Saving the School

I just finished a book titled Saving the School by Michael Brick.  It is about the efforts of the principal, teachers, parents and students to bring up the test scores at Reagan High School in Austin Texas to prevent the school’s closure.  It is an interesting story and I think it really highlights the fact that it takes more than simply hard studying to bring up scores.  The principal worked very hard throughout the year to include students and parents in her efforts to save the school and to bring up the school’s collective image of itself from “academically unacceptable” to “worthwhile.”  This is a good read.  Brick puts together a narrative that is easy to follow and weaves together the personal stories of the principal, a teacher, a coach, several students and other support staff as they struggle through what could possibly be the last year for Reagan High. 

I realize that the story is abstracted from Brick’s personal experience and written from his point of view, but it surprises me that no one seemed angry about the fact that Reagan was deemed unacceptable because of one point on one subgroup in the entire school even after radically bringing up scores for all subgroups.  No one even questions whether or not the tests were bad for the students, bad for teaching, worthwhile or even valid measures of what might happen for that student later in life.   No one ever expresses the kind of anger they ought to be feeling over an education system that creates such a mess in the first place. 

What they did is truly laudable—make no mistake about it.  It just makes me wonder how many folks are out there buying the federal government’s schtick about what makes a bad school or a good school without any questions.  I also have to wonder where the civil right’s lawyers are in this mess.  Since Black and Latino students are the ones who get the shaft worst whenever any kind of “consequences” are doled out over the “academically unacceptable” label up to and including school closures, why aren’t there lawyers lining up to sue the state or federal government over policies that clearly create a greater racial divide even while purporting to narrow it. 

Brick did mention the charters waiting like vultures to swoop in and take things over once Reagan closed.  He also talked about all of the companies selling their “pass the test” study programs on back to school night.  What a racket!  These people get money from the federal government for every student they enroll in their programs after the federal government wrote the law that allows states to declare schools incompetent in the first place.   If the federal government plowed that same amount of money into the school, they might not have dropped so low to begin with!

The bottom line is that while I didn’t get any brilliant teaching ideas out of reading the book, it was a very inspirational read.