Zero Tolerance has a foe in Pinellas County
Wilcox: School choice ‘flawed’
Pinellas County schools superintendent Clayton Wilcox is outspoken and brutally honest about the school system under his administration. He also has a head for common sense.
He said the school choice plan was “fundamentally flawed from its inception” and in need of short- and long-term changes.
Members of the School Board are “very well-intentioned,” Wilcox said, but are “struggling with the line between management and policymaking,” meaning they too often interfere with his job.
For those of you not familiar with it the school choice plan is an attempt at replacing forcible integration with voluntary integration. Various incentives are used to tempt parents to send their kids busing to distant schools in order to maintain a racial balance inconsistent with local populations.
Wilcox’s direct management style and intolerance for politicking have rubbed many administrators the wrong way. His local superintendents don’t like the way he contacts school principals directly, a disagreement with School Board attorney John Bowen ended in a screaming match and he openly feuds with veteran board member Linda Lerner.
His role, he said, is to “tell the truth relentlessly.”
He recounted a recent meeting with principals in which he recited “10 brutal facts” about Pinellas high schools. “Then I stood back and said, “You’re the only ones who can solve it.”‘
He said it was the first time many of them had been asked to solve a problem.
I like this guy. In particular I’m fond of his opinions on zero tolerance.
Asked his opinion of zero tolerance discipline policies, Wilcox called for a more common sense approach. He spoke of a recent case in which a Pinellas third-grader, new to the U.S., was sent to an alternative school after he pointed a squirt gun at other kids. He was sent to a school that did not have an English as a Second Language program.
“That kind of thing we’re going to change,” Wilcox said. “That just defies common sense. … Organizations tend to do this one-size-fits all thing. We’re going to get away from that.”
A rational, go for the throat administrator with common sense. We need more Claytons in charge of our schools.
I had mixed feelings about this article because, while Wilcox claims he would like a more common sense approach to discipline I don’t see how that is related to creating magnets schools and rolling back desegregation. I do believe the teachers need more training in dealing with diversity. NYC’s Bloomberg does the same kind of thing, he locks up all the poor in prison schools and then opens up a few schools that will cater to a few people.
It’s working. NY state is shining in science:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/27/nyregion/27intel.html
elite schools are likely to boom:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/26/nyregion/26school.html
Home schoolers will have a hard time competing with the collaborative effort between business and goverment that is likely to be poured into these prestigous institutions. That’s ok, they’ll get online classes.
http://www.macon.com/mld/macon/10722964.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
I doubt a program that has been as sucessful as zt in controlling how public education money is spent is likely to change. Only the names have been changed.
Common sense-not incompetance, laziness or even abuse-but common sense is the singel biggest cause of school administrators being canned by a beaurocracy which is terrified beyond words of actuly being required to THINK! I wish Mr. Wilcox well but I don’t hold much hope that his finger in the dike will long hold back the floodwaters of idiocy.
Mike