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School Consolidation
Topic Started: Aug 19 2010, 08:36 PM (344 Views)
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Think about a merger of Grand Rapids, East Grand Rapids schools, a contrast in rich-poor districts
Published: Tuesday, August 17, 2010, 10:38 AM
Dave Murray | The Grand Rapids Press

East Grand Rapids Public Schools stand in stark contrast to the neighbor that borders them on three sides.

While Grand Rapids contends with the poverty and struggles of an urban system, “East” is a pocket of affluence and academic success.

Only 5 percent of its 3,000 students are considered economically disadvantaged, and more than 90 percent reach proficiency on state math and reading tests. Just 8 percent are minorities.

Educators said there is more to consolidating school districts than saving money, including working toward equity by breaking down the walls between rich and poor neighborhoods.

“Maybe someday we won’t educate children according to defined political or geographic boundaries, but according to programs that have the resources to support them,” Grand Rapids Superintendent Bernard Taylor said.

In his district, only about 50 percent of the 18,500 students are at state math and reading proficiency, according to the Council of Chief State School Officers. About 87 percent of students are economically disadvantaged, and 79 percent are minorities.

See what other districts might look like if they merged.

Countywide districts in other states find ways to break up areas of extreme poverty.

“You have to find a way to maximize your resources so every building has what it needs to help every child,” said James Browder, superintendent of Lee County Schools in Florida, where 43 percent of the students are economically disadvantaged. “You can’t have situations where you have the best buildings only where the rich and famous live.”

East Grand Rapids Superintendent Sara Shubel said her district’s size, not necessarily its makeup, is the key reason for its success.

She said the size is considered optimal by many experts, and staff members at the elementary buildings can be “on the same page” with those in the middle and high schools, allowing for seamless transitions.

“If a school is too small, it can’t offer as many opportunities,” she said. “We can offer comparable opportunities to a school the size of the Forest Hills high schools, but perhaps not as many sections of classes.

“But if a school is too big, you have to start looking for ways to break it down into communities.”

Residents of each district involved in a merger must approve a plan for it to happen, and experts said that is difficult, especially because of emotional attachment and community identity.


Sharif Shakrani
But Sharif Shakrani, a Michigan State University professor of measurement and quantitative methods, said parents also worry about academics.

Shakrani, who studied consolidation issues for The Press and affiliated newspapers, said parents in high performing districts worry that academic programs would be watered down in a merger. That doesn’t have to be the case, he said.

Few parents, he added, consider the other outcome, that a merger can bring changes that improve achievement for students in another district.

Leaders in small, rural districts said mergers work better for suburban systems than rural areas. The Kent City district has the fewest students in Kent County but covers many square miles.

Superintendent Bill Smith said a merger with neighboring Sparta might look good on paper until transportation times and costs are considered.

“We have some kids on buses for 45 minutes each way already,” he said. “We would never have two high schools in a combined district, which means we’d be busing students from Newaygo and Muskegon counties all the way down to Sparta. You’d have kids on buses for an hour and a half.”

E-mail: dmurray@grpress.com

Related topics: Michigan 10.0


http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2010/08/michigan_100_east_grand_rapids.html
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Mackinac Center agrees with Bay County school chiefs: Consolidating services - not districts - will save money
Published: Tuesday, August 17, 2010, 5:40 PM
Andrew Dodson | The Bay City Times
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Times File PhotoThe Mackinac Center, a Midland-based free market think tank, refutes an MSU study that collaboration of school districts to a county level will help save Michigan hundreds of millions of dollars.

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Share MIDLAND — Consolidating school districts is not the silver bullet for Michigan's school budget crisis, says researchers from the Mackinac Center, a free market think tank in Midland.


In fact, they agree with what Bay County superintendents said in a roundtable discussion with the Bay City Times last week, arguing that collaboration of services is the answer. View that video, here.


"I think consolidating services will save money," said Michael Van Beek, director of education policy at the Mackinac Center, in a report. "But consolidating districts, that's not a silver bullet and shouldn't be considered. There is no evidence to show that consolidating districts will save taxpayers in Michigan."


That statement comes after a new Michigan State University study commissioned by the Bay City Times and seven affiliate newspapers that ran this past weekend as part of the Michigan 10.0 series on school consolidation. The study says Michigan taxpayers could save $612 million each year after three years by consolidating school districts by county.


Van Beek said the MSU report wasn't applicable to this state.


"It takes data from 20 years ago from a study in rural New York and runs all the calculations based on current spending in Michigan," he said.


According to a Mackinac Center 2007 study on school consolidation, Adjunct Fellow Andrew Coulson found that school costs would continue to rise unless market incentives were introduced. He argues that school officials will maximize operating spending regardless of the public demand for educational services.
Related topics: Bay County schools, Mackinac Center, Midland

http://www.mlive.com/news/bay-city/index.ssf/2010/08/mackinac_center_agrees_with_ba.html
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Raleigh, N.C.'s secret to great schools: Consolidation, busing and putting poor children in middle-class schools
Published: Wednesday, August 18, 2010, 6:00 AM
Kym Reinstadler | The Grand Rapids Press
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Which big city in America has no bad schools, according to a new book?

A: Raleigh, N.C.

Q: Which popular reform methods made Raleigh a top performing district: choice, charters, competition, testing, accountability?

A: None of the above.

Raleigh did it, author Gerald Grant says, by the least popular of all school reform vehicles: consolidation and busing.

“The story of urban schools is usually misery upon misery,” said Grant, professor emeritus of education and sociology at Syracuse University. He wrote “Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There are No Bad Schools in Raleigh.”


Gerald Grant
“Raleigh is the best example we have of how change can happen on a large scale in a way that can raise every student’s boat.”

Raleigh’s countywide school system reduced disparities in educational opportunities between city kids and their suburban and rural neighbors, he said. Despite spending less than state and national averages, the district narrowed minority achievement gaps.

Its students exceed national averages on Advanced Placement tests and do well on college entrance tests. The district sets goals of 95 percent of students passing state exams, well ahead of No Child Left Behind.

Grant said he became interested in Raleigh’s Wake County Public School System because his grandsons attend there.

POCKETS OF POVERTY
Percentage of district students who meet federal poverty guidelines for subsidized lunches

Kent County
Grand Rapids: 87%
Godfrey Lee: 84%
Godwin Heights: 76%
Kelloggsville: 71%
Wyoming: 66%
Kentwood: 55%
Average: 48%
Comstock Park: 46%
Cedar Springs: 44%
Sparta: 43%
Kenowa Hills: 41%
Northview: 40%
Kent City: 36%
Byron Center: 30%
Grandville: 26%
Caledonia: 20%
Rockford: 16%
Lowell: 14%
Forest Hills: 5%
East Grand Rapids: 5%

Ottawa County
Holland: 64%
Average: 40%
West Ottawa: 39%
Coopersville: 36%
Grand Haven: 34%
Allendale: 30%
Zeeland: 28%
Jenison: 25%
Hudsonville: 22%
Spring Lake: 17%

Allegan County
Fennville: 71%
Martin: 51%
Allegan: 47%
Wayland: 40%
Average: 40%
Otsego: 37%
Hopkins: 35%
Saugatuck: 35%
Glenn: 34%
Plainwell: 31%
Hamilton: 25%


But he wrote a book to “reopen a discussion about equal opportunity in education that’s been on a shelf for 40 years.”

Raleigh’s success contrasts with Detroit’s school distress, says Grant, who devotes a chapter titled “A Tragic Decision” to a quashed plan to desegregate metropolitan Detroit.
Grouping children into school district castes — some rich, some poor — is both ineffective and morally wrong, he said.

The only way to hike expectations in high-poverty schools, Grant says, is to change who goes there.

But that is controversial — even in Wake County. Last fall, four new board members were elected in a low-turnout vote, shifting the balance of power. The new board’s first action: A return to community schools.

The decision prompted Superintendent Del Burns to resign and sparked marches and a raging debate about whether the district will become re-segregated.
“Political currents are running counter” to consolidation, Grant said.

The back story

Raleigh and Wake County schools merged in 1976 by act of the Legislature, anticipating a
Supreme Court order to desegregate city and suburbs. Buoyed by business leaders fearing “white flight” from Raleigh, the new unified school district balanced enrollments across all schools based on race.

Family income has since replaced race as the school assignment yardstick, after laws and attitudes changed about race-based policies.

The district said no school would have more than 40 percent of students so poor their lunches are subsidized, and no more than 25 percent of students reading below grade level.

Magnet schools with extra resources attract suburban kids into city schools..

A diverse mix achieved through busing prevents teachers from becoming overburdened with students requiring extra support, Grant said. Wake County has low teacher turnover and the highest number of nationally certified teachers of any urban district in the country.

The practice has also kept kids from more affluent families — including teachers’ own children — in public schools, putting Raleigh schools in sharp contrast with other urban centers. Children learn to cooperate across boundaries of race and class, he said.

Wake County’s population has doubled in 35 years, bolstered by economic development at Research Triangle Park. Public school enrollment has also climbed, including by 4,000 to 7,000 students each of the past five years. The district opened four new schools this year.

“There’s no economic development engine better than good schools,” said Tom Oxholm, vice president of Wake Stone Corp. and a former school board member. He and retired Superintendent Bill McNeal wrote a 2009 book titled “A School District’s Journey To Excellence.”

Oxholm says explosive growth, not socioeconomic balancing, ignited recent discontent with the consolidated system. The district had to frequently reassign students to fill new buildings, he said.

A consolidation opponent, Apex Mayor Keith Weatherly, said his community revolted against consolidation when year-round schools were started to ease crowding, and no school in Apex was left with a traditional calendar.

Grant believes socioeconomic integration is the ticket to improving student achievement.
Some charter schools increase achievement in part by attracting the most stable families.

But Grant said most do no better than traditional public schools..




MICHIGAN 10.0: SCHOOL CONSOLIDATION PROS AND CONS

We've spent the past several months exploring issues of vital interest to Michigan. For a full overview of topics, go to mlive.com/mi10.

Here's a rundown of our August installment on school consolidation:

SUNDAY:
• What are the pros and cons of consolidation?
• Read the study commissioned by Booth Newspapers
• Quick facts on school funding and consolidation
• Should you mess with mascots?
• What about charter school consolidation?

MONDAY
• Live chat with state Supt. Mike Flanagan and Godfrey-Lee Supt. David Britten at 1 p.m.
• Kent County has 19 superintendents; a comparable Florida region has one.
• Peter Luke: What would it take to consolidate?

TUESDAY
• How two districts share one superintendent • A day in the life of Jon Felske, superintendent of Wyoming and Godwin
• What if Grand Rapids merged with East Grand Rapids?
• Dave Murray: Some possible mashups

WEDNESDAY
• Success story #1: Lessons from Raleigh, N.C., where integrated schools are thriving
• Success story #2: A look at the Glenn public school, K-6, with 45 students

SUNDAY
• Should Michigan be a one-university system, like California?

“I see great fallacy in the idea I call turnaround schools, which includes charters,” Grant said. “It does little good to create an island in a sea of poverty.”

Detroit is a direct contrast to Raleigh, Grant said. A 1974 Milliken v. Bradley court case said Detroit Public Schools and surrounding districts did not have to integrate, sealing the urban district’s decline, he said.

“If Detroit had been integrated with suburban schools, you wouldn’t have houses in the city selling for $8,000 today,” Grant said. “You would never have had the violence of Hell Night. Despite changes in the economy, the whole area would be more stable than it is today.”

Could Michigan do it?

One West Michigan superintendent who used to work in North Carolina said urban districts here would have a hard time converting to a regionally consolidated system, despite its many advantages.

Michigan’s Legislature doesn’t have the courage, or the budget, to eliminate overlap in school services and end “economic racism,” said Colin Armstrong, who came to
Muskegon Public Schools after four years ago leading Robeson County, N.C., schools.

Poverty is too concentrated in cities to defuse its effects without broad consolidation, which would require unpopular busing, he said.

“In Michigan, the goal is to segregate core and suburbs,” Armstrong said. “Power brokers live in the suburbs and have no interest in disadvantaged kids and their families.”

He also said Michigan’s structure is a challenge, with more school districts and strong unions. Muskegon County has 13 districts, while there are 20 in the Kent Intermediate School District and 11 in the Ottawa Area ISD.

In Wake County, there were only two school systems to consolidate — Raleigh and the rest of the county. The state funds one school administration staff countywide, although voters in 15 cities pay an extra tax to maintain city schools.

Even in Wake, socioeconomic balancing is unpopular especially among newcomers, he said. They are annoyed that their new home doesn’t come with a guarantee their child will attend the closest school, or any one school for more than three years at a time.

But Armstrong said Grant is absolutely correct in his conclusion: Putting poor children in middle-class schools creates expectations that aid upward mobility. He believes it because he has lived it. His father’s formal education ended at age 10; his mother’s at age 14.

“Neither of my parents graduated high school, yet my friends at school made it obvious to me that I was going to university,” Armstrong said.

“It was my peers who made it possible.”

E-mail Kym Reinstadler: kreinstadler@grpress.com


Related topics: Michigan 10.0

http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/08/raleigh_nc_a_picture_of_equal.html
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MSU Consolidation Study Seriously Flawed
By Michael Van Beek | 8/19/2010 5:09 PM

A new Michigan State University report on school consolidation appears to contain a substantial amount of plagiarized material, including whole paragraphs that seem to have originated from other sources, the Mackinac Center reported Aug. 18. Diligent reviewers shouldn't stop there, however, because the study's methodology is also deeply flawed. Even if you assume that all districts would save money through consolidation, the conclusion that they could save $612 million remains wildly exaggerated.

The report, authored by MSU's Education Policy Center senior scholar Sharif M. Shakrani, takes the findings and mathematical model from a 2001 study of 12 rural New York state school district consolidations between 1985 and 1997, and applies them uniformly to all 551 Michigan districts, regardless of size or location.

The authors of the New York study acknowledged that they only examined rural districts, and even in these they could find no savings from consolidating larger districts: "We find no support for the use of state tax dollars to encourage consolidation among districts with 1,500 or more pupils."

This limitation should have eliminated about half of Michigan districts from the MSU study's calculations. Instead, most of the 10 counties the MSU study calculated particular savings for contain large urban districts, including Kent, Washtenaw, Muskegon, Saginaw, Kalamazoo and Genesee.

Beyond that dubious geographical misapplication, the MSU researcher also appears to have incorrectly applied some of the specific New York findings. For example, those earlier scholars found that consolidations saved 8 percent in overall "operating" costs, defined as everything except capital outlays. However, in the MSU report this overall savings rate is applied to a more specific "operations and maintenance" category.

This matters because the MSU author also tries to break down potential savings from consolidating services, not just districts, and incorrectly applies the same 8 percent savings prediction. These misapplications exaggerate MSU's savings predictions for both consolidating districts and consolidating services. In fact, the 2001 study does not seem to predict cost savings at all for operations and maintenance.

The MSU report also misrepresents the data by claiming not to include charter schools in the consolidation, but including them in its savings calculation. The MSU report itself explains why doing so is a mistake: "(C)harter schools are not considered for potential inclusion in school district consolidation since they are intended to function independently. ..."

But the data used to generate the report's headline estimate of $612 million in potential savings comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, which includes charter school spending. This further inflates purported cost savings.

Furthermore, the MSU study does not consider capital costs, which the 2001 study found actually increased after consolidation. Again, the result of excluding these costs is exaggerated savings compared to those that would result from a proper application of the New York model's details.

There are other problems. The original 2001 study projects consolidation savings over a 12-year period, but the MSU report appears to compress these into just three years.* Also, most of the figures Shakrani used to calculate potential Michigan savings come from one table in the New York study listing the projected "economies of scale effects" of combining two 1,500-student rural districts. Yet these are the very districts the earlier authors concluded should not be expected to produce consolidation savings, because other rising costs offset them.

In sum, the MSU report on school consolidation, and the widely reported potential cost saving figures it generated, suffers from two irreparable flaws: The first is simplistically applying 20-year-old data from a narrow class of school districts to current spending trends for the entire state of Michigan. Compounding the methodological error, procedures from the New York study were misapplied and data was misrepresented, significantly inflating the claims of potential cost savings. These flaws invalidate the product as a credible resource for any discussion about how to generate better results at lower costs in the Michigan public school system.

* It is possible that the MSU author reran the New York study's statistical model using Michigan-specific data to find the savings over a three-year period. However, the report does not provide any results from a regression if one was used, nor does it mention anything about rerunning the statistical model. It appears that author simply multiplied the predicted savings rates (although incorrectly in at least one case) by total 2009 spending for certain school services in Michigan.

http://www.mackinac.org/13417
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Possible Plagiarism in MSU/Newspaper Report on School Consolidation
By Tom Gantert | Aug. 18, 2010

A school consolidation study done by Michigan State University's Education Policy Center received significant media coverage around the state. It also appears to contain text that was plagiarized from other sources, according to Mackinac Center Education Policy Director Michael Van Beek.

The report, titled "School District Consolidation Study in 10 Michigan Counties," was done by Sharif Shakrani, senior scholar at the Education Policy Center at MSU and a professor of measurement and quantitative methods. The report was paid for by Booth News Services and got front-page treatment in newspapers across the state.

Van Beek said he noticed similarities between the MSU report and another report on which it was based. The Mackinac Center used plagiarism-screening software and found more than 800 words in the paper that appear to be taken verbatim or nearly word-for-word from several sources, including a 2001 study done by William Duncombe and John Yinger of the Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University. In those instances, which appear throughout the study and include entire paragraphs, there was insufficient or no attribution, Van Beek said.

Shakrani said his research involved graduate students and included about 50 different sources, many of which he said were used for background purposes.

Shakrani said they didn't give credit to all the sources he drew upon in the study. He did say he credited Duncombe and Yinger, "the source we relied very heavily."

Shakrani read a passage from his study where it cited where he got the information.

He was asked if he did that for all the sources.

"That may not be the case in all sources," Shakrani said. "There may be a paragraph or two that may be relevant. I'm not sure about that. I've got to check."

"This is for newspapers," Shakrani said. "It is not for a scholarly publication."

http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/13407
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