Another graduation season, another valediction to improving KCMO’s public education

Elsewhere in this issue, David Martin’s column examines Spark Bookhart and his status-quo-friendly Hands Off the Kansas City School District campaign. Last week, a couple of Plog entries offered reminders of what the district is up against.

Staff writer Nadia Pflaum’s April 29 Plog post, “KC’s dropout rate: first, the good news,” reported that district officials are looking forward to announcing a much lower dropout rate this year. Last June, 42 percent of students walked away without a diploma. This year’s rate is in the neighborhood of 10 to 12 percent. Sounds like a huge improvement.

Not so fast. The district’s 2008-09 numbers might not have anything to do with more kids staying in school.

Students who transfer to other districts don’t count as dropouts. In the past, the district could report that a certain number of students had left for a different school system. But last fall, Missouri’s Department of Education changed its standards. A school district must now provide the name of each transferred student’s new school and the exact dates of departure and re-enrollment. Otherwise, the state counts a departed student as a dropout.

Finding out about the new rules in March 2008 was “like if it were the last two minutes of the Super Bowl, and they tell you that now the end zone is in a different spot,” says Michelle Metje, the district’s coordinator of Transition Services. She keeps track of attendance at Kansas City, Missouri’s 62 public schools. Until this year, the district’s records were poorly kept, Metje says. “This time last year, we didn’t know where 2,500 kids were.”

The state gave the district a grace period — if it could document where the kids went, Kansas City’s 2008 dropout rate could be amended, Metje says. So she coordinated what she calls an “emergency fire drill” to fix the district’s records. She and her staff of student-data analysts started by visiting all 62 schools and physically pulling all transcript requests that transferring students had filed.

Metje also used a computer system called MOSIS to track down some missing students. Schools can no longer use Social Security numbers to ID kids because many are undocumented citizens, Metje says. In MOSIS, each student is assigned a new number that’s recognized statewide, a process that started in 2005. Using MOSIS numbers to search for Kansas City students classified as dropouts, Metje found 89 kids who had left for different districts in one day. In all, she estimates that she personally corrected 10,000 student files.

The District’s IT department created a program to track the kids whose destinations were still unknown.

In a few months, Metje and her team reduced the number of “missing” kids from 2,500 to fewer than 400.

By the end of the summer, the state amended the district’s 2007-08 dropout rate from 42 percent to 21 percent.

Last year’s scare forced Metje and the head of Pupil Services to improve the district’s record-keeping. This year’s projected lower figure reflects those efforts.

But looking at this year’s data against last year’s renders quantitative comparison impossible.

Andre Riley, the district’s communications specialist, says the district’s procedures have improved, not the dropout rate itself. He says there’s still good news, though. “Through our approved accounting procedures, we are able to demonstrate what we believed all along,” Riley says. “While we do have a significant dropout problem, it isn’t as drastic as some would have you believe.”

Incoming Superintendent John Covington may want to consider a new motto for the district: Kansas City, Missouri, schools: not as bad as you thought.

Meanwhile, staff writer Peter Rugg suggested in an April 30 post that KC’s previous superintendent, Anthony Amato, really was about as bad as we thought.

Amato bailed after less than a year of service here, leaving a lot of arguing behind. One lingering question among his critics: Were his key programs just canned plays that he implements wherever he goes? Was he a decisive leader willing to do what was necessary to turn Kansas City’s schools around or just an asshole who couldn’t work with anyone? Rugg’s July 18, 2007, story, “In Amato We Trust,” suggested the latter. More and more, it looks like Rugg was right.

After leaving his KC job with an ungodly severance package, Amato took over the Stockton school district in California. Just as he had done in Kansas City — and everywhere else he has worked — he immediately announced that the district would implement the Success For All reading program. According to the Stockton Record, the program is being phased out because Amato enacted the program before bothering to submit it for approval to the California Department of Education. Shocker. Which means the $6 million the district sank into the program was totally wasted, as was the academic year spent training students in the program.

Amato told the Record he was disappointed and maintained that the program helped students. But considering his history, it’s hard to know how he can be so sure. After all, he has never sat in the big chair longer than nine months.

This Cuckold Goes to 11
This week, The Pitch’s sister paper in Minneapolis brings us a story of Craigslist mayhem and devastating personal loss. Around here, we can be thankful that CL users are still figuring out how to remedy pain through free Internet classified ads rather than cause it. Music Editor Jason Harper (with an assist from a tipster) found a guitar amp for sale on Craigslist last week that really puts out. In his April 30 Wayward Blog post, “The Guitarist, His Amp, the Singer, His Wife and Her Lover,” Harper quotes the ad:
“I caught my guitarist screwing my wife so I am selling his guitar amp! – $300. … Here is the low down on the amp. This thing is ALWAYS louder than my amp. It is a peavey XXL 212 and apparently has no volume knob because that son of a cocksucker would never turn it down. It has three channels, Clean, Crunch, and Look At Me, I Am Playing Another Lead! It has a foot switch that changes between the channels and turns on and off the effects loops so you can have a ginourmous home made pedal board and look like the biggest douche that ever graced the stage of the Riot Room. There is also a reverb so you can make your guitar sound like the moaning echos of a man who’s wife is a cheating whore. I assure you, it is in pristine shape, as the former owner took care of it like it were his baby. Well, he is busy taking care of other things now, isn’t he? Please buy this thing before I throw it through the window of his house.”
The best part comes last:
“Also looking for new guitarist.”
Whoa. Sorry, dude. And sorry, poor little amp. Anyone willing to confirm that the amp really does come from a broken home and the ad isn’t a joke?

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