For the second time in seven years, the Derby school board has dropped a plan that would address socioeconomic inequities within its two elementary schools.
Schools Superintendent Matthew Conway told parents at a forum Oct. 23 that the district was reconsidering a plan to convert the Irving Elementary School into a third grade through fifth grade school, and convert Bradley Elementary School into a kindergarten through second grade school.
Both schools are currently kindergarten through fifth grade, with limited pre‑k programs at both.
A subcommittee of the school board of education, after more than two years of work, suggested the changes earlier this year as a way to address Derby’s widening achievement gap among its students. The move was recommend as a way to possibly save money in a city that has trouble coming up with the money to fund public schools.
Click here for an earlier story explaining the glaring inequities in Derby’s elementary schools.
However, the proposal was met with stiff opposition from parents at Bradley Elementary School on Derby’s east side. The proposal was also met with less than enthusiastic support from parents at the Irving School on Derby’s west side.
Conway said additional research shows the plan isn’t workable because it had the potential to create two high poverty elementary schools within in Derby. He cited stats showing students in high poverty schools do not perform well academically.
While that is welcomed news for kids in Bradley, which isn’t a high-poverty school, what it means for Irving, the high-poverty school two miles away in a city of roughly 13,000 people, remains to be seen.
The matter has been tossed back to a subcommittee, the members of which will presumably start their work all over again.
Much has changed since the subcommittee started its work about two years ago. There is a new superintendent, a new assistant superintendent, and new principals at three of the four schools.
At forums on the proposed redistricting, parents urged the school board to give these new leaders — especially Irving’s new principal, Jennifer Olson — a chance to turn things around before making drastic changes.
There was also talk at the Bradley forum that changing the grades would somehow lower property values in a city where the school district is already considered under-achieving.
Statistics from the district show deep differences between Bradley and Irving. The racial differences have Derby schools flirting with a state law created in the civil rights era meant to make sure that all kids get access to a solid education, regardless of the where they live.
Click here for more information on the gap between the two elementary schools.
Now that the Irving/Bradley redistricting won’t happen in the proposed form, Conway brought in an education expert Oct. 23 to talk to parents about alternatives.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, an expert in socioeconomics and school reorganization efforts, spoke at two parent forums.
Conway said at the beginning of one of the forums that unlike some districts, like Greenwich, Derby isn’t in danger of having the state come down on the city for having racially imbalanced schools.
But Derby’s getting rather close — the state likes racial diversity inside schools to vary by no more than 15 percent from the community as a whole.
“We fall within the 15 percent,” Conway said. “Granted, we are just within the 15 percent at both schools, but we are within that 15 percent and not at a point where the state may come in as they have with other districts and say you must do something.”
When it comes to students’ socioeconomic status, though, there is a larger gap, and it’s growing, he pointed out.
“We do fall outside that range when you talk about socioeconomics and low income,” Conway said — adding that there are no state guidelines mandating integration efforts based on the income level of students families.
In other words, it’s still a problem that needs to be addressed.
“I look at this data and say regardless of what the state might or might not mandate, this is our community, and it’s our opportunity to look at this data and decide as a community what to do about it, how to balance the economics within each of our buildings,” Conway said.
A presentation at the forum by Kahlenberg reinforced that viewpoint.
He said the things that make up a good school are obvious: kids who want to learn, involved parents, excellent teachers.
“The problem is that nationally, it is very difficult to create those conditions when you have high concentrations of poverty,” he said.
For instance, there are more incidents of “teacher disrespect” in high-poverty schools, Kahlenberg said, and such schools have more of a transient population.
Parental involvement is also less pronounced in high-poverty schools, Kahlenberg said.
The quality of teachers also suffers, he said.
If life were fair, Kahlenberg said, low-income students would get the best teachers.
“But in fact we know that on average the opposite occurs,” he said. “Teachers leave high-poverty schools at higher levels.”
Bonnie Rodriguez, whose daughter attends Irving, asked Kahlenberg whether there are programs to draw altruistically-minded teachers to low-performing schools.
“We have people in the world that are wonderful and kind and giving,” Rodriguez said. “We have people that want to go to the Peace Corps. Are there no people with education degrees that want to serve a certain type of child, or a certain group?”
“Absolutely there are,” Kahlenberg replied. “But on average, the teachers who have options, the ones who have proved themselves successful in the classroom, on average they move away from high-poverty schools. There are lots of fabulous teachers in high-poverty schools who don’t fit that mold that I’m talking about, but at a district level you have to think about the averages.”
He also pointed out that low income students who attend schools with more affluent peers score better on tests.
“Low income kids who get a chance to go to more affluent schools are about 20 points ahead (on standardized testing), which is about two years of learning, so in the fourth grade that’s very significant,” Kahlenberg said. “Actually they’re scoring better than the middle class kids who are stuck in high poverty schools.”
That’s true even in places were more money is spent on low-income schools, he said, citing statistics from a study of Montgomery County, Maryland.
“Middle class students are less affected by school environment one way or the other than low-income students,” he said, adding that there are benefits for such students to be around peers “with different life experiences,” i.e. those from economically and racially diverse backgrounds.
But research shows those benefits are lessened in schools with more than 50 percent of students below the poverty line, which the plan the subcommittee put up for consideration would do, Conway said.
So what could Derby do instead?
“Compulsory integration” — like Boston busing kids across the city in the 1970s as a legal remedy to segregation — is not the answer, Kahlenberg said.
Middle class parents have lots of options — they can go to private school, they can go to another town. And so now it’s really about choice and incentives for people of all backgrounds.
It’s the economic mix that matters more than the racial mix in terms of student achievement, Kahlenberg said.
Simply collapsing the two schools could result in some middle class flight, which would not be good for the system as a whole.
“You’re right at the tipping point there where if you collapse the two schools into one system, then you would end up with two schools above 50 percent low income, which the research suggests is problematic,” he said.
Kahlenberg suggested first polling middle class parents who have students in private and parochial schools to ask them what offerings would bring them back into sending their children to public schools.
“It is possible to bring middle class families back into public school systems through incentives,” he said.
“Find out what sort of offering, what sort of magnet approach, would get (those parents) interested in coming back to the Derby public schools,” Kahlenberg said, listing Montessori programs as one example.
He also said Derby should build partnerships using the magnet school model with “well-regarded local institutions,” e.g. Yale University in New Haven.
Conway said at the end of one of the forums that the conversation about how to fix the racial and socioeconomic disparities between the two schools “starts here, starts now, starts with parents.”