Last night when I looked up my voting location, the name rang a bell: Weinland Park Elementary School. I'd heard this name somewhere. One of our sponsored schools, Columbus Collegiate Academy (CCA), is in the same neighborhood and when I checked the street address I put two and two together. Weinland Park is that beautiful?new building I always admire! The sprawling one with orange brick and different colored windows etched together in square patterns that remind me of Crate & Barrel mirrors.
You get the point. It's a sweet looking building. But the reason I recognized the school name was because it's the single-worst performing elementary school in the city of Columbus (according to Ohio's Performance Index score). The school serves grades K-5 and its scores are barely believable. Third-grade reading proficiency is at 21 percent, and math is barely better at 27 percent. Out of ten academic indicators, the school meets one. Located so close to CCA, which serves grades six and seven, Weinland Park's fifth graders could potentially enroll here for middle school. But they leave Weinland Park with reading proficiency rates that average 27 percent and math that averages 13 percent. This makes CCA's incredible success ? moving sixth graders to 74 percent proficiency in reading and 82 percent in math (an improvement of forty-some points in both subjects in one year!) all the more amazing.
Still, despite knowing that Weinland Park earned this lousy distinction, when I walked into the building I was impressed by the bright colors, the windows, and the high ceiling in the cafeteria. This didn't feel like an atrocious school. Few would guess that it was. Looks are so deceiving. (Several schools we recently studied for an upcoming Fordham report due in May, Needles in a Haystack, confirmed the opposite point- the simplicity or un-impressiveness of a facility has nothing to do with academic achievement.)
The New York Times ran a front page story the other day, Despite Push, Success at Charters is Mixed. ?Despite some flaws to the piece, it made an important point that I was reminded of this morning as I stood in front of the voting machine in this brightly lit school library. In describing a poorly performing charter school in Ohio, the NYTimes writes:
Even though the school did worse on the Ohio math and English exams than the average Cleveland public school, families did not flee Arts and Social Sciences Academy. On the contrary, enrollment has doubled in each of the past two years. It is a phenomenon often seen in academically failing charter schools when parents perceive them as having better discipline than district schools.
I wonder to what extent this phenomenon applies to perceptions about the building itself. Especially for low-income families whose other options may look like the prototypical inner-city school?dull brown brick, windows that will barely open, crumbling dry wall, graffiti ? I guess I can understand why having a nice facility would impart a false sense of quality, or ? channeling Jonathan Kozol ? at least a sense that their children matter enough to be given a beautiful environment to learn in.
But even attending school at the Louvre couldn't compensate for the damage of attending an elementary school for five years with such appalling academic results. We just wish more parents in communities like Columbus's Weinland Park realized this.
- Jamie Davies O'Leary
Update: Thanks to ?feedback? for pointing out the error. CCA students reached 82 percent proficiency?in math (not 41). Big difference!
Update 2: Weinland Park is the worst school of its kind, aka elementary school, in the city. This is according to Ohio's Performance Index score, a weighted average of student performance in all tested subjects and grade levels. Scores range from 0 to 120. A score of 80 or higher indicates, on average, school-wide proficiency in all tested grades and subjects. Weinland Park's Performance Index score was 59 for 2008-09.
