Back in February, Dropout Nation reported on Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson’s effort to overhaul the city’s woeful traditional district, including a partially decentralization of school management by embracing a portfolio approach that allowed flexibility for the few high-performing districts while still keeping the failure mills under its control. Back then, we commented that while Jackson’s plan had promise, it was not the full abandoning of tthe obsolete and ineffective traditional district model still in place, leaving the central bureaucracy responsible for the district’s failures in charge of 55 percent of the schools it currently operates.
Since then, charter school operators and advocates actively opposed Jackson’s move to place charters under a city-controlled “Transformation Alliance” that will be charged with regulating school quality (and weeding out both low-quality charters and district schools) across the entire city; Republicans who control Ohio’s state legislature, gave enough consideration to those concerns that they forced Jackson to alter his plan to only allow the Tranformation Alliance to regulate charter authorizers. The American Federation of Teachers’ Buckeye State affiliate were also miffed that Jackson’s plan would also force the district to share tax dollars with the city; the AFT’s own opposition to this bit of financial magic led to complaints from one Ohio state senator backing Jackson’s plan, Nina Turner, that the union was engaging in a vendetta against her.
But in that four-month span, Jackson managed to win over the AFT’s Cleveland local, which, given that Jackson’s plan found wide favor among both Republicans and Democrats in Ohio’s state government, likely expected to lose considerable clout influence over school operations no matter what happened. And this week, Jackson won approval for his plan from the state legislature itself.
The resulting bill still doesn’t move Cleveland away enough from the obsolete and ineffective traditional district concept — and is still nowhere close to the Hollywood Model that Dropout Nation thinks would work best for advancing systemic reform. But the plan still has possibilities for helping all kids in Cleveland get the high-quality education they deserve. Although Jackson won’t have the ability to directly oversee charters as he hoped, he still gets oversight over the outfits that authorize them; if Jackson does the job right, Cleveland could effectively get rid of authorizers that are approving poor-performing charters, and in the process, improve the quality of school options for the city’s families. Through provisions that allow the mayor and his school czar, Eric Gordon, to overhaul dropout factories and failure mills without seeking AFT permission, the city can now take stronger steps toward revamping existing district schools or shutting down failure mills and dropout factories that do tremendous social and economic harm to the communities they fail to serve.
The provisions that may do the most good for Cleveland’s kids may lie with the teacher quality reforms put into place as part of the approved plan. Abandoning traditional degree- and seniority-based pay scales and embracing a performance-based compensation system will allow for the city to reward high-quality veteran and new hires alike; this goes a long way in fostering cultures of genius in every school that nurture student success and allow for teachers to gain meaningful rewards for their success. While Dropout Nation is no fan of the so-called multiple measures approach of combining weak and useless classroom observations with more-objective student test score data that Cleveland will use in its new teacher evaluations, the fact that the latter is being used at all is one more important step toward measuring the work teachers are doing in every school.
Certainly Jackson will have to actually make his reform effort work — and Cleveland has had a long history of being the one place where mayoral control of districts has not been a success. But he deserves credit for taking important steps in transforming one of the nation’s worst school districts. And reform-minded mayors in the rest of the nation should follow his example.