The schools that forgot to teach

Once upon a time a public school district in Kansas City received lots of money to improve its school buildings. Over 15 years it pumped in over 2 billion dollars in one of the nation’s most ambitious and costly school rebuilding.

For example, one school, Central High School, built an Olympicsize swimming pool, a super indoor running track, and installed personal computers for almost every student in the school. Magnet programs in computer science and classical Greek civilization were supposed to foster high achievement. This school cost a whooping $32,000,000.00. But has not achieved excellence.

Nearly all the other schools in Kansas City were equally improved and today are one of the most physically impressive in the United States. So it went for 15 years of spending totaling over $2 billion dollars. The buildings are beautiful. With such magnificent buildings and state of the art facilities for studying, everyone was happy. Right? Nope!

But something horrible happened in Kansas City that destroyed all the joy of having those wonderful structures. The state of Missouri yanked away the city schools’ accreditation.
The district has developed a dismal scholastic record. Great buildings, lousy teaching. Someone forgot about teaching students!

“Kansas City has been an island of incompetence in a sea of indifference,” says Michael Casserly, director of the Council of Great City Schools. One parent, Clinton Adams states, “We put too much emphasis on trying to attract whites. An equal amount… should have been placed on serving the kids who were here.” It seems that the district was more concerned in trying to attract white students back into the school district. By building attractive buildings, the district hoped to impress white parents whereby they would send their children to the Kansas City schools.

After wasting fifteen years and spending a fantastic budget on capital improvements, the message is getting through. As parent Mattie Mansur said, “Urban kids deserve to have the same topnotch schools buildings as their suburban peers. But that’s not enough. What they also need is attention to instruction.” Hopefully Kansas City has learned its lesson well.

This story caught my eye because I have a strong feeling that the CNMI public school system is heading for a similar disaster.
Finally the PSS has received a decent budget to build new schools and additional classrooms and renovate its current dilapidated buildings. For that generous budget totaling almost $42,000,000 much thanks goes to the Governor, the Legislature and to the BOE and its COE. It was long overdue. But….

The but is that now that new schools are becoming a reality and in a year all campuses will have finished their face lifting. The fear is that budget constraints or some other excuse will not give the PSS the qualified teachers and study materials needed to make the real improvement which is teaching.

If the PSS is to improve its teaching capabilities and insure each student an optimum opportunity to become educated, it must start searching for these funds to hire young talented teachers.

We must stop social promotions, we must develop remedial study programs for slower students, and we must encourage parents to become concerned about the quality of education, not just about the appearance of the school buildings. Lack of classrooms will no longer be an excuse for poor teaching.

The remaining job to improving the quality of education is more talented teachers and better teaching materials. If we fail to realize this vital truth, the CNMI will join Kansas City as “an island of incompetence in a sea of indifference.”