Ramos Says Get On The Train

Superintendent of Schools John Ramos makes his pitch about education improvements and the future of city schools in an opinion piece distributed to media outlets. From Ramos:

That sound you hear in the distance, rapidly moving closer, is the rumble of a freight train. That freight train is headed to the future, and in Bridgeport we face a critically important decision–we either pick up our school system and put it on that train barreling to the future, or we stand at the station and wave as it goes by.

I think the choice is clear. All aboard.

We’ve made progress in Bridgeport Public Schools, but let’s face it; the future opportunity and challenges for our children will be incredible. We must fundamentally transform the public schools of Bridgeport.

Let’s give credit where it’s due–to the hard-working teachers and administrators in our schools, our parents/guardians who get our children up and to school every day and work with them at night to make sure the homework and the class projects get done, and to the students themselves who do the hard work.

They’ve all been responsible for the progress; a 5 percentage point improvement in literacy, a 10 percentage point jump in math, an 8 percentage point increase in the graduation rate, among other measures. The progress is real, the hard work a constant.

But we know it’s not enough. Too many students still drop out before they graduate. Too many students are not demonstrating academic proficiency. Too many are not prepared for success in the workplace or college when they leave our public schools. The loud blast of the train whistle ought to be telling us that our ride to the future is going to pass us by unless we act–now.

Here’s the next step to getting on board: In the coming weeks we will ask Bridgeport families and community members to participate in a very important survey about the future of Bridgeport Public Schools. This survey will mark the first time the school district has reached out to the community with a real, transparent, aggressive effort to find out what you want to see in your public schools. We need the community on this ride with us if our schools are going to get there.

Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, recently called on educators to embrace what he called the “new normal”–the challenge of doing more with less. What is probably less known is that Bridgeport Public Schools have been leading with this charge for many years now. We have coped successfully with serious decline in our budgets, but at the same time we have begun the transformation that must occur if our schools are going to adequately prepare our children for the future.

We need a collective community will to complete this transformation of our public schools. The mission statement of Bridgeport Public Schools and its supporting community is to graduate all students “college ready” and prepared to succeed in life. My first goal as the leader of this school district is to bring the entire community into this conversation, a critical dialogue on transforming our schools.

This transformation is essential because of where that train to the future is going. The skills that will be required of our children when they enter the workforce are radically different from just a few years ago. What worked in the past is not guaranteed to work in the future.

We’ve been chipping away at innovation and transformation, one innovative program at a time. For example, we are starting to offer online classes for our students as a means to provide the high-quality courses students deserve without a significant increase in expenditures. In addition, we have transformed Bassick High School into the state’s first CommPACT (Community, Parents, Administration, Children and Teachers) high school. An educational reform model developed at the University of Connecticut’s NAEG School of Education, CommPACT is designed to give teachers and staff more control over how the school is run while also offering the latest research on effective teaching and learning.

But we need this public discourse to help us to work together to make substantially more progress. Far too much energy is spent cursing the darkness. We need to light one candle.

The survey has been designed for the purposes of a dialogue. It gives me the opportunity to share some critical facts with you. I invite your feedback on these facts and some opportunities and challenges that are before us so we can be sure that every perspective is reflected at the table when we sit down to make those important decisions about the future of our schools.

I do hear from a handful of the members of this community, but I have a feeling that reflects only a narrow slice of the perspectives in the diverse city that is Bridgeport. The survey and the strategic engagement that will surround it will enrich us with more perspectives to feed into the process of decision-making.

It’s my hope that members of our community will take part in the survey. Let’s work together to transform our schools. Our children will repay us ten-fold when they graduate as confident, well-educated citizens ready to thrive in the future.

One day just over 150 years ago, another train from another era brought the future to Bridgeport. On March 10, 1860, a prairie lawyer from Illinois rolled into town. A standing-room-only crowd turned out at the corner of State and Broad Streets to hear the tall stranger talk about his vision for the future. Then he climbed back on the train and rolled off into what would be a long dark night before a new dawn in America. That man was Abraham Lincoln, and the people of Bridgeport, and indeed America, were with him that night as he headed toward the future.

Now it’s our turn. The train is here. I say we get on board.