On April 26-28, the Detroit – For Inspiration Recognition of Science & Technology (FIRST) World Championships were held, hosting over 15,000 students and 40,000 spectators from all around the world, including of 111 Michigan teams. It is with great excitement that the Michigan Department of Education (MDE) share two Michigan teams, Stryke Force, Kalamazoo and Team RUSH, Clarkston were part of the winning alliance for this year’s game, FIRST POWER UPSM.
The State Board of Education (SBE) celebrated the success of the Stryke Force, Kalamazoo and Team RUSH, Clarkston FIRST Robotics teams by honoring them at the June 12 board meeting. Their presentation demonstrated the level of technical capacity, educational excellence, and 21st Century competencies achieved by these students and the students participating in the 1400 teams across the state.
Stryke Force had students Sierra Staunton and Kjersten Lindbloom, present. Sierra shared, “We work to inspire others, because FIRST inspires us. Through FIRST, STEM is accessible.”
Team RUSH had students Valentina Vargas, Jessica Ray, and Jason Richards present. Valentina shared that Team RUSH, “aims to create self-confident leaders who inspire others to celebrate STEM.” The students from Team RUSH shared that they work to fail faster in order to learn more to ensure they are focused and execute their mission.
Both teams shared that the FIRST Digital Badges allow them to demonstrate to colleges and industry their mastery of high valued 21st Century skills. SBE member, Lupe Ramos-Montigny stated, “I’m encouraged and inspired by you. You are on to great success.”
All State Board members and Interim State Superintendent Sheila Alles congratulated the teams for their success at the 2018FIRST World Championship and thanked them for their attendance and presentation.
Many other Michigan teams were awarded with high honors at the Detroit-FIRST Robotics World Championship. Team 2834, Bionic Black Hawks, Bloomfield Hills, won the Chairman’s Award, the highest honor given at the FIRST Robotics Competition Championship. This award recognizes the team that best represents a model for other teams to emulate and best embodies the purpose and goals of FIRST. Michigan teams were represented in every subdivision winners, as well.
The FIRST Robotics Program empower students to demonstrate their competency in learning in a variety of ways. They have opportunities to solve problems that leverages the power of technology by developing and testing solutions in creative and imaginative ways. They are able to construct knowledge and make meaning of their learning experience for themselves. Students become global collaborators by utilizing technology to make connections with others to broaden perspective and learning through the creation of original products.
This program supports Michigan’s Top 10 in 10 strategic plan by supporting Goal Two, strategy 2.6 and 2.7 by engaging students in well-rounded learning experiences in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), language, business, culture, and creativity, as well as providing access to personalized learning technologies that support and enhance those learning experiences.
The MDE is looking forward to supporting the FIRST Robotics grant program in the 2018-19 school year through continued commitment of grant funding. The 2018-19 and 2019-20 FIRST Robotics World Championships once again will be hosted in Michigan.
Alondra Alvarez lives about five minutes from her high school on Detroit’s southwest side but she drives there instead of walking because her mother fears for her safety. Once the 18-year-old enters the building, her surroundings take on a more secure feel almost immediately as she passes through a bank of closely monitored metal detectors.
“My mom has never been comfortable with me walking to school. My mom is really scared of street thugs,” said Alvarez, who attends Western International.
As schools around the U.S. look for ways to impose tougher security measures in the wake of last month’s school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead, they don’t have to look further than urban districts such as Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York that installed metal detectors and other security in the 1980s and 1990s to combat gang and drug violence.
Security experts believe these measures have made urban districts less prone to mass shootings, which have mostly occurred in suburban and rural districts.
Officials in some suburban and rural school districts are now considering detectors as they rethink their security plans after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 19-year-old former student Nikolas Cruz allegedly brought in a duffel bag containing an assault rifle and opened fire. He’s charged with 17 counts of first-degree murder and 17 counts of attempted murder.
The massacre has galvanized thousands of students around the country who walked out of their classrooms for 17 minutes — one for each Parkland victim — on March 14 to protest gun violence.
“I think urban schools are eons ahead. They’ve been dealing with violence a lot longer than suburban schools,” said Philip Smith, president of the National African American Gun Association.
During the mid-1980s, Detroit was one of the first districts in the nation to put permanent, walk-through metal detectors in high schools and middle schools. New York schools also had them in some buildings.
By 1992, metal detectors had been installed in a few dozen Chicago high schools. And in 1993, under pressure to make schools safer, Los Angeles’ district announced that it would randomly search students with metal detectors.
Such measures “are designed to identify and hopefully deter anybody from bringing a weapon to school, but metal detectors alone portray an illusion of being safe,” said Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of the 50,000-student Detroit Public Schools Community District.
“Our schools need to be safer than they are,” Vitti said. “As a nation, we need to fully fund and make sure all districts can adequately staff school resource officers and also offer mental health and first-aid training to all educators.”
Security measures don’t always keep guns off school grounds. A 17-year-old high school senior was killed and another student wounded March 7 in a Birmingham, Alabama, classroom shooting. Metal detectors at the school were not in use that day. A 17-year-old student has been charged with manslaughter.
Two students were shot and three people suffered other injuries in February when a gun in a backpack accidentally fired inside a Los Angeles Unified School District middle school. The district does random metal-detector wand searches daily in middle schools and high schools. A 12-year-old girl has been charged with being a minor in possession of a firearm and having a weapon on school grounds.
In response to the Parkland shooting, Florida’s governor has said he wants to spend $500 million to increase law enforcement and mental health counselors at schools, to make buildings more secure with metal detectors and to create an anonymous tip line.
A package of legislation passed by the New York state Senate includes provisions for metal detectors and improved security technology in schools. A parent in Knox County, Kentucky, has said his law office would donate $25,000 for metal detectors in schools there.
Alvarez, the student at Detroit’s Western International, said she and others who attend the school go through metal detectors every morning. Her elementary and middle schools also had metal detectors.
“I’ve always seen it as something that made me feel safe,” she said, adding that all schools should have them and not just inner-city ones “so students don’t feel discriminated against.”
Metal detectors are seen as a symptom of a “stigma that already exists,” said Mark Fancher, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan’s Racial Justice Project.
“There is a presumption that urban schools — particularly those with students of color — are violent places and security demands you have procedures in place that are intended to protect the safety of the students,” Fancher said.
But metal detectors, property searches, security guards and police in schools create conditions similar to those found in prisons, he said.
“Students, themselves, internalize these things,” Fancher said. “If you create a school that looks like a prison, the people who go there will pretty much decide that’s what is expected of them.”
Many urban districts have a greater awareness and sensitivity when it comes to students’ needs, said Kenneth Trump, president of the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services, a K-12 security consulting firm.
“I think in urban schools, the approach of most of the educators, administrators and security personnel is, ‘We realize there are issues kids bring to school,’” said Trump, who has been in the school safety field for more than 30 years. “The people will tell you, ‘We are not in denial … we acknowledge our problems. We just don’t have enough resources to deal with it.’”
Suburban and rural administrators, parents and students often view themselves as different from their big-city counterparts, and that may impact how they treat school security, he said.
“There’s very often that divide of ‘There’s us and there’s them. We’re not the urban district. We are the alternative. We’re the place people go to get away from the urban district,’” he said.
Nikolai Vitti’s voice trembles a bit when he talks about his maternal grandfather, Richard J. Past.
The man toiled tirelessly at Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Plant and passed away three years ago at age 84.
“After he retired,” Vitti recalls. “He had a lot of time with me. He was instrumental in taking me to my sports practices. I wouldn’t be the person that I am without him.”
Vitti, superintendent of the Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Florida, was appointed to lead Michigan’s largest school district in April. He began work as a consultant earlier this month and takes the reigns officially on July 1. His starting salary is $295,000; his contract is five years.
Dr. Nikolai Vitti and family
The Dearborn Heights native comes to a school district that had 300,000 enrolled students in 1967 but now has fewer than 50,000 children. What’s more, Detroit Public Schools Community District has struggled with financial challenges and has been under state control for 15 of the 18 years.
But Vitti maintains that he’s up the job. At 40, he is among the youngest Detroit district superintendents ever. Only Arthur Jefferson, the district’s first black schools chief, was younger. Jefferson was 37 when he was appointed to the post in 1975.
GROWING UP IN DEARBORN HEIGHTS
Vitti grew up during the 1980’s and early ‘90s. His father left the home when he was young so high school athletics, basketball and football at Dearborn Divine Child, provided roles models as coaches. Sports gave him the opportunity to fire up jump shots in Calihan Hall and go after the pigskin in the 80,000-seat Pontiac Silverdome. Equally important, he learned discipline as a team captain and it helped to prepare him for college and a public schools administration career.
“I think that I’m a strong leader because of those experiences,” he declares.
Although he struggled with dyslexia, Vitti studied at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and later earned the prestigious Presidential Scholarship graduate degrees in education at Harvard University.
Metro Detroit is one of the nation’s most racially segregated areas in the nation and Dearborn Heights, a white and tony working-class and middle class town, is 90 percent white. Racial segregation and hostile policies toward black and browns come to mind when one thinks about western Wayne County communities like his hometown. However, Vitti, a son of immigrants who grew up a stone’s throw from ethnically diverse Inkster, points out that his experiences in his uncle’s pizzeria and in sports was enlightening.
“My view of the world was very different than the average Anglo-Saxon American growing in metro Detroit,” he points out. “I was exposed to (ethic and racial) diversity at a young age.”
Moreover, Vitti is candid and philosophical when discussing race. He doesn’t mind questions about his marriage to Rachel, who happens to be black and hails from the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area.
“We should be proud of our identity,” Vitti states. “Far too often, whites try to erase race, which is linked to an identity. Idealistically, I look forward to a world where we recognize each other based on race because that’s linked to a history and a culture, experiences and values.”
The Vittis have been married for 16 years and have four children.
“I’M ABOUT THE WORK”
After college, Vitti worked in New York City, North Carolina, Miami and Jacksonville but not in metro Detroit. So what’s on his list of immediate to dos?
“When you talk about entry,” he says. “It’s about engaging internal and external stakeholders.”
Further, Vitti wants to “have an authentic dialogue” with area elected officials, which includes school board members, city, county and Detroit legislative leaders; as well as the foundation and clergy communities and school union leadership.
“At the heart and core of this is engaging teachers,” he states. “If you ask me, ‘Who do you really want to get to?’ it is teachers, principals, district staff, parents and students.”
What’s intriguing about Vitti’s approach to K-12 education?
“I’m adamant about focusing on what I call The Whole Child,” he states. “At the core, schools should be about reading, math, science, writing and social studies but we just can’t do academic work in our schools. It has to be broader than that.”
Vitti suggests a greater need for arts, music, foreign language and athletics. Several years ago, for example, he freed up about $20 million so that all Duval County elementary schools had music and art teachers.
In his public interview with the Detroit Board of Education several weeks ago, Vitti declared that wanted to put charters schools out of business. He believes that when traditional schools are doing their job well, there are better equipped than charter schools, which are also public schools.
“I believe that when traditional public schools and traditional education gets it right, they get it right better than any other form of education,” he says.
“I believe that when you look at traditional public schools, we have a better pool of teachers and principals,” he states further. “And we have a better bench than charters do. I also believe that, at its truest form, traditional public schools are closer to the community because there is a higher level of accountability. You have an elected local board.”
Vitti started work as a consultant this month and is prepared to enter contract talks with DPSCD unions, if necessary. “It’s part of the job,” he points out. The Detroit Federation of Teachers executive board earlier this month rejected a tentative agreement with school district administrators.
He believes that through partnerships, internships and playing an active role in helping to move favorable public policy in Lansing and Washington, D.C. small business play a greater role in urban public school education in general and DPSCD in particular.
“Without a strong traditional public school education system and I mean traditional public education system,” Vitti states. “we’re not going to develop students who are employable with the right skills for the future and the now.”
So what’s the best thing about coming home to metro Detroit?
Vitti states:
“The peace and opportunity that comes with serving the city I love and people who share many of my life experiences at one of the most important and defining moments in the city’s history.”
It is 50 years since the Detroit riot, which followed a police raid on an unlicensed bar in 1967. The intensity of that event was surpassed previously only by the 1863 New York City draft riots during the Civil War, and subsequently by the 1992 Los Angeles riots. By the time it ended, 43 people were dead and over 1,000 injured. The 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and the National Guard were deployed. At least 2,000 buildings were destroyed in a neighborhood that, half a century later, remains largely a wasteland.
The chaos, violence and brutality erupted in a city of multiple ills, with discrimination in policing, housing and employment rife; the quality of public education incredibly poor; and limited access to medical services. The riot erupted in one of the most neglected neighborhoods, in one of the nation’s most segregated cities—and little changed as Detroit continued its decline in the 50 years that followed. The city’s traditional public school system—which could and should have been a great equalizer, helping erase other injustices—has been dubbed the worst in the nation.
Today, as in many other cities where the public education system all but collapsed, public charter schools, which operate independently of the traditional school system, educate a large share of students enrolled in public schools. Taxpayer-funded and tuition-free—like traditional public schools—public charter schools may determine their own school curriculum and culture, while being held accountable for improved student performance by their authorizer, which can demand changes and even close campuses.
[/media-credit] Dr. Ramona Edelin is executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools.
Proficiency as measured by standardized test scores is better than at its nadir, but still far from satisfactory. There are some bright points, however. Charters have helped raise student proficiency. Of those public school students who took standardized tests in school year 2015-2016, 50 percent were enrolled in charters—but 61 percent of those who scored as “proficient” were charter students, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. And nearly half of charter students significantly outperform their Detroit Public Schools counterparts, Stanford University’s Center for Research and Education found.
With 53 percent of public school students enrolled in charters, Detroit has followed a similar path to the nation’s capital, which has a 46 percent charter school share. Only Katrina-hit New Orleans at 92 percent is higher among large cities. Washington, D.C. had similar problems with its public school system, as well as many of the same economic and social issues. Washington also began to innovate in its public schools with charters in the mid-1990s, amid a traditional system that, like Detroit, was seriously in decline academically, organizationally dysfunctional and dangerous to student safety.
If anything, the charter and other education reforms introduced in the District of Columbia have produced even more significant gains for the public education offering in the city as a whole.
Before the charter reform, half the public school students dropped out before graduating. Last year, the on-time—within four years—high-school graduation rate was 73 percent for charters, and 69 percent for DCPS, lower than the national rate, but fast catching up.
Standardized test scores also significantly improved at both charters and DCPS, with the strongest gains in the most underserved neighborhoods—not at the expense of a varied and diverse curriculum, but alongside one.
As public schools of choice, charters have brought options to families who pre-reform would have lacked the means to access alternatives to substandard schooling—especially important in a city where three in four public school children are economically-disadvantaged and half are defined as “at risk.”
The demand for these unique public schools is such that nearly 10,000 students are on waiting lists to attend one or more charter campuses in the school year about to begin. Demand for traditional public schools in the out-of-boundary program also has increased. And parental choice has been simplified by DCPS and D.C. charter participation in the common lottery, which allocates places when schools’ popularity causes them to be over-subscribed.
Charters’ success also has catalyzed improvements in the traditional public school system, following the introduction of mayoral-control of DCPS and the appointment of three reforming School Chancellors.
From Detroit, Washington, D.C. and New Orleans to the 13 other urban school districts where the charter share is above 30 percent, education reform has been a beneficial agent of change. This reform transforms the lives and life prospects of children growing up in our nation’s most troubled and vulnerable urban communities—for both traditional and chartered public school students.
Yesterday, a twelve-member task force, convened by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), released a report on “Quality Education.” The task force was formed in December 2016 after the NAACP’s October 2016 call for a national moratorium on expanding charter schools until a set of conditions were met.
The charge of the task force was to bring forward “practical recommendations that respond to the urgency of this resolution and the inequities undermining public education.” In order to fulfill their charge, from December 2016 to April 2017, the task force held public hearings in seven cities—New Haven, Memphis, Orlando, Los Angeles, Detroit, New Orleans, and New York.
The report acknowledged that, from testimonials at the public hearings, they found some positive aspects of charter schools. However, the report ultimately concluded that “even the best charters are not a substitute for more stable, adequate and equitable investments in public education in communities that serve all children.”
Criticism of Public Hearings
According to NAACP task report report, the “hearing format [for the public meetings] ensured testimony” from all of the following stakeholders: educators, administrators, school policy experts, charter school leaders, parents, advocates, students, and community leaders. However, some have questioned the authenticity and fairness of these meetings, claiming that they did not include groups and individuals who were charter supporters.
For example, in Tennessee, members of Memphis Lift, a parent-activist organization, voiced disapproval when they were only allowed 12 minutes at the end of a four-hour meeting. Additionally, in Orlando, Minnesota education activist Rashad Anthony Turner was ushered out of the meeting by police after he interrupted a speech by Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers President, because opponents of the moratorium were kept waiting.
Task Force Provides Five Recommendations Based on Public Hearings
According to the report, the testimonials illuminated the “perceived” benefits and problems with charter schools. Using those testimonials, the task force created five recommendations, summarized below, that would improve the quality of charter schools.
Recommendation #1: Provide more equitable and adequate funding for schools serving students of color. The task force argued that education funding has been “inadequate and unequal for students of color for hundreds of years.” In order to remedy the problem, the task force recommended that states should implement weighted student formula systems and model them after the systems that Massachusetts and California have pursued. They also recommended that the federal government should “fully enforce” the funding equity provisions within the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).
Recommendation #2: Invest productively in low-performing schools and schools with significant opportunity and achievement gaps. In order to ensure that all students receive a high-quality education, the task force recommends that federal, state, and local policies need to “sufficiently” invest in three things: creating incentives to attract and retain teachers, evolving instruction to be more challenging and inclusive, and providing more wraparound services for students such as health and mental services.
Recommendation #3: Develop and enforce robust charter school accountability measures. There were five parts within this recommendation. They are as follows:
Create and enforce a rigorous chartering authorizing and renewal process. The task force recommends that states should only allow districts to serve as authorizers. This is significant since, of the 44 states that allow charter schools, only four—Wyoming, Virginia, Iowa, and Kansas—have district-only charter authorization.
Create and enforce a common accountability system.
Monitor and require charter schools to admit and retain all students. This recommendation calls for open enrollment procedures, and asserts that charter schools should not be allowed to counsel out, push out, or expel students that they “perceive as academically or behaviorally struggling, or whose parents cannot maintain participation requirements or monetary fees.”
Create and monitor transparent disciplinary guidelines that meet students’ ongoing learning needs and prevent push out. The report recommends that charter schools should be required to follow the “same state regulations regarding discipline as public schools,” and use restorative justice practices.
Require charter schools to hire certified teachers. Many states allow charter schools to hire uncertified teachers at higher rates than traditional public schools, however Minnesota is not one of them.
Recommendation #4: Require fiscal transparency and equity. The task force recommends that all charter schools be held to the “same level of fiscal transparency and scrutiny as other public schools.”
Recommendation #5: Eliminate for-profit charter schools. This recommendation not only states that all for-profit charter schools should be eliminated, but that all for-profit management companies that run nonprofit charter schools should be eliminated as well. Approximately 13 percent of U.S. charter schools are run by for-profit companies. Additionally, at least 15 states allow virtual schools, with many of them operated by for-profit organizations.
Report Elicits Scrutiny from Education Advocates
In response to the NAACP report, Nina Rees, CEO and President of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), issued a statement where she indicated that NAPCS was glad to see the NAACP recognize the value of charter schools and agreed with them that “whoever oversees a public school should take that responsibility seriously, have the highest expectations, and hold educators in the school accountable” for educating students.
However, Rees also asserted that the NAACP’s policy resolution and report failed to “acknowledge that Black parents are demanding more and better public-school options,” citing a nationally representative survey which found that found 82 percent of Black parents favored allowing parents to choose their child’s public school.
She also cited a 2015 CREDO Urban Charter Schools Report, which found that Black public charter school students gained 36 days of learning in math and 26 in reading over their non-charter school peers.
Chris Stewart, based in Minnesota and former director of outreach and external affairs for Education Post, asserted that “the NAACP has lost its way,” claiming that they have become an “unwitting tool of teacher unions” due to the union’s significant contributions to the NAACP over the years. He also claimed that the unions are “threatened by the growth and success of non-unionized charter schools.”
District-Charter Collaboration: Hope in a Time of Political Tension
The growing and contentious disagreements between education organizations and advocates regarding the merits of charter versus traditional district schools are not new and will likely continue to dominate the news cycle.
However, in recent years, a growing number of districts and charter schools have put aside their political differences and worked together in order to do what’s best for students. Our next two blog posts will examine the cities where some of those collaborative relationships are taking place, as well as provide history on district-charter collaboration in Minnesota.
If it feels as if Michigan schools are being tugged in multiple directions, that’s because they are. And while all the attention to improving outcomes of the state’s schools is positive, the dearth of a comprehensive vision will render these efforts useless.
The governor, Legislature, State Board of Education, Michigan Department of Education and the School Reform Office are all involved with creating and implementing school policy in this state, and that has led to a confusing mix of proposals and benchmarks for schools.
And as we’ve said before, without clear direction, accountability goes out the window.
Exhibit A is the state’s education plan recently submitted by state Superintendent Brian Whiston to the U.S. Department of Education, a requirement for states to receive federal education dollars. In most states, this accounts for 8 percent of the total school budget. That’s sizable in Michigan, which spends roughly $14 billion a year on K-12 education.
By Ken Coleman, Special to the Michigan Chronicle
By Ramona Edelin Special to the AFRO
