I am a St. Louis native, and it bothers me how insulated Wash. U. students are form the surrounding community. I often hear opinions of Wash. U. students on local issues that I feel are unashamedly uninformed, and based mostly upon prejudices formed in other cities under different circumstances. Jeff Stepp’s March 6 article about the woes of St. Louis public schools is an example to which I took particular exception. Although I agree that too many people have been left behind in St. Louis, Stepp’s arguments were uninformed and, in many cases, just plain arrogant.
My objections begin with Stepp’s method for evaluating public schools. The one St. Louis high school Stepp picked out as a high performer was Metro Academic and Classical, a school that selectively admits students in much the same manner as a private school, although it is publicly funded. If Stepp’s recommendation for improving public education is to grant it only to high-performing students, that is a much more controversial position, and he should have made it explicit. Furthermore, the rating Stepp used was based solely on the number of students taking AP and IB tests. Many states or districts mandate that certain groups of students take these tests, and there is considerable regional variation in preferences between offering AP programs, IB programs, or both. These factors combine to make the measure a poor standard for comparing performance of schools under different regulation. I do not by any means intend to disparage Metro Academic and Classical, but someone in the know about St. Louis metro area public schools would know that there are other public high schools of comparable caliber.
Stepp also touted the performance of several high schools in the greater D.C. area, which is also coincidentally where he is from. I cannot claim great familiarity with that area, but I did look up the demographics of those top schools. In terms of mean income, rates of single parenting and other factors that tend to determine student performance, they are more similar to schools in the upper middle class St. Louis suburbs than to the districts serving the people Stepp believes have been left behind. So if Stepp’s implication was that St. Louis could improve its public schools by making all of its citizens more affluent, I agree. I think it is clear, however, that things are not that simple.
I also took issue with Stepp’s question, “Where would our community be without the University?” To a St. Louis native, statements like these are compelling evidence of how insular the University community is, and how this insularity distorts perspectives on local issues. The University is a self-interested institution, and although in the past it has been a stabilizing force in the community, its influence is not entirely positive and not everyone who lives in its vicinity regards it as a good neighbor. For example, the University has bought considerable amounts of housing in University City. As a non-profit organization, the University is not obliged to pay property tax, and it has therefore been meaningfully eroding the tax base of the University City public schools, which many already regard as marginal. Stepp seems to imply that the University is a savior of the community, and I challenge him to reconcile that image with the reality of its behavior.
It is not my intention to portray the University as a villain, nor is that my belief. My argument is that in Stepp’s rosy characterization of the University, he fails to attain any real perspective on the issues facing the community. I know Stepp wrote with good intentions, but he seemed almost totally uninformed about the nuances of the problems he was discussing.
Alexander is a junior in Arts & Sciences and can be reached via e-mail at acmueller@artsci.wustl.edu.