School Board talks about equal opportunities for Metro students

I want to thank Rev Tex Thomas and the entire IMF Ministerial Leadership in taking such a strong interest in helping to advance education in our city. The meeting yesterday was very engaging and much was learned in terms of our moving forward with healthy discussions that will lead to solutions that we can all wrap around and make happen. I mentioned in the discussion that "It takes a village to raise a child" and we have gotten away from this mindset. Many of us are becoming too self centered and taking the position of only dealing with children who do not demonstrate the all too normal adolescent mistakes. I also shared that children are exposed to different lifestyles etc and do not necessarily have to be bussed into an affluent area to have that exposure anymore. With technology being at the level it is today and their access to so much in the school by way of books etc, our children are much more aware of the diverse communities etc than in the past. The below article also highlights some of the points made in our discussion.

Picture: The Rev. Inman E. Otey sings “Lift Every Voice and Sing” with members of the school board at the Sixth Annual Celebration and Conference of the 500th Year of the Prophetic African Diaspora. Matthew Williams/The City Paper

Article by Amy Griffith, The Nashville City Paper

Six school board members had an unusual opportunity to discuss the ideas underlying their opinions about student equity — a concept that hovers constantly over the board’s discussions of rezoning and student assignment — at a community meeting Wednesday.The annual Celebration and Conference of the 500th year of the Prophetic African Diaspora, sponsored by the Interdenominational Ministerial Federation (IMF) at Jefferson Street Missionary Baptist Church, included food, prayer, drums, and singing. It also drew a large enough number of school board members to constitute a quorum, as well as Rep. Brenda Gilmore and a visit from Mayor Karl Dean.As part of a panel, school board members David Fox, Steve Glover, Karen Johnson, Ed Kindall, Gracie Porter and George Thompson discussed their own ideas of what constitutes equity for students — and most acknowledged that while the board shares in common a commitment to equal opportunities for kids, there are disagreements as to how that should be attained.Kindall said schools in the inner cities should have more resources than schools in suburban areas, for equal opportunities in education to be achieved. At some Nashville suburban schools, for example, parents may be able to raise thousands of dollars for after-school events, which can’t happen at many inner city schools. “Equity, to me, does not necessarily mean equal,” Kindall said. The challenge, Kindall said, is finding a way to provide these resources without taking anything away from children at higher-resource schools. Thompson said he agreed with Kindall’s comments, and went a step further by arguing that Nashville has done so much for its most high-level students that the needs of other kids have suffered. Thompson citied the district’s troubles with federal No Child Left Behind legislation, as well as the increased involvement in school system governance from the state Department of Education, as results.“As a school board and as a city, we continue to focus on high-level student achievement at the expense of closing that achievement gap,” Thompson said. “That’s our problem.” Board members Fox of Hillsboro and Johnson of Antioch diverged somewhat from Kindall’s statements, though both said they agreed with Kindall’s desired end result. Fox said he is more concerned with ends than means, and after the panel he elaborated that he considers equity in educational opportunities to be reflected by an appropriate range of student academic performance. He added that he is more concerned with achieving this end result than with the measures necessary to make that happen — a philosophical distinction that he said informs his own opinions about student. Johnson said she agreed with what most board members said, but emphasized that achieving cultural, racial and economic diversity is more complex than it used to be.“We have a high influx of Spanish-speaking, Hispanic families in the mix. … We can’t look at the situation anymore as black and white,” Johnson said. “This is a different day and time, and the challenges that we face are significantly different than they were 20 or 30 years ago.”While rezoning decisions are not at the forefront of board discussions, the issue is simmering at meetings of the district’s Rezoning Task Force, which is due to present recommendations to the school board this spring. The task force is designed to bring all the issues of student assignment in public schools — including neighborhood schools, overcrowding in high-growth areas and questions of building efficiency — closer to families and communities, rather than being created solely by the school district.Dean on Wednesday did not publicly comment on rezoning, though he did say he agrees with the importance of providing adequate resources for public education.“We’ve proposed a budget that fully funds schools,” Dean said. “This is the issue. This is our time. … We’re a city moving forward, but this is the issue that we’ve got to get right.”The Rezoning Task Force meets most Fridays at 5 p.m., at the district’s Bransford Avenue central offices.