St. Louis Public Schools Superintendent Diana Bouriaw is one of 17 applicants to be the next head of the Cincinnati Public Schools, according to a Cincinnati newspaper.
Bourisaw, who has led SLPS since July 2006, decided not to re-apply for her job after the Special Administrative Board unexpectedly announced they were searching for a new superintendent.
Considering the relatively small group of educators with experience leading urban districts, Bourisaw may have an advantage on her competition for the Cincinnati job. In fact, according to the Cincinnati Enquirer, several school board members there have specifically said experience in a large, urban setting is a high priority for the roughly 34,000-student district. Bourisaw is just one of seven applicants from school systems with more than 20,000 students. Enrollment in SLPS was 32,135 last year.
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May 12th, 2008 at 12:12 am
Does Walt Jocketty have anything to do with this?
May 12th, 2008 at 9:08 am
Schools will not improve as long as we keep recycling the same old names. The schools are structurally flawed and the big villians are the teachers unions, new, stupid teaching methods like the idiotic new math, the diversion of funds from the classroom to bureaucrats and an overall lack of control. I’m sorry, but I am not buying arguments that black kids can’t learn. I grew up in the fifites and sixties and attended a school o
n the East Side that was ten percent black and those kids learned just like everybody else, so that argument doesn’t fly unless you believe that black kids have declined mentally in the past thirty years. Why can’t liberals just see its the schools that are broken, not the kids. Why do liberals continually stick up for the teachers unions that promote mediocrity and protect bad teachers at the expense of our kids? I can show you a Christian school in East St. Louis where kids are doing addition and subtraction and reading in kindergarten. The kids are extremely respectful, polite and eager to learn. And they do it for less than 20% of the cost per kid versus the public schools. If our public systems can’t figure it out, give people the choice to save their kids by moving them to schools that can.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Well, flyover, that’s one way to look at it.
Another way would be to consider how little control the people who are in classrooms with students actually have over the way schools are run.
But you seem to know a lot more than they do.
May 12th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
I can show you a school (more than one, actually) in the SLPS where the kids are doing addition and subtraction in kindergarten, and the kids are extremely respectful, polite and eager to learn. No, it’s not Kennard. Have you ever been in a St. Louis Public School, flyover? I’d be happy to take you on a tour.
May 12th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
Oh, and the kids are reading, too.
May 12th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Fixing structural problems would be a huge step forward. Actually, didn’t Bourisaw say she could break the Teachers’ Union? One of the biggest obstacles is the state board, which just effectivly kicked Bourisaw out. Who will be the next Superintendent? John Danforth?
May 12th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
A student’s union would be great, though…
May 12th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
I have been to Beaumont once, when I had a young intern from there some years ago. I do know quite a lot about what’s wrong with schools as i have been very involved in our district’s move from deficit spending due to a balanced budget without any reduction in test scores.
I also have lived through problems with the idiotic new math with a child at one of the area’s most prestigious private schools. I had to home school her in math the summer between fifth and sixth grades using the old style math. She now averages over 90 while many of her classmates who were not as fortunate have had to leave the school because they could not keep up. There’s a reason we’ve all had to memorize multiplication tables since Aristole’s time, because it works. The educational establishment always tries to come up with novel ways to reduce classical methods of teaching math, but last year even the Math teachers association admitted it doesn’t work. That school I mentioned in East St. Louis uses the old style math and the kids are so far ahead of even some of the private schools, its not funny. My point is the schools are the problem, not the kids. You want to dispute that, go ahead. I have seen a lot of waste in schools that ought to go to the classroom. Did you know that until recently, every employee in the Ladue District received a free pair of tennis shoes? That there was a $60,000 teacher catering budget for after school snacks? The Supt. spent hundreds of thousands of dollars remodeling a 20 by 20 office? Let me know when you want to go, I am usually in North St. Louis on Thursdays volunteering.
May 12th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
Kind of confrontational, aren’t ya?
May 12th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
kind of?
May 12th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
For whatever reasons—Milwaukee sent people to Cincinnati to look at how they were doing things. Sounds like they involve the teachers in figuring out what to do—I would imagine Doctor Bourisaw would have difficulty explaining such concepts to Slay and the other takeover geniuses.
He said the successes in Cincinnati resulted not only from discipline policy changes and a move to smaller high schools, but also from strong collaboration between the district and union officials, a commitment to meaningful professional development for staff and the involvement of the local business, social services and higher education communities.
Posted: May 4, 2008
Seeking strategies to lower suspensions and raise the graduation rate, Milwaukee Public Schools officials will travel to Cincinnati this week to check out a district that’s drawn national attention as a model of urban school reform.
Cincinnati Public Schools has reported that between 2000 and 2007, it raised its graduation rate from 51% to 79% and eliminated the gap in graduation rates between African-American and white students.
Along the way, the district in southwest Ohio, which has about half the students of MPS, changed the way schools handle student discipline problems, referring misbehaving students to in-school suspensions rather than sending them home.
This specific change caught MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos’ eye.
“We suspend a lot of kids,” Andrekopoulos said. “What we need to do now is to leverage more time on-task for children in the classroom.”
Last school year, nearly half of MPS ninth-graders were suspended at least once, and a quarter of MPS students were suspended. African-American boys in special education faced the sanction at the highest rate.
And so the 13-person MPS delegation, which includes administrators, teachers, union representatives and School Board member Terry Falk, will examine the alternatives to suspensions used districtwide in Cincinnati, including anticipating which students might benefit from an anger management group or help from the school social worker and offering those interventions before a student’s behavior veers out of control.
“People assume that children know how to behave in school settings,” said John Hill, an MPS student services coordinator who organized much of the trip. “Research has shown that by teaching the expectations and rewarding positive behavior, you really can reduce the incidents in a classroom.”
Falk said he had long has his eye on the Cincinnati reforms as lauded in Education Week, on CNN and elsewhere. But he said he wants to make sure the reality extends beyond the headlines.
“If it is working, then the next set of questions is why is it working?” Falk said. “I expect that I’ll come out of Cincinnati with as many questions as I have answers.”
Falk said he has had several conversations with Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota. Nathan administered the $2 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that supported the Cincinnati reforms.
He said the successes in Cincinnati resulted not only from discipline policy changes and a move to smaller high schools, but also from strong collaboration between the district and union officials, a commitment to meaningful professional development for staff and the involvement of the local business, social services and higher education communities.
“Sometimes people are looking for the solution or the panacea. It’s a fruitless search,” Nathan said. “There is not one thing that happened in Cincinnati that produced the results that a lot of folks would like to see.”
MPS is the first district to send a delegation to see Cincinnati schools firsthand, though others frequently call seeking information, said Kathleen Bower, Cincinnati Public Schools’ lead psychologist.
Bower said she’s looking forward to the exchange of ideas with Milwaukee schools officials.
“There’s no canned program; everybody shares with everybody else,” she said. “We’re finding something that really helps kids, and we want to share it.”
May 12th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Ohio has some adventurous ideas coming out of their charter schools. See if anything kind of jumps out at you in this article…..
Article published Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Center OKs shuttering of charter in Cleveland
Board member says schools mismanaged
By IGNAZIO MESSINA
BLADE STAFF WRITER
More publicly funded charter schools may have been mismanaging millions of taxpayer dollars and are far from meeting academic standards, a member of the Lucas County Educational Service Center board said yesterday.
The Lucas County Service Center governing board voted unanimously last night to close the International Preparatory School - the oldest and largest charter school in Cleveland - because of a long list of problems there, including missing taxpayer money, low test scores, and failure to submit state-required data.
There has even been a recent allegation that three teachers were paddled by a school leader last winter.
Service center board member Joan Kuchcinski said more of the 103 charter schools the agency sponsors statewide could face probation or suspension as the board begins to closely examine their books and academic records.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:10 am
Three teachers paddled by a school leader? Is this a charter school or a pimp’s ranch?
May 13th, 2008 at 11:46 am
Well, it was 2005, in Cleveland, and it was just an allegation….but still…charter schools tend to be loosely regulated.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:52 am
They ought to paddle the school board, too. A friendl told me this joke recently. What’s the difference between a three year old and a school supt.? The three year old will stop whining when you give him want he wants.
May 13th, 2008 at 12:28 pm
I can only hope that she is going far from St. Louis…do you have a start date because I would like to throw a party
May 13th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Here’s my solution to fix St. Louis schools. Abolish the St. Louis School System. Divide the city into pie shaped segments with the segments joinging in downtown and radiating out to the city limits. Then, by state law, annex each segment into its adjoining county district. For example, the CWE would become part of the Clayton District. The schools in that area would become part of Clayton Schools. The teachers would be employed by Clayton and residents in the area would pay their school taxes to Clayton and vote in Clayton District elections, although they would still live in the City of St. Louis. Think about it. Property values in the CWE would double overnight. New people would want to move into the City. Obviously, Clayton is the best example. You couldn’t do it with adjacent Districts like Wellston or Riverview, but you could make it work. It would eliminate the waste of the SLPSS bureacracy because the county districts already have enough bureaucrats. The schools in the City could be run from Clayton, or Lindbergh, or whereever just as efficiently as from downtown. The state would have to subsidize the program for a while as they are doing now until things stabilize. Kids win, teachers win, City wins, bureacracy loses.
May 13th, 2008 at 1:25 pm
Really flyover, beauracracy loses? Your earlier stories about the waste in the Ladue district don’t make this sound like a way to avoid that.
Glad to see you in favor of allowing people to vote for school board members, though.
Your comment about a whiny superintendent shows you know absolutely nothing about what has happened around her. Dr. Bourisaw is the classiest act this city has seen in a long time, and if the elected board as configured in April 2007 had been allowed to stay in place, we would still have her and we would have seen a year of progress instead of the mucking around the SAB has done.
May 13th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
THE STATE ISN’T SUBSIDIZING ANYTHING for the SLPS! In fact, they are taking money away from SLPS by giving charter schools more money per student than SLPS gets. Where do you get your non-information, flyover?
May 13th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
I am not talking about her. She wasn’t responsible for what’s happened in SLPSS. My point is something revolutionary needs to happen, not just changing the same faces in the educational biz. My comments about Ladue are that it is now fixed and working well within its budget. It was out of control, although compared to SLPSS, Ladue was a model of decorum. I am in favor of democracy, unlike the Democrat party which prefers only fractional votes with the power resting with the party elite. You know its a great idea, but you won’t admit it because a conservative suggested it. You’d also love to live the Clayton District while still remaining in your wonderful City. Or, are you one of those bureacrats?
May 13th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
If I wanted my kids in the Clayton district I would live in Clayton. I don’t know if you are a conservative and you have no idea of my political views or whether I am affilitated with any political party. Never been a beauracrat in my life and never plan to be. Just a parent trying to save my kids from the state of Missouri’s idea of “helping.”
If you weren’t talking about Dr. Bourisaw, don’t post such a comment on a thread about her. What else would anyone think?
Even if the city flocked to your idea, ask if those county residents who all moved out there to get away from city dwellers would go for it. Fat chance. So what’s the point in even discussing it? Come up with something that might actually “fly.”
May 13th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Something revolutionary? Like the state playing fair, perhaps?
May 13th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Sorry, those people all live in St. Charles now. I I had a comment about education recylcing the same faces. It seems to fit to me, however, it is a nuance, I admit, sorry you didn’t catch it. If you are not a liberal, I apolgize, however I think you are. I am pretty sure I am all alone here. But, even Clark will have to admit that things have certainly been more interesting lately, or do you enjoy just hearing the party line?
May 13th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
I’ll admit that it’s amusing to whack down silly comment after silly comment coming from you.
May 13th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
Like Old Faithful…he is always dependable and predictable!
May 13th, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Yes, take that any way you want…
Mariano Favazza for MAYOR-2009!
May 14th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Mariano Favazza for MAYOR-2009!
Please don’t make me laugh while I’m at work
May 14th, 2008 at 11:26 am
Who for Mayor… Mariano Favazza
You can’t be serious
May 15th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
I’m sorry if I made you laugh. I didn’t realize you preferred to live in a pit of agony and despair.
And yes, I am serious. Got someone better?
May 15th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
flyover,
You stated…
“It would eliminate the waste of the SLPSS bureacracy”…
In the last couple of years the SLPS have drastically cut many essential people, programs, etc…They have outsourced the maintenance, custodial, and food services. All to the detriment of the students and employees.
The argument that the SLPS is suffering from a bloated bureacracy (which may have had some truth in the past) is no longer valid. I believe we are suffering (most) from a lack of personnel. I have had family members who worked at and attended the Ladue system. You cannot accurately compare Ladue to the SLPS.
As far as your offer to volunteer, we can always use you at my North Side school. We haven’t had a security guard for several years now.
May 16th, 2008 at 10:57 am
Jim, i had the impression that the food service was outsourced during either the Roberti or the Creg Williams era—and I thought I remembered some words of complaint about that from the Purdy-Downs part of the elected board—please correct me if i am mixed up on this.
There was an item about Bourisaw in Deb Peterson’s column. She has not applied to Cincinnati. She was not exactly quoted—but peterson used the phrase “it ain’t so”. I am trying to picture Bourisaw using that phrase when talking to a reporter—I ain’t visualizing. No big deal if she did or didn’t.
May 18th, 2008 at 9:59 pm
Joe,
You are correct; the services were outsourced during Roberti. The stationary and operating engineers went all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court and won their case for re-instatement, yet the appointed board refuses to abide by the ruling.
Aramarkup and Sodexhose have been extended another year. Remember, before Aramark the SLPS food services actually made a profit. That profit could have been used for more nutritious food in the lunch lines- a plan I believe the current elected board never got a chance to implement.
I also wanted to correct the posting. Dr. Bourisaw did not refuse to re-apply for the position she has. She gave the appointed board a two year contract proposal for her job and they decided to look elsewhere. Dr. Bourisaw refused to re-apply for the superintendent position with the revised job description- an academics clerk and rubber stamp. No person could expect a real superintendent to be responsible for the ends when they could not control the means. A person who concentrates on the implementation of academic policy only is an academics assistant; it is not even an academic affairs officer.
Slay and company learned from their mistakes under Roberti. Under Roberti, there was no one to blame but themselves for bringing the district two points away from full accreditation to the level we see now. This can not be the case the second time around. They need a face or name to blame when things go even further south. But, they need things to go further south to continue their agenda of opening more failing charter schools and eventually throwing up their hands and saying- vouchers are the only way.
ONE PROBLEM- SULLIVAN IS THE SUPERINTENDENT BY LAW. THERE IS NO NEED TO HIRE ANYONE. Oh wait, then Slay and CO would still be responsible, so let’s waste money on a search for something we have already inherited thanks to 162.1100.
As for Dr. Bourisaw, I think any district will be lucky to get her. I agree with the earlier post that she is the best superintendent the SLPS has seen in what seems to be an eternity.
Chad Beffa
May 19th, 2008 at 11:46 am
I am just banging my head against concrete this week. God bless the elected board–if nothing else, they send out relevant information.
In Sunday’s paper, Giegerich wrote an article which trashed Gateway for something which the administrator dealt with on February 27th.
Meanwhile, the Texas Can operation at 4300 goodfellow will apparently shut down? You cannot get information about it in St. Louis, but here is a statement by one of their executives slash superintendents—–
Richard Marquez and Yolanda Cruz-Wilder, both executives with America CAN!, said the board for their nonprofit is ending its programs outside Texas, namely its schools in Baton Rouge and one in St. Louis.
REPORT FROM WBRZ NEWS 2 IN BATON ROUGE, LA
School Board ends deal
By CHARLES LUSSIER
Advocate staff writer
May 16, 2008 -.
May 19th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
WUUUH? Shutting down it’s operation? Why? Can this be exploited?;) Is this part of an emerging trend with charter schools? How many charter schools are there in St. Louis? How will any upcoming economic problems affect charters? Anyone?:):) I’m desperate here.(cuz that is some good news)
And yeah, Giegerich does not like Gateway in particular. What a piss-boy.
May 19th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Channel 5 JUST ran a piece on the ghost-student; to their credit, it was much more accurate and fair than piss-boy’s article.
Here is what I heard what happened(word of mouth):
1: A student de-enrolled from Gateway in order to go to Oklahoma City
2: The grades in question were NOT Semester grades, the only ones which actually count for anything; instead, they were progress reports, intended for parents as a simple “progress report” (confusing, huh?
3: The incident has been taken care of.
And just for the record, I’d REALLY like to know how frequently these types of things happen. It just seems like a routine error, something everyone who works in an office has to deal with on a weekly basis.
May 19th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
My question is—why is chanel five following up on a minor story—instead of trying to find out what is happening with an entire charter school. Why are Baton Rouge citizens being told of what is happening but St. Louis citizens are not?
By the way—I read a story that in Texas—26 million dollars in fraudulent attendance was reported by charter schools—and 9 millon of that could not be recovered—because the charter schools that stole the money have gone out of business.
So we get a lame report from Giegerich about one student—in which the administrator made sure no fraud was committed.
Associated Press
April 6, 2008
AUSTIN — Nearly half of the charter schools in Texas have incorrectly reported student attendance, resulting in $26 million in undeserved payments that the state is trying to recover, according to state records.
The Texas Education Agency probably will never recover at least $9 million of the debt because 20 schools went out of business before repaying the state.
Gulf Shores Academy, a Houston charter, owes the state more than $8 million. The school has owed TEA money for attendance reporting mistakes for several years. TEA filed a court motion to revoke the school’s charter in 2006, but the case is tied up in court and the state hasn’t gotten any money back.
May 19th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Apparently, they are only “suspending operations for a year”.
http://www.ksdk.com/news/news_article.aspx?storyid=146513
May 19th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
Thanks—I am not sure just what they are doing sending geds out by mail—but it is a charter school, so minimal explanation remains the order of the day.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Still pretty disappointed in the media coverage of this. There was a really nice article by Giegerich in the pd–front page–about Wellston. Every one of their 29 graduating seniors has been accepted to go to college—good for them.
But the underlying motive would seem to be more camouflage for the state—the pd and kmox adamently refuse to report the very significant story of the Can academy closing. A major point emphasized by Giegerich in this story is that the state took over this school—and voila—look how they magically turned things around.
I wonder about ksdk reporting the story—and no one followed up. It was not emphasized that heavily—-it seems very convenient to have one news source do a ten second minor release without followup–maybe it was the role they were supposed to play. Two letters in the pd today about last sunday’s story—-maybe i will check back on this post in a few days and it will seem like paranoid delusions regarding news manipulations and management.
May 22nd, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Trending up–the safety of the concrete walls in my basement. Trending down—the amount of money in my budget for aspirin tablets.
Can! Academies can’t make a go of it here
By David Hunn
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
05/22/2008
Can! Academies students (from left) Antonio Ford, 17, Keitren Teer, 18, and Devan Johnson, 17, at the school Wednesday on Goodfellow Blvd.
(Huy R. Mach/P-D)
ST. LOUIS — Students played cards in class one day this week, as they do most days now.
Others watched movies or milled about in the halls, loud and aimless. The teacher sat at his desk, filling out job applications.
The Can! Academies of St. Louis, a charter school for high school dropouts, started this past fall on Goodfellow Boulevard, just south of Interstate 70.
Today, the state school board is expected to vote to close it, at least for one year.
Its failure has led critics to again question Missouri’s growing but still controversial charter school movement. Can is one of the first charters to open after a request from the office of Mayor Francis Slay, who is championing the schools as alternatives to a troubled city school system. It is also the first charter directly under the wing of the state department of education.
But state and city officials say its fall is an isolated situation. They attribute it mostly to unprepared leaders and underestimated challenges — two-thirds of the students arrived with third-grade reading levels, or worse.
They say Can’s end, while difficult, is an example of a benefit of charter schools: Those that fail can be closed.
“I think as the sponsoring institution, we’re doing the right thing,” said Jocelyn Strand, state director of charter schools. “They’re not meeting our criteria and our expectations.”
But the school’s leaders say Can was doomed to fail from the start. They say they never got the support they needed from their central office, in Dallas, and that they were denied the basics: tardy bells, intercom systems, computerized attendance logs, even textbooks.
They warned everyone of the troubles, they said, but were given little lasting aid.
“It’s been really, really hard,” said academy principal Vinikka McCoy, in her first year as an administrator. “My husband says all the time, ‘They sold you a dream.’”
McCoy’s bosses in Texas told her not to talk about the problems, she said. And they told her not to let other staffers speak publicly.
But McCoy is leaving, as is everyone still here, including the only teacher who stuck with the school from the beginning. Staffers are so angry, they want people to know the truth:
Fights roil the campus weekly, gang signs cover the bathrooms, classrooms are unproductive, and both students and teachers are left adrift, uncertain when they lose their school and their jobs.
Teachers, administrators, parents and students all spoke of specific problems:
— Administrators constantly changed student schedules. At the start of the year, students had regular classes. Now they have study hall all day.
— Can’s payroll department didn’t withhold retirement from teacher paychecks until recently. It is unclear what will happen with those staffers already gone.
— Attendance was taken by hand each day; leaders couldn’t say exactly how many students went in and out of the school. They estimate 530, but, for periods, data entry was months behind.
— The school couldn’t keep teachers in classrooms or students enrolled. Roughly two dozen teachers quit or left over the year. There are now just seven teachers and only about 118 students who come with any consistency — maybe half that attend daily.
— School disorganization now threatens college applications. “They’re never able to give you any straight answer when it comes to records,” said Shelly Davis, mother of student Jur’nell Davis. “Nobody has his test scores. All they’re telling us is he passed.”
Can Superintendent Yolanda Cruz, based in Texas, referred questions to the nonprofit group’s vice president of communications, Cheryl Rios.
Rios said she would only answer questions via e-mail, and sent a three-paragraph statement from Can’s president, Richard Marquez.
In the statement, Marquez said the Can model is proven, but “it was still a Texas program trying to fit in a Missouri model.”
“That doesn’t mean it can’t succeed,” he said. “It just means that time is needed to take what was learned and come back with a system to serve these kids the best way possible.”
Indeed, Can’s 10 Texas schools are well-known for taking at-risk students and getting them high school diplomas.
Strand said it’s clear now that the school opened here too quickly, that the administrators hired were too inexperienced, and that management gave too little support, especially with students who needed so much help.
This spring, Marquez apologized to state and city officials.
Today, Strand will recommend the state board suspend Can for a year, and give the organization an opportunity to hire new staff and retool the model. If successful, it could reopen in the fall of 2009.
Still, Strand said, this year is not lost. As many as 50 of the 530 students who went through the St. Louis program will have passed their GED tests by the end of the year. Through a Missouri conversion program, they could receive their high school diplomas.
“These are kids who were already out,” Strand said. “So the fact they’re back in is huge.”
But students were left either angry or confused this week.
Tuesday, as some played spades and others watched movies, Rayford Marion put his head down in a quiet class next door.
Marion, 17, passed the GED in May. He’s working at a fast-food shop in the evenings. But the school says he needs more hours in class in order to get his diploma.
So he comes to school before work, just to sit there. Still, he’s worried about the teens next door.
“They think tomorrow when they take the GED, they gonna pass,” he said. “But they not doing nothing to help themselves.”
“They don’t understand,” he continued. “Sometimes, there is no third chance.”