After Jasper Ho’s “dream team” went down to defeat in the primary, I decided to take a break from this blog, and perhaps restart it as a “Majority Report” when the new Board takes office. When the current Board Majority voted to eliminate almost thirteen teaching positions from our schools, words literally failed me. Nothing could be said that would change that decision. The primary was over; the public had spoken, but, with their usual arrogance, the current lame-duck Majority decided to go ahead with their ruinous reduction in teaching positions.
I have restarted this blog, however, because I have since come to believe that this reduction, advocated most vocally by Amy Faust, was actually conceived by Jim Shrawder. He is the only member of Jasper Ho’s dream team to win a partial victory – taking the Republican nomination in Region 3. In deciding how to vote in November, people need to be aware of the harm this plan has on our children’s education. Now that school has been back in session for about a month, the effect of the reduction in force has become clear. I will be reporting on this situation in future posts.
Jim Shrawder refers to the current majority as “fiscal conservatives,” but, by their own words, cutting costs was not the issue. Without dissenting comment by the four voting with them, Jasper Ho and Amy Faust made eliminating teaching positions a desirable end in itself. Fiscal conservatism had nothing to do with their action. By their logic, small classes and multiple electives must be bad things. Remember, they are not saying we cannot afford to keep these positions, they are saying they do not want them.
In fact, Mr. Shrawder has stated that since PSSA scores at the High School have dropped while the student-teacher ratio has decreased, we may assume that increasing that ratio should improve those scores. This would be a logically correct statement only if the small class size of a low student-teacher ratio somehow caused the lower test scores. Logically sounding nonsense seems to be Mr. Shrawder’s specialty.
I made a study of PSSA scores over the last ten years and presented it to the Student Achievement Committee on September 12th. I compared the scores a class of students received in eighth grade to those they received in eleventh grade. Based on this study, there is no doubt that there is a problem at the High School. However, determining what that problem might be is not as simplistic as Mr. Shrawder would have us believe. The scores I used were those supplied by both the Department of Education, and Mr. Shrawder’s favorite site, schooldigger.com. While accurate, they do not give near enough detail. While they allow for a comparison an entire eighth grade’s scores to those the same class received in eleventh grade, these are not necessarily the scores of all the same students. During the intervening three years, students leave the district and others enter it. How much this affects our scores is not revealed by the gross data available to the public. How much effect did special needs students have on the overall score? What about gender effects? (These might be available on the Department’s web site.) Is there a particular educational experience that influences scores? Most importantly, do the declining scores represent an actual drop in achievement and learning, or reflect instead the attitude students have about the test? The publicly available data does not give us the answers.
As a result, I have asked the administration to track the progress of individual students across their years in our district. That data might reveal the reasons for our declining overall scores and point us toward solutions. It is always best to draw no conclusions until the data is examined, but I very much doubt that it will tells us our problem has been small class sizes.
As soon as I can figure out how to do it, I will try to put a link to my study in a future post.
