Plan B – We Don’t Like it Either
August 1, 2021
Mike Mathieson
I’d intended to write an article solely devoted to one of our ideas on how to spend several million dollars of CARES money, but current events force me to take a step back and into the fray. I’m going to touch on our plan for a Khan World School-like campus in Decatur later in this article, but first I have to say that I really feel sorry for our Superintendent of Schools right now. To have the plan to build a new Dennis School in Lincoln Park scuttled by (what I’m guessing, because the rationale for the decision by the Park District was not made public) a few NIMBY’s just doesn’t make any sense. Clay Gerhard was on the Brian Byers Show a week ago and said that the Decatur Park District has too much land to maintain for a community our size, and we all know Lincoln Park doesn’t get much use, so it certainly was in the best interest of the Park District to sell the land to DPS, but for some reason the Park District chose to be the voice of reason for the community and not sell the land. It just doesn’t make sense. Shouldn’t the Park District do what is best for the Park District?
Look, if you’ve been reading our articles, you know Duane and I have proposed (what we think!) are better ways to spend the CARES money. But you also have heard us say that if everyone is taking millions of dollars from the federal government than our city will be chumps (yeah, chumps – that’s an old word that means foolish, easily deceived, etc.) to not take the money too. And if the best we (read: the current school board and administration) can do is use it to build a school, then OK – that’s the best we can do. Duane and I think we’re right all the time... but really? Maybe we aren’t. Maybe a new Dennis School is the best we can do, and to let 20 or 30 or 40 million dollars get unused – that’s probably the worst possible outcome for Decatur. If DPS doesn’t spend the money and it were to get divided up and given back to the community – OK, then. I’m on board – don’t spend it! Give it back to the taxpayers! But that’s not the way this works.
So, now we’re going to plan B. And if plan B is Woodrow Wilson, once again, I’m going to tell you we have a better plan. With apologies to the regular readers (but bear with me – I am going to get to a new idea at the end here), we feel we should spend the money on:
Hire extra teachers. Instead of hiring 50 to 100 teachers this year, hire 150 to 200. Use the extra teachers for remediation (students nationally are as much as one year behind right now), and as subs, and bring them along slowly, with training. (And again) we know this is hard work. We know. But try. Please.
Consolidate into one High School. Offer more targeted and advanced classes for the upper quartile and the bottom quartile.
And finally, the new idea I really want to tell you about… Create a new Khan World School-like campus within the one Decatur High School.
You can read about Khan World School here.
Now, after you’ve followed the link above and read about the Khan World School, imagine this same type of school but without the difficulties of an on-line format. Instead of the daily seminars on current affairs, and the literature conversations taking place via Zoom, the kids will be able to interact with each other in meeting rooms specifically designed for small group conversations. And when a student needs help, they don’t have to schedule time with teachers on-line, they get up from their workspace and go have a conversation with one of the teachers. Obviously, this concept works great for kids in the upper quartile of academic ability because the student can advance at their own pace. If they are ready for Calculus as a junior, then they can work the curriculum then – no waiting! But the concept makes sense for the bottom quartile of students too. Too often these kids are moved along to the next subject without fully comprehending the last topic. With this new format, this process would change. To get a good manufacturing job it’s not good enough to simply have a high school degree anymore. Companies now test applicants for math and reading proficiency, and merely passing kids on year after year isn’t good enough. In our version of the Khan World School, students will need to demonstrate mastery of a subject before advancing to the next level.
Parents are paying $10,000 for the on-line version of this school. Done correctly, I hope Decatur’s Khan School would attract top students from around the area. Imagine that - families in Maroa and Mt. Zion wanting to send their kids to Decatur!
Much of the learning would be self-directed, so the teaching load should be manageable with current staff, but there still are many difficult questions. But if we put the effort into this that we were going to put into building a new Dennis School, our district could be much further ahead in a few years. So perhaps the DPS Administration should pause and not rush toward the easy thing, but instead look to help all, or at least a much larger percentage of students in the district.
Duane will be posting an article next summarizing the current state of DPS and many of the topics we’ve discussed over the last year: from declining enrollment to declining test scores. Then, after that, I’m going to look at the programs we’ve implemented locally, and programs that have been studied and/or tried nationally, to bring up test scores with little to no success, and attempt to make the point that this should be the time to try something completely new – something like our own DPS version of the Khan World School. Subscribe and watch your inbox for more.