We started by asking about funding, and received a surprising answer. According to the interviewee, HSPVA receives “significantly more” money than regular comprehensive high schools. This extra money goes toward specialists that are brought in for the fine arts programs. In addition to the relatively large allotments from the tax base, HSPVA also holds fundraisers to generate more funds. As he explains, these fundraisers allow the school to have freedom from the monetary restrictions of HISD and the state of Texas.
We also discussed the role of the administration in HSPVA. Administrators at HSPVA and all schools have to handle a range of tasks, including satisfying parent complaints, ensuring teachers are performing their jobs, and communicating with the school board and higher levels of administration. An administrator’s relationship with teachers is supervisory in nature and differs from educator to educator: it is “everything from ‘let me hold your hand and walk through [your performance]’ to ‘nice job see you in a week.’” The relationship is both personal yet hierarchical.
In addition, the administration has three main components to its job: “political... leadership... and management.” Politics clearly places a large burden on administrators because they have to use time to ensure that “the right people get in front of the school board to speak.” How the school board, a publicly elected group of individuals, votes affects how every school operates, thus requiring everyone involved with them to devote time and energy into promoting his or her agenda in this political setting. On top of this political aspect, administrators have to function both as leaders within the school and the community and as supervisors, regulating the actions of the school. As the interviewee states, “my job is to understand everything that goes on in this building...and to make sure there are no train-wrecks.”
Yet administrators that could be totally devoted to students and teachers are instead spending time catering to the political system that gives them funding. The administrator we interviewed says that “this is a complicated system” because of the “multiple layers of control, spending, and [politics].” He stresses the hierarchy of things, that there is an extensive chain of command of bosses and subordinates. The politics involved with running a school under the school board is draining time and energy from every school’s leading figures.
We then discussed the educational ideals of HSPVA and how the school runs its program. In HSPVA, every student devotes three hours to their specific art form every day, an art form that cannot be changed easily for his or her four years at the school. According to the interviewee, there is only a select few that are willing to devote this amount of time to the arts, and so the artistic program cannot be expanded to other schools in the district. He gives the analogy to “skimming cream,” taking only the cream of the crop for HSPVA. While clearly an excellent means of finding exceptional artists, this also prevents those that could be great from being exposed to the arts, and limits the expansion of the same art that HSPVA is trying to teach and promote.
The interviewee also offered the suggestion that to create a good education system we must encourage and promote the hopes and dreams of students at lower grade levels. Those who are struggling in lower and middle school lose confidence and will not succeed in high school sometimes even dropping out. This is reminiscent of the interview with Mike Feinberg, who stressed the necessity of an appropriate “mindset” for students to succeed. The interviewee, however, stresses the ramifications of not maintaining this will to learn and perform, mainly that students who have had their aspirations crushed see no point in trying in school. He suggests that at some point in middle school, the child-like will to learn is crushed by schools, and that to fix high schools, we must look into younger grades and see why students lose their passion.
Looking at magnet schools in general, he explained the myriad of problems. They cost significantly more than regular comprehensive high schools, not including the expensive busing that is required to transport students that are not close to the school. Magnets also are supposed to serve the gifted and talented in their area of expertise, something not in line with the public school agenda of serving every student, or the goal of serving only district students. Thus, magnet schools, while providing a specialized education, do not always fall into the mission of public schools to serve everyone and promote the “no child left behind” doctrine.
In general, the interviewee believes that HISD provides schools adequate freedom to teach what and how they want. “Exemplary” schools in the school district are allowed to teach freely as long as the students perform well on standardized tests and fulfill the set curriculum. HISD is also one of the few districts that allows schools to determine the number and positions of teachers, and actually gives a large degree of freedom to schools in spending their allotted money.
Thus, in the interviewee's opinion, the current system is adequate in providing education, but he believes that there is something in society that “turns students off” at young ages. Akin to Feinberg’s hypothesis, the mentality of society as a whole must be changed to better the system, but this mentality does not go hand in hand with any fundamental transformation of the system itself.
--George, Joey, & Zach
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