An Open Conversation about Ferndale Schools

As a long-time Ferndale resident, I’ve noticed that many families either move out of Ferndale when their children reach middle school age or they send their children to non-Ferndale schools.  Half of all the school-aged children on my block don’t go to Ferndale public schools.  Some go to Royal Oak, some to Birmingham, some to private school.  Oakland County has some of the best public schools in the state and yet many of Ferndale’s schools don’t measure up.  As someone who has lived in Ferndale for over 20 years and loves this community for so many reasons, having children has caused me to re-evaluate. 

As a parent, education is my top location priority.  Among my parental social circles, the conversation focuses on adjustment to middle school, but I think the conversation needs to start earlier – in our elementary and pre-schools.

In the fall, 2012 MEAP scores were released and Kennedy Elementary was identified as a “focus school” by Michigan, among the ten percent of public schools having an achievement gap – the distance in scores between the highest and lowest performing students.  Additionally, results indicated that many of Ferndale’s schools fall below county and state averages for percent of student proficiency in various subjects.

By day I am a professional diversity and inclusion consultant, so I decided to take a closer look at school performance statistics and downloaded data from the Michigan School Data website: www.Mischooldata.org.  To keep things simple, I pulled out third and sixth grade data.  I found that Roosevelt (K-3) and Coolidge (4-6) fall below county averages for both math and reading while Kennedy (K-6) surpasses county averages:

• For 3^rd grade math, 33.7% of Roosevelt kids meet or exceed proficiency while 66% of Kennedy kids meet or exceed proficiency (40.9% statewide; 44.6% county-wide).
• For 3^rd grade reading, 67.3% of Roosevelt kids meet or exceed proficiency while 84.6% of Kennedy meet or exceed proficiency (66.5% statewide; 73% county-wide).
• For 6^th grade math, only 26.7% of Coolidge students meet or exceed proficiency while 81.1% of Kennedy students do (40.2% statewide; 45.5% county-wide).
• For 6^th grade reading, 58% of Coolidge students meet or exceed proficiency while 83% of Kennedy students do (68.2% statewide; 66.7% county-wide).

Clearly, there’s a significant difference in student achievement between schools; in some cases it’s shockingly different and not openly or regularly talked about.  Now let’s overlap this with some additional information. 

• At Kennedy, 25% are students of color and one-third are economically disadvantaged.
• At Roosevelt, nearly 60% are students of color and two-thirds are economically disadvantaged.  At Coolidge, 65% are students of color and three-quarters are economically disadvantaged.

2012-2013 school officials acknowledge that performance along racial and economic lines is a strong concern.  It was likewise stated as a priority in the 2008-2009 Ferndale School Annual Report - five years ago.  But what are we doing about it? 

How do poorer students and/or students of color happen to end up in the lower-achieving school(s) and how do white and/or advantaged students happen to end up at the higher achieving school in Ferndale?  There are only two elementary tracks – you get one or the other.  On a deeper level, the Kennedy achievement gap cited earlier also falls along racial and economic lines with lower performers more likely to come from low-income and/or families of color.  Even in the better performing school, students of color and low-income students fare worse.

Since I am not an elementary education expert, I focused on the diversity issue here and what some might call a latent form of segregation among Ferndale Elementary schools.  Other parents have noticed this as well and I’ve heard a number of theories to explain it.  The two predominant theories include: 1) parents self-select or self-segregate their children into schools where most of their local neighborhood families are going (and the four Ferndale city quadrants and other feeder cities are somewhat economically and racially distinct); and 2) the Ferndale lottery system results in perhaps an unintentional favoring of white, higher-income families. 

We need to ask ourselves some questions about these theories.  Are parents educated equally about their education options – even in preschool?  What other practices influence or support school choice?  What’s the school transfer process and how does it operate?  How does the school lottery system impact families that move into Ferndale when their kids are older?  What’s the demographic profile of families who move in with older kids?

Some may say the school differences are coincidental, but these circumstances do not arise out of chance and are often built upon the past.  Ferndale’s history on school segregation is actually one of the worst in Oakland County. 

In doing this research, I enlisted the support of my legal expert and life partner, Jennifer LaTosch, who is also an attorney.  She found that in 1980, the City of Ferndale was forced by the United States government to de-segregate its schools after a contentious legal battle.  In 1980. 

The school desegregation efforts of the 1960’s turned into a legal battle exhaustively fought by the Ferndale School Board administrators and board members (in position at the time) for nearly two decades.  The issue?  Ferndale insisted that whatever segregation was happening, was unintentional and driven by parent self-selection, and therefore they should do nothing. 

The United States Court of Appeals disagreed.  After numerous administrative reviews, trials and appeals, the court determined that there was not only an intentional segregation in the creation and operation of one of our elementary schools in 1926, but there was also continuing segregative effect lasting until the time of the trial (the late 1970’s).  Even after the Court’s ruling, the district fought the process - it refused to develop a constitutional plan to desegregate the schools.  Finally, the court itself developed a desegregation plan for Ferndale, which was implemented in January of 1980.

The school in question was Grant Elementary, which now operates as our early education facility – pre-school – and serves mostly African American and low-income families, many of whose children go on to attend Roosevelt and Coolidge.  The current school demographic snapshot is not coincidental.

So what do we do with this information?  I think the first step is to simply look at the picture and begin the conversation.  Why is there such disparity in our schools?  What kinds of factors create this disparity?  What can we as a community change in order to reduce and ideally eliminate this disparity?  What would happen if families at Grant Early Education Childhood Center and at the Drayton Avenue Co-op and Ferndale Montessori were all equally educated about school performance measures?  What would happen if we eliminated the lottery altogether?

And the biggest question of all, how can our schools address the achievement gap, ensuring that all children, regardless of race or class, can perform at the top, regardless of which school they attend?  This last question, I leave to the educational experts.  Thankfully, Kennedy has such a team working on this issue with each teacher meeting every week to analyze the problem, research solutions and implement change efforts.

Kudos also to the current Ferndale Board of Education for embarking on a comprehensive strategic planning process.  I hope these questions are considered in the planning process and I look forward to hearing their recommendations for the future.  More importantly, I urge current parents, past Ferndale parents, parents-to-be and all the Ferndale residents who want this to be a great place to live, to get involved and help make positive changes for our schools.  Ferndale is a great city, but it can’t rise to its full potential without schools that are great for *all* its residents.