Sohn: Community 'study hall' tests Hamilton County educators, community

Brandon Hubbard-Heitz, Zac Brown, education reporter Kendi Anderson, Edna Varner, and Sylvia Flowers, from left, sit on a panel during a forum hosted by the Times Free Press titled "Study Hall" held at the newspaper's offices to discuss education in Hamilton County on Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2016, in Chattanooga, Tenn. A panel of educators and education administrators answered questions about teacher quality, preparation, and solutions to education issues facing the district.
Brandon Hubbard-Heitz, Zac Brown, education reporter Kendi Anderson, Edna Varner, and Sylvia Flowers, from left, sit on a panel during a forum hosted by the Times Free Press titled "Study Hall" held at the newspaper's offices to discuss education in Hamilton County on Tuesday, Oct. 18, 2016, in Chattanooga, Tenn. A panel of educators and education administrators answered questions about teacher quality, preparation, and solutions to education issues facing the district.

Chattanooga 2.0’s 10 urgent strategies

1. Strengthen and support families.2. Provide early-learning networks to help parents ready their children for school.3. Re-imagine learning to incorporate the 21st Century technology and the Gig into classrooms.4. Make reading a priority.5. Make great teaching a priority, and increase the number of highly effective teachers in classrooms.6. Empower and support principals — with training, not just lip service.7. Focus on equity in community schools to make all schools good schools.8. Prepare all students for college and career.9. Increase post-secondary completion.10. Connect more residents to high-paying jobs.

It's sad to say, but education in Hamilton County this past year has had almost as much drama as America's 2016 presidential campaign.

But still not enough. Not enough, because there is more at stake in our classrooms.

So we're rallying the village.

Here, all politics are local, and it will take our village to fix what's broken for many of the 43,000 students in Hamilton County public school classrooms, for the 100-plus major employers in Hamilton County that cannot find enough local job-ready workers and for all of the nearly 350,000 county residents.

The Chattanooga Times Free Press last week hosted a "Study Hall" community conversation where about 150 people listened to and questioned four public K-12 education experts.

The topic was painful: How to recruit and retain highly effective teachers to a school system with the highest percentage of "least effective" teachers among the state's largest urban school districts in the state, a state that ranks in the bottom half in the nation on many education measures.

Nearly 30 percent of Hamilton County public school teachers are considered "least effective" by state measures - almost three times as many least-effective teachers as the state average and twice as many as Knox County, Metro Nashville and Shelby County school systems. Adding insult to injury, many of those least effective teachers are placed where they can do lasting harm - in predominantly poor and minority classrooms that already contain students who already overcoming more obstacles.

Over the course of two hours, a listener could boil the problem down to about three words. Dedication, equity and pay.

The dedication part was a no-brainer. A stellar teacher has to have a passion for teaching, for starters. But getting to equity and support - both in mentoring and pay - is tougher.

How our "Study Hall" audience got to those thorniest of issues was telling. Two of the last several questions came from students, and their pointed questions - devoid of political correctness - were among the hardest for panelists to answer.

Akia Lewis, a student at The Howard School, was blunt: This is great talk, what's next, and what are you going to do about it? she wanted to know. Another Howard student, Menachin Brown, got straight to it: Why does CSAS have more effective teachers than Howard?

Edna Varner, a former teacher and principal who now serves as the senior adviser of Leading & Learning at the Public Education Foundation's Project Inspire, explained how a school's leadership culture answers parts of both questions.

Before she became the principal of Howard years ago, she was an assistant principal at a magnet school. She found that the mindset and conditions at the magnet school made it possible to remove barriers and obtain resources, but that's a culture that non-magnet schools rarely have.

"If I hadn't been at the magnet, I wouldn't have known what to ask for," she told listeners. "We must accelerate what works. It's called equity."

As for the pay part? That's a question for state and local elected officials - and all of us as taxpayers. Starting salaries for Hamilton County teachers is $37,500, according to Interim Schools Superintendent Kirk Kelly. In Nashville, it's about $4,500 more. And in Georgia, it is higher still.

But teacher pay alone will not fix the fact that a third of Hamilton County teachers are ranked "least effective."

Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce, local foundation and school leaders have been working on a plan of improvement known as Chattanooga 2.0 for about a year. Big components of that plan are early childhood development initiatives and teacher mentoring programs. One leader of the Chattanooga 2.0 effort, Jared Bigham, describes the plan as "a silver buckshot approach, because no single silver bullet will fix this." But having highly effective teachers is the closest thing to a silver bullet, he added.

Another leader of Chattanooga 2.0 says privately that the plan's toughest obstacle is the more basic problem of "getting everyone to hear us."

That doesn't just mean finding enough groups to hold similar "Study Hall" events. That means getting through to people just how serious it is that we hire and retain better teachers, that we help all our preschoolers, all our third-graders and all our high school graduates - not just four in 10 of each group. Right now, just four in 10 of the county's youngsters are kindergarten ready. Just four in 10 third-graders can read at or above grade level, and just four in 10 high school graduates obtain some sort of technical certificate or degree that would help them be qualified for the county's many new living wage jobs that pay $35,000 a year and up.

So listen up, parents: You - some 80,000 strong here in our county - are the way to make these needs and goals be heard.

You're already doing yeoman's work: You're getting up at the crack of dawn to get these kids on the bus. You pinch pennies for notebooks, readers, lunches or snacks, extra trip fees. You ask every day about homework, you reassure your kids week after week that they and their schools are good - and then you pray you're right.

But there's one more thing you need - you must - do.

Demand.

Demand of your school system. Demand of your city leaders and your county leaders. Demand of your community.

Like Akia Lewis, ask them to move beyond talking about having effective and best teachers and move on to getting them. Demand that they stop talking about why our schools don't have art and music teachers - proven ways in increase learning - and find a way to get them. Demand that they move beyond talking about Hamilton County vocational classes and start growing those classes. Enough with the talking about adopting and achieving the goals of Chattanooga 2.0. Just do it.

Demand it at city councils. Demand it at the County Commission. Demand it at your local chamber meetings, your Kiwanis meetings, your Rotary meetings.

Your children are waiting.

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