Here we are again. The Rochester school board and Bolgen Vargas, the superintendent it hired with enthusiasm
three years ago, are parting ways.
Vargas’s contract doesn’t expire until next June, but
tension between him and board members had been building, and they told him
recently that they weren’t going to renew his contract when it expired. So
they’re buying out the remainder of his contract, and he’s leaving at the end
of December.
The board and Vargas are trying to make the change as smooth
and publicly palatable as possible. While not denying the seriousness of the
situation, they’re describing the early contract termination as simple common
sense. And it probably is. If the board wants a different direction, for
instance, why have Vargas draft a budget that another administration would have
to operate under?
Is there more to it than that? Certainly some people will
insist that there is; the tension between Vargas and the board hasn’t been a
secret. And now many people will fly into yet another tantrum, damning the
school board, damning Vargas, damning the teachers’ union, damning the district
as a whole.
But that’s misguided. There’s a growing crisis in public education
in Rochester, and our latest difficulty with a superintendent is the result of
that crisis, not the cause.
The problem is that the public and community leaders expect
the impossible from the school district. Rochester has one of the highest
child-poverty rates in the nation. And we expect the school district to provide
a quality education that will set students on a path to college or a career,
despite the poverty and its concentration in a large swath of the city.
This is not a Rochester problem. It is a problem facing
every urban school district in the country.
I’m past the point of arguing about the effects of
concentrated poverty on children and on their education. Facts are facts. The
effects of living in a highly stressed, high-poverty neighborhood have been
documented, repeatedly. We’re snuffing out the chances of a successful life for
thousands of children. Tragically, for too many city students, the future is
one of continued poverty, life in stressful neighborhoods, and, for some,
crime, prison, or early death.
But it’s easier to point fingers than to work together and
come up with solutions – easier for those of us on the outside to damn the
district than to recognize that the solution involves us.
Vargas and the current school board are good people,
committed to trying to do the impossible. We can get rid of all of them and
bring in new players, but if we insist that the district has to do this job by
itself, we’ll find ourselves in this same position a few years from now.
The Rochester school district did not cause the poverty. It
cannot eliminate it. Teachers, school board members, administrators: all can do
a better job, and we should expect them to. But they cannot work miracles.
This is a moral issue, and I can’t think of a more important
one facing this community. That we have let our urban education crisis continue
to build, decade after decade, is a sin.
This community is in the early stages of a new effort to try
to deal with the poverty. As its leaders have emphasized, if that effort is
successful, it won’t happen overnight. It took a long time for Rochester’s
poverty to get this bad, and it will take a long time and enormous effort to
make a dent in it.
Meantime, we’re
facing another big change in the school district. That puts a major
responsibility on the shoulders of school board members, obviously. But those
of us on the outside have plenty of responsibility, too. A good place to start
would be to stop blaming the school district for a problem the community
continues to let build.
This article appears in Oct 28 – Nov 3, 2015.
I believe RCSD needs a super who is more articulate and motivating, with brilliant ideas. What about Dr. Bill Cala or Dr. Steve Uebbing (from UR and the new East HIgh)?
I like Dr. Vargas, but I don’t see him as motivating and articulate enough to move RCSD to the max. He did not seem EXCITED enough for the job. Education should not be about the: Bored of Education!
I think we need a super-intendent with super intentions!
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http://www.SavingSchools.org
Since Mary Anna is commenting on poverty or concentrated poverty, it’s only fair that I remind her that it’s a well known fact that Rochester’s poverty level has grown tremendously since the 1970’s (from @ 2,900 to over 38,000). However, it should be taken into account, that during that time span, many uneducated, unskilled and impoverished people, came to Rochester in that condition, prior to their arrival, in hopes of finding work and a better life.
In other words, the high poverty level did not get there just because people in Rochester got poorer over the decades but because more poor people came to Rochester, who added to that statistic.
In the long run, Rochester should consider how to curb its influx of new arrivals who add to the poverty number.
The recent poverty task force, that involved @ 150 people to address poverty, came up with ideas that only puts band aids on gashing wounds and cost a lot of money. Poverty is and will not going away; however, making a dent by reducing the number of impoverished people coming to Rochester might be part of a solution to curb concentrated poverty. How to implement that is another issue.
As far as Vargas not being excited enough for the job, remember he had many years of experience with the RCSD , as a prior board member and he is well aware of the dysfunction that exists in the district. Any unsuspecting newcomer, like Brizard, can come in all hyped up until reality sets in. and then it all hits the fan.
Vargas was a good choice at the time with a counseling background, to try to juggle all the opposing forces; in the district; and be a leader to boot.
If Vargas is not up to this almost impossible task, then keep him until you scrutinize a new superintendent and find one that’s better. But please, no more of the merry-go-round of rotating superintendents; we already went that disastrous route.
We need a stronger commitment from the school board and whoever the new super might be to WAIT AWHILE!!! Stop the petty politics and let the superintendent supervise for a reasonable amount of time.
Ms. Towler:
Well said!!!!!
Respectfully,
Van Henri White
Remember when the primary qualification during the last Superintendent search was that the candidate be local? Can we please not make that mistake again?
Mary Towler writes: “This is a moral issue, and I can’t think of a more important one facing this community. That we have let our urban education crisis continue to build, decade after decade, is a sin.”
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What about what City Newspaper can do, right now? How about interviewing people from the community, who have ideas to share about fixing our Rochester schools?
For the past 20 (twenty) years I have been submitting ideas to newspapers and to Rochester school board members and superintendents. But my ideas have all been ignored.
Take for example the simple idea of using the Easy button from Staples, to suggest easy steps in learning. I sent this idea to City News a number of times and it was ignored.
It you look at the image to the left of this post, you will see an Easy button on a desktop. The image on the screen is me talking about the value of the Easy button at a school meeting.
I hope that with this shake up with Superintendent Vargas, we can learn something about participation from the community. I hope that City News will learn from it.
I think poverty is a poor excuse. We have to open our hearts and our minds to one another and start listening UP…
THAT WAS EASY!
THANKS MUCH See my blog:
http://www.SavingSchools.org
It is only an impossible job depending on how you view the goal. The primary responsibility of the leader is not bring everyone out of poverty. because that will never happen. The most important goal is to motivate and inspire his or her employees with the end result being higher student achievement. The is very doable.
Additionally, words must be followed by action and in the case of urban schools, the action must be radical. This is where our leaders fail and the local media (including your paper) have let them off the hook. Rochester schools have done nothing radically different and this is shameful Why this district does not have Pilot schools like those in Boston is unexplainable. It is just as perplexing why the local media, including your paper, has not been asking this question.
Impossible job to fix Rochester schools? Maybe we are looking in the wrong directions. Maybe the answer has less to do with politics and school funding and more to do with common sense and brain science.
It turns out that there is a TV series on “The Brain” running on WXXI- 21, right now. It is a six part program with David Eagleman, and there are 3 remaining hours, on Wednesdays, Nov 4, 11, and 18. See, below for videos of the first three episodes:
http://video.pbs.org/program/brain-david-e…
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For years I have been suggesting that RCSD focus on the psychology of learning and motivation, but my suggestions have been rejected, time and time, again. Perhaps with a new superintendent, we can focus more on learning and motivation, itself… Hello?
http://www.SavingSchools.org
Gotta Say It
I’m curious, you don’t consider our effort at East “radically different”? Our District has never had an EPO before and to be brutally frank, in the past, most school transformations have been planned and put together in less then three months time. Many of those efforts have failed or fizzled out. Planning alone for the East High/UofR effort took more than a year before implementation. Additionally, if you are interested I can send you a copy of the Union contract/agreement for teachers at East. I think you will see that it is “radically different”from the contract which the rest of the teachers in RCSD operate under. Finally, we are looking to develop an elementary EPO model from which we can establish and replicate best practices for the rest of our District.
BTW a number of Board members are looking at the pilot school approach as well.
Mr. White,
U of R’s program at East is radically different but there are fifty other schools needing the same change, it took over 25 years to start and you guys had to pay the U of R ten million dollars to do it. The Pilot program has been developed and working for 20 years. The difference now is the U or R’s clout and the cash. As an attorney you would likely lose the argument you are trying to make about how proactive you and the board have been. The jury is laughing.
Why are you on the left so obsessed with other people’s money?
Pretty much every article Mary Anna writes anymore blames “concentration of poverty” for everything. But even with a “concentration of poverty”, the neighborhood doesn’t need to look like a ghetto. What’s stopping folks from picking up a rake, broom, or paint brush. Clean up the place where you live. That should help your spirits.
There’s a lot of vacant storefronts in the city. Bring them back by reducing the minimum wage in certain areas of the city to $5/ hr. to give people a chance. Just the work ethic- show up to work and better yourself and you will find yourself getting raises before you know it.
Funny, in the current election, this paper endorses democrats across the board, as always. Maybe THAT’S the problem.
Many of the responses on this page suggest an absolute lack of understanding of the impacts of poverty on health, well-being, culture, and the brain. Yes- RCSD teachers would do well to borrow from current brain research, pedagogy on motivation and engagement, culturally responsive pedagogy, etc, etc, etc. There is much we can do on that end to pull students in to our classrooms. But even the most perfect pedagogy and practice cannot undo generations of poverty. Research demonstrates that the effects of poverty leave imprints in one’s genes generations after the stressors of poverty have been experienced by the mother.
And to individuals criticizing those who live in poverty for failure ” from picking up a rake, broom, or paint brush. Clean up the place where you live. That should help your spirits.”- perhaps you have never had to invest all of your time and energy in to making ends meet, only for them not to meet. The point here is that we have a culture of hopelessness and of people who have learned that they are powerless and who externalize everything because of that perceived (or real) powerlessness. It is easy to judge, but that’s because most of us who critique are not living in those conditions.
An while the “easy button” concept can be a great tool for motivating some students, it downplays the complexities and realities of urban education: an easy button for math problem quickly becomes insulting when you have failed an exam multiple times or when you have always been underperforming on tests. If urban ed. just needed an easy button, it would have been fixed by now.
Finally- East high school. If the experiment at East works (and it would be wonderful if it did) , that merely underscores the need to put more resources and greater selectivity of students into the design of our schools. Countless former East High School students have flooded OTHER city schools (many of which had well established cultures and academic expectations). Those students, of course, are the special ed students, the ones with histories of suspension, the ones with lower parental investment, the ones with intense needs. By reducing not just school size but by tacitly removing these students (it was not explicit, but there are passive systems that schools embrace to make this happen while appearing to be open to all), East has merely handed off its low performing students to other schools. Hasn’t fixed the problem- has simply moved it elsewhere. But as of yet, we have no proof that East works. In fact, we won’t have any true evidence for several years (as a single year or two years of performance is not substantive). The true test comes 3-5 years after the concept has been rolled.
Liz Ruckdeschel offers interesting comments:
(And while the “easy button” concept can be a great tool for motivating some students, it downplays the complexities and realities of urban education: an easy button for math problem quickly becomes insulting when you have failed an exam multiple times or when you have always been underperforming on tests. If urban ed. just needed an easy button, it would have been fixed by now.)
Let me suggest, that instead of dismissing ideas like the use of the EASY button, we collect such ideas so that all students, teachers and parents can make use of them.
(Suppose you went to the auto mechanic to have your car fixed and he pulled out a big sledge hammer. You might think that he could do harm to your car, but you trust that he has many tools available to do the repair work, Fortunately, we now have many tools available in education.)
Perhaps RCSD can find an enlightened superintendent (like Bill Cala) who understands the value of putting ideas and tools together.
“The best is the enemy of the good.” (Voltaire)
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http://www.SavingSchools.org
Liz, I have been there, and it sucks. But you know what brought me back? Just keep on moving forward. You do what you can with what you’ve got. Eventually things will turn around for you if you can keep a positive attitude. But I ask you, how do you keep a positive attitude when there are so many enablers in the city?
“…most of us who critique are not living in those conditions. “
You happen to catch the news yesterday Liz? Someone living in those conditions was awarded a $88,000 scholarship. Guess he missed the message that his life is supposed to suck because he lives in the city.