Here's a draft of Saturday's "Our View" ...
In the past few months, we’ve written several editorials asking the Iowa City School District’s redistricting committee to keep all options “on the table” when discussing how to redraw school boundaries. And we’ve specifically asked committee members to consider transforming some of the district’s high-poverty schools into magnet schools or to allow individual schools to start experimenting with other forms of innovative curriculum.
Now that the committee is in the process of narrowing down its options, we ask the committee members to include provisions for magnet schools and specialized curriculum as part of each and every redistricting recommendation they make to the school board.
For example, West Liberty has offered a successful dual-language immersion program for more than a decade. It’s not a bilingual program geared at teaching non-native English speakers in their own language; it’s a dual-language program in which children are taught in both English and Spanish with goal of making every student bilingual and bi-literate.
If the Iowa City School District were to take the next two years and transform Twain or Wood into a magnet school focusing on elementary-age language immersion, parents from all over the district would start viewing the southeast Iowa City schools in a new light. Or, if not at Wood and Twain, such a program could be offered as a natural expansion of program in another Title 1 elementary with large population of students for whom English is a second language.
A similarly creative focus could be offered for music and the arts. Although every school has both music and art classes, those classes are offered only a few times during the week. A magnet school that focused on getting an instrument or a paintbrush into the hands of each student every day would attract parents from throughout the district. As would a school focused on advanced math and science programs.
It remains unclear, however, where the push for such a school-specific curriculum should begin: As a top-down decision by the board and administration or as a bottom-up, grassroots effort by individual school communities.
Unfortunately this “chicken or the egg” conundrum has stymied any substantial discussion of magnet schools and other innovations. Without a clear, organized effort to the contrary, the district always has moved forward in its long-term planning under the assumption that all schools should offer as close to the exact same curriculum as possible.
Fortunately, the 38-member redistricting committee represents a place where the grassroots converges with officialdom. And the redistricting process represents a rare opportunity to move forward with such a major change in the district’s status quo.
Money, of course, is the major limitation on such experimentation. The committee needs to ensure that its recommendations would not increase the district’s operating budget. So far in the redistricting process, those costs have focused primarily on transportation. But magnet schools and other programs could require increased spending on specialized staff and equipment. If the committee made such a recommendation, it would be with the understanding that the district would have to figure out how to offer such programs at the same costs as the current program, to come with additional grants for the programs or to reconfigure the way the district distributes Title 1 and other current funding.
The other limitation is ensuring equity of opportunity. Any changes to the schools in high poverty neighborhoods must benefit the neighborhoods as well as the district as a whole. If the district started moving toward establishing a magnet school, a large number of slots would have to be reserved for the students who live near the school. Otherwise, such a solution merely would replace one district problem for another.
We think the redistricting committee has to do more than just allow district officials to pay lip service to keeping such innovative curriculum options “on the table.” We urge the committee members to recommend that the district set up a time line for how such a magnet program could be implemented in at least one high-poverty elementary by the 2012-13 school year — when most of the boundary changes under discussion would take effect.