does not have to have an interest any broader than the interests of business in a well prepared workforce or in having schools that will make it easier to draw relocating companies here to share a compelling interest with the rest of the community. In fact, more businesses around the country are recognizing that, whether or not you call supporting education a "civic obligation," they have a huge vested interest in better schools. Businesses will tell you it's getting harder to find workers with the skills they need. They are starting to recognize how the startlingly high dropout rate (30% overall, but around 50% in the 50 largest cities) affects them. Dropouts earn only about 1/3 the annual income of college graduates, and they are three times as likely to live in poverty and 8 times as likely to wind up in prison. Thus, they have less purchasing power to buy the products and services businesses offer. They contribute fewer tax dollars and, with 40% of them receiving government assistance, are more likely to be net costs to the system. More HS graduates with college-ready skills would mean higher incomes, which would reduce pressure to maintain higher tax rates on business. For reasons such as this, the US Chamber of Commerce has become a big supporter of efforts to deliver more resources to disadvantaged kids. If they see this more as a biz-piggy investment in their own business futures, rather than an effort to promote democracy, fine by me. I don't have to share the same exact motivation to recognize the value of making common cause here.

And since when does where there kids go to school become a qualification for involvement in the discussion? In one breath, Mr. Barry says that failing to weigh in on the rezoning plan until one minute before midnight doesn't invalidate someone's critique. Yet he seems to argue that sending your kid to a private school -- whatever the reason -- means you can't claim to have a civic-minded interest in the quality of public schools. This compounds a logical fallacy with a logical inconsistency.

And has anyone actually attempted to measure the percentage of Chamber members who send their kids to private schools? I'm curious. Would it be higher than the percentage of upper-middle class and upper-class whites in the overall population who send their kids to privates? (Purely for the sake of argument, I'm accepting the premise that all Chamber members are white and upper-middle class or above.) Is there any real data to support the claim that all the Chamberpigs send their kids to private schools, or is this one of those ideas that has been repeated so many times, with just enough anecdotal support, that it is simply assumed by the media to be true?

B to the 3, you are probably still groggy from staying up late to write your epistle.

All of Chamber members don't send their kids/grandkids to private schools. Some live in other counties but the leadership has and does when they have a choice. And, did you go read about Wake County, or did you just dismiss it as not a creative idea?

http://www.wcpss.net/history/index.html

Louisville is working hard too on how to use zoning and school choice as a way to keep their schools from completely resegregating. You might want to subscribe to this daily education feed because it frequently describes what other schools systems are doing to deal with this same issue:

ASCD SmartBrief ascd@smartbrief.com

BBB: Here's the lead story link in yesterday's ASCD and it's about systems working to use class integration as a tool for diversity:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/magazine/20integration-t.html?_r=1&ref=education&oref=slogin

See what you think. We certainly can't solve our dilemma here by hiring the "right" Director of Schools and leaving it to her or him. It's up to all us to find the solution but we must look broadly. Peabody College is the leading national education school in graduate education in Administration. Don't see their scholars pulled into these discussions much. They probably are busy advising these other systems who use them as the experts while we keep looking under rocks and behind trees.

Anonymous:

When I go to your link about Wake County, it seems to suggest that the big idea there was the merger of city/county schools. Um, we already have that format. If there are other secrets to their success, it appears they must be buried within a bunch of links about the history of the past 30 years of their schools. I didn't bother to read those. Please point out what you found to be the best and most transferrable ideas. The year-round schools? More power to 'em. They'll approve achievement but not racial balance. The number of magnet schools? I wish we had more of them here. Garcia, the biggest obstacle to more magnet schools, is gone. But there remains a lot of hostility on the board to magnets, most notably but not limited to those who voted against the rezoning plan.

I'll take a look at your info about Louisville? But didn't they get shot down by the courts?

As to the "Chamber types:" Again, exactly how relevant is it that the kids/grandkids of the leadership attend private schools? Does it mean they have no interest in bettering public education? Their kids must attend public schools before they, as taxpayers who help fund the schools, get a seat at the community table?

Finally, let me acknowledge engaging in a little rhetorical excess about the superintendent hire in the attempt to make a point. Will the new superintendent be a panacea? Of course not. There is no panacea. But a superintendent can/should be the keystone for any serious effort at school reform. In fact, I would argue (without rhetorical excess) that no serious effort will succeed without great leadership from the superintendent. Does anyone think this polarized, almost paralyzed board is going to be able to develop any big strategic initiative without a strong leader pushing them hard? A mayor can get behind it all through the bully pulpit, but a mayor won't be the person who leads it.

Finally, with all due respect to Peabody, I have learned not to put much trust in schools of education, who tend to produce theories in search of guinea pigs. Some of the people who are most dangerous to public school education are the holders of graduate degrees in education whose careers have not been tempered by the experience of actual teaching.

I suggest you read the long article in the New York Times magazine from this past Sunday that overviews all the information of comparison you are asking for. There are no quick answers,especially if educating yourself is difficult and too tedious. Many of the districts who are really trying to create public systems that continue to work for a all socio-economic classes are studying each other and what noted researchers are finding out. If you would prefer to shoot from the hip and mouth, there you go again and this is what you get - a downward spiral of the same old same old.

BBB: For the record, for people who diminish our public schools teachers, I only picture the wonderful people who taught my children and have a hard time making them into callous self-serving adults. The same is true for college educators: most I know, and I have known quite a few over the years, were first teachers and principals in public schools before they acquired their PhDs.

Anonymous:

Sadly, your experience with schools of education has been different from mine and from that of many others. Looks like it hit a nerve for you.

As I noted earlier, my particular complaint is with those whose academic learning is not tempered by significant real-world experience. I wish I could say that most I have encountered had more experience as teachers and principals than as academics, but that is not the case.

I'm not saying that the educational theories produced by academics are worthless (although a special room in hell, next to Dick Cheney's suite, should be reserved for the quacks who decided that teaching phonics was an outdated concept). I'm just saying that they shouldn't be used primarily as our models. Better to study what is actually working (and not working) in the real world.

Thanks for the tip on the NY Times magazine. It's on my coffee table, waiting to be read. They also had an interesting round-table discussion a few months ago about public-private partnerships in the schools. Among the participants, as I recall, were Joel Klein of NYC (another strong superintendent whose background, by the way, was as an antitrust lawyer, not an academic) and someone from the Gates Foundation. Strange bedfellows, considering that Klein once led the effort at the Justice Dept. to break up Microsoft.

I thought Cheney and friends had done so much damage that all the suites in hell were reserved for them! I do know many current people at Peabody and other places who are doing excellent studies which are in response to asking urgent questions about zoning that we all would like to understand too. There certainly are some bigger than life egos in academia so you have to look beyond that to the validity of their work. Do read the NYTimes article. I've been following all this for many years and it's great that a journalist can precisely present an overview for the educated but naive reader on the current state of the issue. Makes me want to read her other articles on education.