All of a sudden the school board’s unofficial representatives of angry white suburbanites, Kaye McGarry and Rhonda Lennon, are making noises that CMS is spending too much on improving high-poverty schools. Especially since those irresponsible blacks are flunking out of school no matter what you do for them. OK, those weren’t their exact words, but it was the clear, underlying meaning of their calls for CMS to focus more on absenteeism and parent involvement as factors in students’ failures. As the daily paper reports today, Lennon said, “It’s clearly not the dollars” that can change those schools’ performance.

This all came up because a CMS report on whether kids in poorer schools are getting an equal shot at education “revealed” that the high-poverty schools receive the most per-pupil spending in the system. Despite the extra spending on libraries and computers and such, results have generally remained unsatisfactory. I put “revealed” in quotation marks because the extra spending on poorer schools was universally known before the report came out – in fact, it’s been a feature of Supt. Gorman’s policy for some time. It’s a feature that makes common sense if the community is at all concerned about all students getting a decent education.

Lennon and McGarry are only partly right, however, about reasons for lagging performance. Cool libraries and shiny computers are one thing — and it was about time the poorer schools were equipped well enough to bring them into the modern world – but the main issue is the quality of the teachers (he said for the thousandth time).

Unfortunately, McGarry and Lennon and Gorman don’t see it that way.  They need to read the report more thoroughly; specifically, the part that details how the poorer schools have more inexperienced teachers, fewer advanced degrees, and way fewer teachers with National Board Certification. That’s disturbing, but it’s nothing new. As board member Tom Tate pointed out, CMS has never given the high-poverty schools the same level of experienced teachers with advanced degrees as other schools. Gorman continues to say that teacher experience makes little difference in student achievement, even though, as the Observer’s Ann Doss Helms points out, “CMS students with board-certified teachers outperform peers with teachers who don't hold that credential.”

Surely McGarry and Lennon aren’t so buried in suburban resentments that they can’t remember why extra spending was slated for the previously ill-equipped high-poverty schools. That, however,  wasn’t enough to level the playing field. CMS did the right thing by bringing the technology and resources up to date in those schools. Now it’s time to also give those kids better teachers.