Proud Cometh Before the Fall (of Manchester’s Schools) – Updated

On October 23, 2018 I announced the withdrawal of my support from Manchester Proud.  Prior to that, I had raised a number of  red flags.  My primary concern was that business people who meant well and sincerely wanted to help improve the city’s schools were going to be co-opted by “educational experts” who had little more than a radical left wing educational agenda.  This announcement was made two days after serious conflicts of interest involving members of Manchester Proud were uncovered.  A year later, after calling them out for scheduling a secret “workshop” meeting with the Board of School Committee, this site published indisputable proof of Manchester Proud’s political bias and predicted, yet again, what the final outcome of their efforts would look like.

More disturbing than what the plan does, and we’ll get to that shortly, is what it doesn’t do.  Remember, this is supposed to be a strategic plan that will guide the district for the next five years and beyond.  Yet, it does NOT address any of the following items:

• Facilities:  The district’s significant decline in enrollment has left a glut of space, yet Manchester Proud failed to address, in any way, which, given the continued and projected decline in enrollment, makes the omission more than curious.
• Union contracts:  As Chair of the Special Committee on Negotiations, I twice asked Manchester Proud Coordinator Barry Brensinger to have the assembled business people review the teachers contract.  They refused.  One cannot fully assess, understand or appreciate the day to day operations of the district without reviewing that contract or those of the district’s other five labor unions.  Moreover, it is IMPOSSIBLE to discuss the district’s finances and have any honest discussion of, or true “focus on fiscal sustainability,” without considering the contracts.  The single biggest driver of school district spending is the teachers contract.  It needs to be reformed if it is to be sustained and that is why we didn’t get a contract with the teachers.  Their position was that they wanted their “step raises,” which cost $1.9 million dollars per year at current salary levels, in addition to COLAs.  Note well that the step raises alone spend all the schools get in increased funding under the tax cap.
• Academic standards:  There is lots of data that reveals a steady and steep decline in proficiency scores since the adoption of the Manchester Academic Standards, which are little more than Manchester’s rewrite of the failed Common Core National Standards.  There was no assessment of that data and no review of the standards.  There was, however, a recommendation that the district add to its Common Core offerings by adopting the Next Generation Science Standards, despite their failure to improve science scores across the nation.
• Role of Parents:  There is NOTHING in this document that addresses the role of parents in the education of their children; not surprising given the biases of those on the Champions Council (Manchester Proud’s board of directors) and the organizations involved.
• Magnet Schools:  While this study recommends the district explore magnet schools, it does absolutely nothing to identify its current magnet programs or how they could be built on.  Moreover, this suggestion is in the subsection entitled “Explore Opportunities for New Revenue.”   There will be no new revenue if Manchester residents choose to enroll their kids in Magnet Schools.  Those who enroll from outside the district won’t do much better than break even.  The idea that this is a “net plus” on the revenue side is simply wrong and demonstrates the ignorance of how school funding works by those who published this plan.
• Increasing enrollment in AP classes, especially by minority students:  This section will be the jumping off point to what this study does, and it’s not pretty.  That the plan doesn’t acknowledge the significant increase in the numbers of students, including and especially minority students, taking AP classes in the last four years is a travesty that underscores one of the major political agendas clearly evident in this document.  The one good thing that can be said for the superintendency of Dr. Debra Livingston is that her administration came up with a system that increased participation in AP classes.  The district now pays for all sophomores to take the PSAT.  Those whose score make the cut are invited by the school principal to consider taking AP classes.  I’m oversimplifying the process a bit because each high school approaches it differently, but the upshot is there was a strong increase in the numbers of students taking AP classes and a disproportionately strong increase in minority students.  I believe this was intentionally disregarded.  Here’s why:

This document has a heavy focus on “equity.”  Now, I’m all for students receiving what they need to succeed but this document does not provide for individual needs.  It breaks students down by race, “newcomer” and language status.  It creates groups and labels them.  Its prescription for equity centers around: 

• “welcoming newcomers;”
• “cultural competence,” defined as “having an awareness of one’s own cultural identity and views about difference, and the ability to learn and build on the varying cultural and community norms of students and their families;” 
• “cultural responsiveness or culturally responsive teaching,” defined as “how instructional staff, and schools, demonstrate – or implement – their cultural competence; using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and performance styles of diverse students to make learning more appropriate and effective for them; it teaches to and through a student’s strengths;”
• and “an equity mindset and cultural competency/empathy ‘mission.'”

All of this is a very convoluted way of saying that the schools have to bend to the cultures of the myriad of foreign students now in the system rather than help those students assimilate into the Great American Melting Pot; the culture that took them in and gave them their shot at the American Dream.  It is also the means used by districts across the country to scandalize American History by vilifying the Founding.  The Founding Fathers will be trashed en-masse because some of them owned slaves.  Approaches like these have been used to de-legitimize the Founding and Founders for decades and they’ve had a devastating effect on the country.  This is a gateway to accepting revisionist history and it is destructive.

It’s also the reason why this plan recommends that the district “dismantle leveling.”  The push to “dismantle leveling” comes from the Granite State Organizing Project and its student Y.O.U. (Youth Opportunities Unlimited) subsidiary.  In 2015, flanked by members of this group, which are refugee and immigrant students of color, Assistant Superintendent David Ryan proclaimed that leveling needed to end if we were to see more students of color enter AP classes.  Ironically, as mentioned earlier, there was a significant increase in minority participation in AP classes without eliminating leveling.  At the time, Ryan warned of those who would oppose leveling, saying they would do so for reasons of “pride, prejudice and power.”  In other words, white people would fight the elimination of leveling for those reasons.  Somehow, their students’ accomplishments would be tarnished if more minority students involved.  Ridiculous!  Loathsome!

In April 2019, then Superintendent Dr. Bolgen Vargas presented reasons to de-level Manchester’s schools.  I am still waiting for the additional data and data breakdowns I asked for during that meeting.  The requests were made because the data they presented, while almost exclusively focused on achievement by race, had enough information about socioeconomic demographics that it was clear that the driver of under achievement in the Manchester School District was neither race nor ethnicity.  It was poverty and family status.  There was also information that undermined the claim that “once in a track, always in a track.”  If Manchester suffers systemic bigotry, it is the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”  Will those expectations improve without leveling?  Doubt it. 

My children were enrolled in West High’s STEAM Ahead program.  The classes weren’t leveled and the level of instruction was determined by the slower students in the class.  For all the training in “differentiation of instruction,” which is supposed to teach to everyone in the mixed class at their own level, it just didn’t happen.  Moreover, the group based projects, which Manchester Proud moves toward lock, stock and barrel, were invariably structured so that a higher achieving student was always coupled with lower achieving students.  Guess who did all the work and guess who all got the great grades.  Guess what always took at least twice the time it should have.  Right, the project, and therefore the overall pace of the class.  I’m not saying that we shouldn’t look at how our classes are structured and figure out better ways to ensure high expectations and achievement levels for all, but “dismantling leveling” is a political talking point, not a sound instructional model.  If it worked, there wouldn’t be tryouts for athletic teams in high schools.  There wouldn’t be freshman, JV and varsity teams.  Everybody’d be lumped together and the teams would be awesome.  This recommendation is political dogma of the left.

So, too, are the recommendations to adopt “restorative justice” reforms in disciplining kids.  The Obama Administration pushed this on schools across the country to address alleged racial injustice in the disciplining of students.  It works along the same line of thought as “disproportionate minority contact” with police departments.  Because minority children are disciplined more often than white children, restorative justice says discipline is inherently racist, just like arresting a person who is a minority is inherently racist.  They ignore the question over whether or not the offense requiring discipline actually happened.  Restorative justice wants to talk to the offender, understand them and council them toward better behavior.  In other words, there are no consequences for one’s actions.  The Parkland High School shooter was handled by the school’s restorative justice approach to “working with” students.  What Manchester needs is a clear and concise code of conduct that is decisively applied to all students in all schools.  Right now, principals enforce what they want to enforce and ignore what they don’t.  It’s a mess and needs to be cleaned up.

This document is steeped in the Common Core National Standards paradigm.  It’s heavy on “soft skills” and void of any real academic rigor.  Question:  How can Manchester Proud recommend a focus on “STEM/Technology Skills” as part of it’s “graduate profile” without addressing math standards that stop at Algebra II?  Why does the “graduate profile” not include excellence in English, civics or history?  Why does it contain “Equity Mindset/Cultural Competency & Empathy?”  Answer:  Because it’s designed to instill behaviors, dispositions, attitudes and mindsets.  It’s a school (bureaucrat) driven value set rooted in leftist ideology to indoctrinate children into an “acceptable” belief and value system.  The last thing they want is intellectually high functioning individuals who can think for themselves and determine their own beliefs, dispositions, attitudes and behaviors.  This is a system designed to teach kids WHAT to think, not HOW to think, its platitudes about “critical thinking” notwithstanding.

What, exactly, is “a transformational learning experience,” anyway?

As this is getting long, I’ll end on governance.  First, I will say that the way the data was collected and shared is meant to be as clear as mud.  Allow me to quote Jon DiPietro, who ran for school board from Ward 6.  He is an engineer with a substantial background in data collection and analysis.  This is what he had to say about the data presented by Manchester Proud:

Very hard to follow.  They don’t use standard survey reporting methods and don’t provide raw totals.  It’s hard to know how many responses they received for each section and they’re not broken down demographically.

In a word, this is worthless to me.

To be clear, I’m not saying the data is worthless.  I can’t tell because they don’t provide enough of it for me to judge.  But there is more than enough for me to be highly suspicious.

For example, one of the large call-outs in the report reads in bold red letters, “People of color were far more likely to express negative feelings toward the school district than white residents.” On the next page, they state that “Because of the small group of respondents (a total of 62, due to the voluntary nature of the demo-graphic page), these tables do not show statistically significant differences.” They’re not kidding.  40 responses (for this particular question) from a non-representative sample of a city with 112,000 people are completely worthless.  That would be around a 20% margin of error if the sample were random, which it is not.  The fact that they spend so much ink discussing the results from this section is questionable, to say the least.  Why do they bother reporting meaningless numbers, drawing conclusions from them, and then stating on the next page that they’re not significant?

Overall, the sample itself is not representative, which they admit in the beginning.  Women, college graduates, and minorities are over represented.  But they never mention it again or correct for it.  The fact that their demographics were so far off means that their sample was not random and contained bias, so they have no basis for claiming a confidence interval.

Finally, what’s interesting to me is something conspicuous in its absence.  The word “tax” never shows up a single time anywhere in the report or survey.  Having been involved in many municipal elections (not to mention knocking on a couple of thousand doors myself), I can tell you this is mind-boggling.  It strains credulity to think that they did not get a single respondent in the city to mention taxes as a factor.  It’s consistently the top issue residents are concerned about.  The fact that they never asked about it betrays their bias, in my opinion.

It’s propaganda, not science.