{"id":1463,"date":"2011-09-30T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-09-30T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/09\/steve-prigohzy-guru-of-chattanooga-hamilton-co-school-consolidation.html"},"modified":"2011-09-30T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-30T12:00:00","slug":"steve-prigohzy-guru-of-chattanooga-hamilton-co-school-consolidation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/09\/steve-prigohzy-guru-of-chattanooga-hamilton-co-school-consolidation.html","title":{"rendered":"Steve Prigohzy, guru of Chattanooga-Hamilton Co. school consolidation"},"content":{"rendered":"We’ve seen that Steve Prigohzy’s magnet school, CSAS<\/a>,\nwas started in 1986.\nChattanooga school consolidation with Hamilton County, Tennessee was in 1995.\nAnd look who was waiting to tell them what to do:\n\nChattanooga, 1995: City Referendum on Consolidating Schools, and No Legislative Interference<\/a>,\nby Smart City Memphis, 1 January 2011,\nquoting Education Week 2 August 1995,\n
\n
<\/td><\/tr><\/table>\nA month after the election, the board voted to ask the Public Education\nFoundation to help frame the new system. The move was partly on the\nadvice of educators in Knoxville, who faced a raft of problems after\nconsolidating rapidly with Knox County eight years ago.\n

\nThe foundation, one of the wealthiest local education foundations in\nthe country, has worked closely with educators in both the city and\ncounty. Its president, Steven H. Prigohzy, is a dynamo with a clear\nvision of where he\u2019d like to take education in the new system.\n

\n\u201cThis is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a county\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n

\nof this size\nto rethink public education,\u201d he says. \u201cBut it\u2019s very difficult\nto make people understand that. What they invariably say is, \u2018I\u2019m\ndelighted to hear there will be a new school system. Now, when the\nmerger happens.\u2019\u201d\n

\nThe word merger conjures up technical images: combining pension plans,\nequalizing salaries, choosing a transportation system, locating a central\noffice. All legitimate issues, but not about children.\n

\nWhat Prigohzy\u2013and the steering committee overseeing the plans for the\nnew system\u2013envision is on another level entirely. For starters, they\nare talking about a few simple, but powerful, benchmarks: insuring that\nstudents achieve a standard of literacy by 3rd grade that will enable\nthem to succeed in school, making sure every student who finishes 8th\ngrade is on track for postsecondary education, producing students who\nare able to enter college or the workplace without remedial coursework,\nand getting the public more involved with school reform.\n<\/blockquote>\nThe article goes on to talk about investments from the Annenberg\nFoundation and the Lyndhurst Foundation.\nWhich could explain CUEE and the Chamber’s continuing\ninsistence that foundations would invest after “unification”.\n

\nThe article says that investment was matched by “old money” from the Chattanooga area.\nSo basically the old boys\n(or the “white fathers” to use\nTerry Jenkins’ term<\/a>)\nused foundation money to leverage a buyout of the public school systems.\n

\nAnd they looked to Prigohzy to tell them what to do:\n

\nPlanners of the new school system will draw some of their lessons from\nChattanooga\u2019s experience with its Paideia schools, organized around the\nprinciples of the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler. His influential 1982\nmanifesto, The Paideia Proposal, caught the Lyndhurst Foundation\u2019s\nattention. In it, Adler argued that schools, the foundation of our\ndemocracy, must eliminate tracking to accommodate individual differences\nand respect children\u2019s potential. Pedagogy, such as the Socratic\nquestioning method, should be designed to engage students, he wrote.\n

\nCivic leaders convened by the foundation agreed to give the\nprinciples\u2013considered radical at the time but which have since gained\ncurrency\u2013a try. The Chattanooga School for the Arts and Sciences,\nwhich opened 10 years ago with Prigohzy as its principal, showed\npeople that high-quality programs would attract an integrated student\nbody. Parents lined up to get their children into the magnet school,\nwhich has consistently produced well-educated students. Since the school\nopened, the city school system has created five more Paideia schools,\nincluding some neighborhood schools that don\u2019t have the luxury of\ntaking children from highly motivated families.\n<\/blockquote>\nFor an alleged proponent of the Socratic method, Prigohzy doesn’t\nknow how to answer questions very well, does he?\nWell, better than his acolytes in our area,\nwho either\n\ncan’t answer simple questions<\/a>\nor \ncontradict each other.<\/a>\n

\nTo be continued….\n

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