Review: City Club of Cleveland - 12MAY26 - Building Brighter Futures and Education in Cleveland
I have noticed that the City Club forums don't get much love on here, so I thought to write and post some stuff about the forums
Dr. Morgan regularly said..."watch us work" but he never described their "work" on the most important details for most parents who have a choice to send their kids to CMSD: reading/math performance + school safety.
Is the educational performance improving? Dr. Morgan claimed that it was several times, but he never really stated any statistics about this. On a side note, I find several qualities about him positive, but he never said the thing that really matters here. As a former Cleveland City parent who chose not to send my son to a CMSD school, I think it is alarming that the city leaders aren't confronting this fact.
They are aware of that students are leaving though. I just think that they are deflecting from the root cause of failure in the schools. During the session, Ray Hart brought up that "outmigration has accelerated the moving of people from cities- they could work from home. They could work from other places. That was not unique to Cleveland..... our network has lost enrollment, about 13%...16% in Cleveland." 16% is a huge amount to lose - nearly 6K from the 36K students in the system in 2020. If so, that would mean that students would represent >50% of the reported 10K population decline the city has had since 2020. This just cannot be right. Outmigration cannot explain all of the enrollment decline, even if poor school performance could be the root cause of a large amount of the outmigration .
I think a lot more of stuff like this is driving people away:
A) School Performance
The CMSD hasn't really shown any improvement since 2022. The score is well below comp cities. They are still below where they were in 2019
B) Safety
4 people shot, bus stop shooting, another bus stop shooting, and this one, which was a huge deal to me and in my neighborhood: teachers letting gunmen into the building so they could flee the police. I saw regulary fights spilling into the street in front of Garret Morgan High School. How could I send my son to a place where he might be victimized regularly there? How can the administrators here malign programs for vouchers that allow parents to keep their kids safe?
Other notes, thoughts:
There was a promise that Ray Hart would share data showing the Clevenland is ahead of the curve in recovering from the pandemic learning loss, and there was even a joke about why he couldn't share that now.
The issue of vouchers came up. Dr. Morgan pointed out that there are probably too many schools in the Cleveland area for the amount of students that there are. Sara Elaquad tried to make it seem like this was disadvantaging Cleveland students, without explaining why. She just brought up that the voucher program gave $8K to everyone, even for families without need. There was a question about this, and the purple-haired lady who always comments (Meryl Johnson) said that the system was healthy in 2022, but that now reductions in state funding + the total impact of the vouchers (1B) has made the budget unhealthy. Sara Elaqad stated that "School choice is fine as long as it doesn't deplete the public option" (everyone clapped). Moderator brought up that levee increases go to charters and public.... she said this if fine though, not the reason they are struggling with funding. It's clear that the city leaders are more interested in budget issues than in performance in education. I get it, that's a big part of their jobs, but the complaining about kids leaving, which is the biggest part of the budget, is directly related to how well they do the education part.
Spending - Dr. Morgan said that they now have controls in place for spending, and that they have reduced spending - $200M reduced overall. But he said that even with some more reductions here, it wouldn't have made a big enough impact to reduce the layoffs.
Second question from a lady asking how it was fair for some schools to offer more electives and clubs while some don't.
3rd question - lady asking how it is fair while people are leaving (morgan pointed out that her school didn't actually lose any teachers, some were moved.)
One point - watching the video I was blown away by how many students in the audience were wearing headphones. Not necessarily over their ears, but sitting in the audience with the headphones on their heads.