These may be the droids we're looking for

67 APS educators accused of cheating barred from classroom | ajc.com
A committee for the Georgia Professional Standards commission, which certified and polices educators, voted to take action against 67 Atlanta educators implicated in a widespread cheating scandal.
The committee recommended 47 teachers for two-year suspensions. One teacher was given a one-year suspension, and 19 educators in leadership positions, such as principals and testing coordinators, were recommended for revocation. The PSC as a whole will vote around noon whether to uphold the action taken by the committee. [ADDENDUM: They did.]

Well, Merry Christmas at long last.

"Educators in leadership positions, such as principals and testing coordinators"? I had no idea a "testing coordinator" was considered a leadership position. I'm guessing some of them might be just as surprised by the designation.

But you know which names I'm looking to see here, and I have no confidence they are among this 67 that the PSC is now willing to address. The big cheeses, Beverly Hall and Kathy Augustine, appear to have escaped retribution, but that leaves the four ex-SRT Directors, Sharon David-Williams, Michael Pitts, Robin Hall and Tamara "Go to Hell" Cotman. They are the ones who sanctioned and sustained the "culture of fear and intimidation" that led to 180 educators being suspended pending hearings. Many of the 180 are, if not exactly innocent, at least victims and unwilling co-conspirators. They don't deserve to have their lives ruined.

Wait a minute.

A revocation [of teaching certification] will make it difficult for an educator to work in another public school in Georgia or another state...

Wait just a damn minute. Make it difficult? I thought you had to have PSC certification to teach in public school. Make it difficult?

From 13 to 7

Atlanta School Board votes to close 7 schools | ajc.com
Originally, 10 schools were slated for closure, but the board decided to close Parks and Kennedy middle schools and Capitol View, White, Cook, East Lake and Herndon elementary schools.

Which is to say, the Stantons (D.H. and F.L.) and Towns got reprieves. If the parents stay active, the wake-up call might have done some good. The overcrowded schools that were in no danger of closing have phenomenally strong parent involvement: The half-capacity schools threatened with closure, well, don't. (Insert crickets here.)

Now, that's a short synopsis for a nine-hour meeting. To be fair, the board did have other business to discuss. There was a little bit of "have security escort this man outside" excitement.

The board did guarantee that everyone who'd signed up to speak would have an opportunity to speak. Unfortunately, the board had no way to screen for people who actually had something to say, and could say it in a way that made sense. Darn that democracy. You can sometimes get the "participation" part, but the "educated" part is trickier. On the other hand, who can the APS blame for that?

It's about race? Really?

Protest over proposed D.H. Stanton Elementary School closing grows heated | 11alive.com
Someone also passed out a flyer that has jaws dropping, even in their own neighborhood.

It's a glossy, professional-looking flyer depicting Superintendent Erroll Davis in a Ku Klux Klan robe. The title reads: "They erased answers. I erase Black schools."

On the flyer, Davis holds a large pencil marked with "No. 00 white schools closed."

The flyer includes pictures of the Atlanta School Board. Davis is African-American, as are seven of the nine school board members.

In small print at the bottom, the flyer says, "Designed by Nathaniel Dryer, Organizer -- Going Against All Odds for our Young People."

Peoplestown residents told 11Alive News Friday morning that the flyer was not created by a parent and they do not support it or agree with its message.

Redistricting is supposed to help solve overcrowding on the north side and empty seats in the south side. It's put some of Atlanta's oldest African-American communities in the crosshairs.

But Davis has said race is not an issue.

Has 11Alive read "Julius Caesar"? Are they trying to sound like Mark Antony? "For Davis is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men."

Let's see. Atlanta is a majority-black city, with a black mayor and a majority-black city council.

Atlanta Public Schools' board is majority black. The superintendent is black. Senior administrators are majority black. The APS work force is overwhelmingly majority black, principals, teachers and support staff. Certainly the system student body is majority black.

And this guy thinks it makes sense to portray the APS board and superintendent as the KKK?

Assuming that this is an opportunistic publicity stunt (which it almost has to be), what audience is Dryer actually looking for?

I'm tempted to say it's not APS' fault that the schools on the white side of town are at or over capacity, while the schools on the black side of town are running at two-thirds to half or less. In fact, in a manner of speaking, it is APS' fault. Sometime in the Hall administration (if not before), someone decided that APS' primary mission was to keep teachers employed, regardless of merit. The way to do this, they apparently concluded, was to put these inadequate teachers in schools APS had already decided would never be academic showcases, because they were full of project kids, and we all know they're not educable, right?* But the appearance of putting up the effort would save jobs.

If I thought this KKK flyer would direct some attention to this still-unaddressed phenomenon, I'd be all in favor of it.

But as it is, it still makes zero sense to close the schools that are overcrowded. Obviously you close the ones being abandoned by the kids the census says live there, but whose parents are getting them into a different school by any means necessary. (Thanks, Malcolm X.) Some request transfers, knowing that means they have to provide transportation to their alternate choice school. Some lie about their mailing address. Some "send the kids to live with an aunt." Some, I'm convinced, just don't go to school at all, because Mom (they're mostly single-parent households) has decided that no school is still better than that school. (And maybe she's right.)

The only solution that makes sense is to close the schools that the parents are staying away from. It's a shame they can't just call them "schools that suck", or the flow of student movement would be a lot easier to understand.
____

*  You know I don't actually believe this, right? The problem isn't that they can't learn, it's that no one really expects them to. But children always learn. Sometimes what they learn is not what you meant to teach them. With conduct like this what are we teaching them? That Real Society does not care for them, has no place for them, has no use for them.

LATER: Flyer About APS Superintendent Stirs Controversy | CBS Atlanta: "Dryer says he didn’t mean for the flyer to have racial undertones..." I don't know how a black man can throw the KKK into an argument in a way that doesn't have racial undertones. Is he stupid or does he think everyone else is? I'll stick to my first impression: Opportunistic publicity stunt.

Two? Just two?

APS redistricting plan: a tale of two schools | 11alive.com
Parents at Coan Middle School were all smiles on Sunday after Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Erroll Davis removed their school from his final school closing list.
..."I think district leaders are making a mistake," said Kevin Lynch, president of the Peoplestown Association and the father of a two-year-old girl. "We're not pleased about it."
Parents in Peoplestown are new to this fight.
Their neighborhood elementary school, D.H. Stanton, was added to the final closing list on Saturday night without any warning.

Only a reporter who hasn't been following the ongoing Battle of APS Redistricting could conclude that it comes down to "a tale of two schools", making it sound like it's a choice between closing a middle school and an elementary school.

And, about the "without any warning" scare: this is a warning, not a final decision. This is only the list that, barring new information and subsequent changes, the superintendent will present to the board. We're still a long way from a "final closing list." There are still a couple of weeks and a full battery of neighborhood meetings before the superintendent reports to the board, and there's no guarantee that the board will do what the superintendent proposes. (Although, admittedly, odds are they will.)

But the reporter who really thinks this is a "tale of two schools" is invited to talk to the staff and parents of the other twelve schools what were on the original list of 13 recommended to close (Coan was on that list, now apparently "saved"), plus Towns Elementary (which wasn't on that list, but is now recommended to close).

I say "staff and parents" without including "students" purposefully, since some students can be counted on to plead with puppy-dog eyes that "the only school we've ever known" remain open, and others would cheerfully dance on the rubble of a school, with absolutely no care for whether the grown-ups thought it was a Good School, or how much money it cost to keep open.

But I may be expecting too much of staff and parents to hope they'll think of the system's best interests. Certainly the system has not historically shown much interest in thinking of theirs.

Best of a bad situation

APS to close 10 schools under plan for new boundaries | ajc.com
Atlanta Public Schools will close 10 schools and eliminate about 5,500 of 13,000 extra seats under the final redistricting proposal released Saturday by Superintendent Erroll Davis.
The proposal, which goes to the school board for a vote on April 10, reduces the number of elementary and middle schools with less than 450 students from 38 to 17. The plan also organizes schools in a "cluster" format, where groups of elementary schools feed into the same middle and high school.

The "school cluster" idea, where each high school anchors a group of middle and elementary schools that feed into it, seems so obvious that I have to wonder why APS wasn't already doing it. Previously, elementary and middle schools were organized into four "School Reform Teams", and all city high schools were in their own, separate Team. This led to a mess where vertical continuity didn't exist. Even within an individual school, some elementary students moved upward into one middle school, some into another. Madness.

But I realize that reorganization is not what this announcement is about: That decision has already been made, and about time too. This is about closing schools. And really, there are very few surprises in this final recommendation. Most of the schools that are scheduled to close have been named on most of the previous drafts, although there's a little variation in exactly where the new zone boundaries are drawn.

Here are the surprises:

STAYING OPEN:

• Coan Middle
• Humphries Elementary
• Thomasville Heights Elementary
• Whitefoord Elementary

Coan's parents mounted a vocal opposition to closing the school and using the building as a "6th grade academy" extension of Inman. Coan survives, sort of, because the Coan students will temporarily be at the (closed) East Lake Elementary building, because of the domino effect of temporarily closing Jackson High for renovations in 2012-13 and moving the student body to the Coan building. In 2013-14, Jackson and Coan return home.

Whitefoord remains open, and will get a few of the displaced Cook students, whose building will become the Inman 6th grade academy instead of Coan. If you've seen Inman Middle, you know they just don't have any room for nearby expansion. And as we've heard over the past two months, not one Inman parent will willingly send a child anywhere else. We'll see how they feel about their 6th graders being sent to Cook.

Thomasville Heights and Humphries are just plain mystery gifts. They were on every list to close. I've heard speculation, possibly unworthy, that Thomasville remains open because no other school will take their students. The Cook kids's influence will be diluted between Centennial Place, Hope-Hill, Parkside and Whitefoord: There's no similar provision to be made for Thomasville Heights, which appears doomed to be the APS' bad example.

And Humphries remains open, it appears, for the opposite reason: Although smaller than APS would like, they're performing so much better than the other schools in their cluster. Sometimes you just don't dare fix something that doesn't appear to be broken.

CLOSING:

• D.H. Stanton Elementary

D.H. Stanton (don't forget the initials: There's an F.L. Stanton as well) wasn't on any of the previous lists to close, but many of its parents begged Davis to close the building before it collapsed.

See also:
East Atlanta Patch: Davis' Final APS Redistricting Plan: Keep Coan Middle And Whitefoord Elementary Open
APS: Superintendent’s Final Redistricting and Closure Recommendations (PDF)

LATER: Oops, I seem to have neglected a couple of surprises, schools that were on one list all along, now moved to the other with no warning.
STAYING OPEN: Boyd Elementary
CLOSING: Towns Elementary
Given where they both are (northwest Atlanta, near Douglass High), it could be as simple as a flip of the coin between them. Just as it could be that D.H. Stanton must die that Thomasville Heights might live.

It's the ones full of administrators you really have to watch out for

Parents fear impact of empty Atlanta school buildings | ajc.com
Parents and community leaders fear a future of more derelict buildings dragging down struggling neighborhoods as 13 Atlanta schools face closure in a bid to balance enrollment and make better use of funding.
Atlanta Public Schools already has 14 empty school buildings, some of which closed in the 1970s.

Okay, you're right to worry about that. APS doesn't have a great track record for re-purposing vacant buildings. All those crack-heads have to live somewhere.

Let's say we have a school like Cook Elementary School. It's running at about half capacity. Where is everybody? The census says there should be plenty of kids. But Cook is a "lower-performing" school, and APS is obligated to allow any parents who want to transfer their child to a better school to do so. Schools like Neighborhood Charter, Parkside (which only has openings because so many of "their" kids are going to Neighborhood Charter) and Drew Charter (where all the principals' kids go). APS can't make them go to Cook. Every parent who can "vote with his feet" is doing that. Every child who can meet the demands of a higher-performance school is getting and staying away from Cook.

Who's left?

The overwhelming majority of the remaining Cook kids are from single-parent households. Mom would like to move her child to a different school, but in order to do that, she'd need a car. (APS will allow you to transfer, but they won't bus you to an out-of-zone school. If you have to ride the school bus, you have to go where they take you.) So, in effect, the kids who remain at Cook are there because they can't leave. Guess what morale is like.

The school board is faced with an unpleasant decision. They can (1) leave the situation as is, spend money they don't have to maintain a half-full school that nobody wants to go to, a school where enrollment is now so low that it doesn't qualify for most forms of state and federal funding; or they can (2) close the school and re-zone the kids into another school...where the parents, teachers, and students don't want them. Since the school they'll be merged into is almost certainly performing better, they won't want their numbers to be dragged down with this massive influx of low-performing students.

And the Cook neighborhood, going nowhere fast, has another big, empty target for vandals and scavengers. Even if the kids get along in their new school just fine, they still have to come home to the Cook area.

In which option are the children better off?

Multiply this times thirteen schools on the superintendent's current "to be closed" list.

UPDATE: Turns out the Cook kids are being split between Centennial Place, Hope-Hill, Parkside and Whitefoord, so maybe there won't be a large enough concentration of them at any one place to destroy their performance scores.

My calculator is broken

96 accused of cheating still on payroll  | ajc.com
Ninety-six out of almost 180 educators named in the Atlanta Public Schools cheating investigation are still on the payroll, officials said Friday. The district took the first steps to fire three more educators Friday by issuing "charge letters" stating the claims against them. So far, 22 charge letters have been issued.

It's almost like they read this blog, they know I'm putting together a scorecard, and they want to throw me more numbers while not quite making it possible for them to add up. I'm missing something, or I've been rounding the "about"s, "more than"s and "some-odd"s in the wrong directions. I've massaged the scorecard accordingly.