Category: Embracing the Hollywood Model


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The End of the Traditional District: Indianapolis Edition


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When Indiana moved last year to become one of the 13 states that either launched or expanded school voucher programs, one could have easily expected Indianapolis Public Schools to take…

Photo courtesy of the Indianapolis Star

When Indiana moved last year to become one of the 13 states that either launched or expanded school voucher programs, one could have easily expected Indianapolis Public Schools to take the biggest hit. By the 2010-2011 school year,IPS served only 33,079 students, a 13 percent decline over the school year five years earlier. Some of the decline could be attributed to the expansion and success of the charter schools serving the old city limits, whose (often modest) successes in improving student achievement have continually embarrassed the worst-performing district in the Midwest outside of Detroit. But the decline had been happening long before charters came onto the scene. For most of the past four decades, middle-class black and white families (along with those families who could take advantage of a decades-long school desegregation order) fled IPS in order to get what was often marginally better instruction and curricula offered by the other 10 districts within Indianapolis (as well as to those outside of it).

No one expected either IPS Supt. Eugene White or the district’s school board to do anything to either revamp curricula and instruction, or even overhaul the entire district’s operations. After all, White has proven in his seven years on the job that he is unfit to check coats at Ruth’s Chris, much less oversee a turnaround. Under White’s tenure, IPS lost four of its dropout factories and failure mills to state control after years of refusing to address the systemic failure at the heart of their struggles, while the superintendent’s nepotism, firing of top-flight staffers, and his own all-too-public searches for new jobs have made the district a laughingstock even among those collection of urban districts (including the aforementioned Detroit, and Philadelphia) not known for being functional. Meanwhile IPS has continued its decline as an educational going concern, with only 31 percent of IPS students successfully pass the state’s reading and math end-of-course exams over the past two school years, and thousands of students being denied futures worthy of their potential.

So it wasn’t shocking to learn this week that IPS is no longer considered the Hoosier State’s largest traditional district by enrollment, after a 9 percent decline in enrollment since 2010-2011. With 2,911 children and their families fleeing the district either for private schools funded through the state’s voucher program, to charters, or to other districts (and taking state school funding with them to boot), IPS finds itself at a point in which staying the course simply isn’t possible (and shouldn’t be acceptable).  Even more students may end up leaving next year, especially as a suit filed against IPS by Darnell “Dynasty” Young, a former student at the district’s Arsenal Tech High School expelled after responding to bullying by students that went unchecked by teachers and school leaders there, makes its way through the courts (and forces more revelations about how poorly White has handled this and other similar cases). For families who want their schools to both safe for their kids as well as nurturing of their genius, there’s nothing about I-P-S that spells school culture success.

There are possibility of changes on the horizon. Mary Busch, who has helped preside over IPS’ failures during her four decades on its board, isn’t running for another term. This could shift control of the board from one that heavily favored White to one which will hand the superintendent his well-deserved walking papers. The district won a reprieve from losing a school last month when state officials decided to allow IPS to contract with Voyager Learning to handle the turnaround of John Marshall Community High School and eight other schools. If IPS is serious about letting a private-sector operator take control of these schools, there may be hope for the other schools it operates.

But in the long run, IPS is likely to end up going the way of Detroit, New Orleans, and other districts that have been on fiscal and educational life support for far too long: Broken apart. A proposed takeover of IPS pushed earlier this year by the Mind Trust, the school reform outfit founded by former Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson, didn’t go very far with either Peterson’s successor, Greg Ballard, or the state legislature. But with few satisfied with either White’s moving-deckchairs reorganization plan or the district’s performance, one can expect reformers to push Ballard into stepping up to the plate, either proposing to the state that he take over most of IPS’ schools (and convert them into charters) or take control of IPS outright.

Given how far gone IPS is at this point, Ballard would do just as well to announce a major expansion of charters in the city, partnering with operators such as KIPP and even Green Dot particularly targeting the black and Latino neighborhoods in which IPS is serving children the most poorly; this potential loss of enrollment could spell the end of IPS as a going concern. It is already clear to many of the city’s families that sending their children to an IPS school is akin to handing them educational and even economic life sentence. One of the few reasons why so many remain is because of the lack of high-quality (and safe) school options that exist outside of what the district has to offer. Moving from West 38th Street to East 96th Street (into the boundary of the Washington Township district) is not only expensive, but no guarantee of better teaching and curricula. Expansion of charters (as well as the possible launch of new private schools looking to take advantage of the state’s voucher program) would spell the end of IPS and the traditional district model it represents.

The fate that IPS is facing is one that is becoming common for failing districts throughout the nation where school choice and Parent Power have become robust. It can be seen in Adelanto, Calif., where the traditional district there refuses to heed June’s court order requiring it to hand Desert Trails Elementary School to its parents after the district’s failed management of the school. It is also clear in Philadelphia, where the district may end up shutting down 104 schools (and borrowing $300 million) just to deal with its fiscal and academic woes. And with the Chicago Teachers Union strike ruefully reminding school reformers about the problems of dealing with National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates more-concerned about defending costly traditional teacher compensation systems and avoiding more-comprehensive performance management than with the futures of children or the districts charged with educating them, more state and local leaders are going to look to expand charters and vouchers (as well as pass Parent Trigger laws) to give families avenues to get out of traditional districts schools and even take over those schools and pull them out of district control.

These factors, in turn, hit upon the reality that the traditional district model is no longer workable. A century ago, the district model may have made sense to maintain. After all, few kids needed a high-quality education to simply stay in the economic and social mainstream; there were no reasons to spend time on teacher performance management (and no tools available to measure either student or teacher performance in objective ways). But in an age in which kids need comprehensive college-preparatory learning just to gain entree into the middle class, and the nation’s education crisis has made it important to help dropouts get back on the path to college and career, the scales that traditional districts such as IPS have brought to the table merely encourage bureaucratic paralysis and the kind of policies that are starting to overburden taxpayers. In an age in which quality is more important than scale, the time has come to move from traditional districts to the Hollywood Model of Education, in which a variety of schools — including independent public  schools, public charters, private schools, online outfits, DIY schools launched by families and communities, parochial school operations, and charter management organization-managed schoolhouses — help all kids succeed in school and life.

This move away from the traditional district model is already happening in Indianapolis. And it needs to happen throughout American public education.

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The Chicago AFT Strike: An Opportunity for Emanuel to Embrace the Hollywood Model


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Plenty of ink and megabytes will be spilled over the implications of the move by the American Federation of Teachers’ Chicago affiliate’s work stoppage. From questions about how it will…

Photo courtesy of the Chicago Tribune

Plenty of ink and megabytes will be spilled over the implications of the move by the American Federation of Teachers’ Chicago affiliate’s work stoppage. From questions about how it will affect what is increasingly a not-so-mutually convenient relationship between the AFT and National Education Association and a Democratic National Committee increasingly dominated by the school reform movement, to whether it could affect President Barack Obama’s re-election prospects, to even if New York City (the epicenter of the famed AFT strike five decades ago that helped teachers’ union gain dominion over education policy), everyone will say their piece while the union and the nation’s third-largest district spar over the direction of education in the Big Shoulders city. [Yours truly offers more of this thoughts today in the pages of the New York Times‘ Room for Debate.]

But for Mayor Rahm Emanuel, there is a new question that has now arisen: How do you provide education — and more importantly, high-quality teaching and curricula — to the Second City’s 404,151 children? While it is quite likely that the strike will only last until September 21, when Chicago AFT rank-and-file miss their paychecks (which will mean that the affiliate will also miss its dues payments), it could last longer. While Emanuel and Chief Executive Officer Jean-Claude Brizard are still providing kids with school meals and safe places to stay during the day through the city’s 147 Children’s First centers, none of this will substitute for instructional days (although given the low quality of some of Chicago’s teachers, many kids may not be missing much at all).

This need not be a complication. In fact, the strike offers Emanuel an opportunity to move away from a traditional district model that no longer works for either Second City children or for the taxpayers who continue to sustain it. Embracing what Dropout Nation calls the Hollywood Model of Education — moving toward a system of charters, DIY schools operated by families and communities, and even online and blended learning options — would be an important step in providing all ChiTown kids with high-quality education.

Certainly the school reform effort that Emanuel oversees, which began under predecessor Richard M. Daley, has helped more Chicago kids get better teaching and curricula. Between 2003 and 2011, the percentage of Chicago fourth-graders who were functionally illiterate declined from 60 percent to 52 percent, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, while average reading score for a Chicago fourth-grade student increased by a full grade level; the percentage of fourth-graders who were innumerate declined from 50 percent to 32 percent in the same period.

But it hasn’t been an unquestioned success. The Second City hasn’t done enough to improve student achievement for young black men, or young men of any race; in fact the gender achievement gaps in Chicago’s schools remains one of the most-critical problems that neither Emanuel or Daley (or their respective school czars, including current U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan) have failed to address. As the Consortium on Chicago School Research pointed out in a study released last year, the city’s high school students are still not equipped to do well in college and career. And the fact that neither Daley nor Emanuel have been willing to end Zip Code Education policies by eliminating school zoning rules (thus allowing even poor families on the South Side to send their kids to better-performing schools in the rest of the city) remains inexcusable.

Meanwhile the district is ill-equipped to address the dropout crisis it has fostered by helping ex-dropouts return to school to get their diplomas and get the comprehensive, college-preparatory education they need for success on the college campus. This isn’t surprising. As Dropout Nation noted last year, the traditional district model isn’t built for such a task despite its gargantuan scale. The fact that AFT and NEA affiliates would rather see guidance counselors lose their jobs during layoffs than rank-and-file teachers (who make up the largest percentages of membership) also makes it easy for districts such as Chicago to not focus on the need for additional help for students who need it most.

Meanwhile this week’s strike has pointed to one of the biggest problems Emanuel face in his efforts: The reality that the Chicago AFT affiliate will continue to push against any advance of systemic reform. It is one reason why predecessor Daley was largely reluctant to make the strong pushes against reverse-seniority layoff policies and for restricting which teachers get near-lifetime employment that counterparts such as Michael Bloomberg in New York City and Frank Jackson in Cleveland have done. Every step Emanuel takes will involve a fight, especially since Chicago AFT boss Karen Lewis wants a major victory in order to bolster her own ambitions (and help the AFT and other education traditionalists gain a victory after a string of defeats).

The strike also hits upon the reality that for all but a few Chicago families, there is no other school option other than the traditional district, which can be shut down at the whim of an AFT affiliate unwilling to embrace performance-based evaluations and new approaches to compensation. Save for the families of the 52,000 kids attending the Second City’s 119 charter schools (and those attending private and parochial schools run by the Archdiocese of Chicago and other organizations), most parents are beholden to the antics of a union whose strike would be illegal if it were done by mothers and dads subject to compulsory school laws.

Yet Emanuel can  take some steps to help those families — and build a new public school system in the process — by looking beyond the traditional district model. He already has the bones to do this thanks to predecessor Daley’s Renaissance 2010 initiative to launch new charter schools in the city, as well as the Children’s First centers put in place for the strike. Some of the organizations the city is working with are already equipped to provide tutoring and teaching to students under their watch. Emanuel should strike agreements with these groups, along with organizations such as the Black Star Project (which is also involved in similar learning efforts) to provide DIY education services to these kids. Emanuel should also announce a new version of Renaissance 2010, teaming up with charter school operators — including major outfits such as KIPP as well as with local operators — to launch another 100 new charters in the city to open by year-end; this includes leasing existing school space to the operators in order for them to get started quickly. [Such a move, by the way, would put pressure on the Chicago AFT, which isn’t interested in the district losing its near-monopoly over education services.]

The next step would involve Emanuel and Brizard teaming up with outfits such as Rocketship Education, as well as initiatives being started by School of One founder Joel Rose and former Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation honcho Tom Vander Ark to provide blended and online learning options throughout the Second City. Starting with the Children’s First centers, the city could quickly fill in the gap left by the AFT strike and provide kids with high-quality teaching and curricula they need. Certainly it won’t be easy to do in such short time. But it can be done — and executed well.

By walking out on Second City kids, the AFT’s Chicago affiliate has inadvertently handed Emanuel a new opportunity to take a different approach to reform. And the end of the traditional district model can mean high-quality education for Chicago kids who deserve better than what they are getting now.

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Julian Castro and the Importance of Mayoral Control in Engaging City Leaders in Systemic Reform


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Dropout Nation readers weren’t surprised when San Antonio, Texas, Mayor Julian Castro discussed his efforts to reform education during his appearance at the Democratic National Convention earlier this week. After…

Dropout Nation readers weren’t surprised when San Antonio, Texas, Mayor Julian Castro discussed his efforts to reform education during his appearance at the Democratic National Convention earlier this week. After all, the Harvard grad was briefly profiled on these pages last year after he announced a series of plans, including supporting what became the successful campaign of former city councilwoman Patti Radle to the board of the largest of the 16 districts serving children and families within its limits. Since we last mentioned looked into Castro’s efforts, the mayor has stepped further into advancing reform, unsuccessfully backing another school board candidate, while taking aim at the Harlindale district on the city’s south side for ousting its superintendent after a little more than three years on the job; in the latter case, Castro even showed up at a Harlandale board meeting to give school leaders the business.  And most-recently, Castro managed to use his bully pulpit to put the kibosh on the San Antonio district’s plans to use bond money for converting one of its stadiums into an entertainment center.

Certainly Castro is doing more than just offering talk when it comes to systemic reform. He is also following a path paved by mayors past and present such as Richard Riordan in Los Angeles and his successor, Antonio Villaraigosa, as well as Stephen Goldsmith, Bart Peterson, and Greg Ballard in Indianapolis (which, like San Antonio, is served by several traditional districts). Yet at the same time, it isn’t enough to deal with the woeful conditions of education for land of the Alamo children. Just 58 percent of the eighth-graders in San Antonio Independent’s original Class of 2009 graduated on time while only 62 percent of South San Antonio’s eighth-graders and 72 percent of their peers in Harlandale graduated five years later. For the young Latino men who look like Castro when he was young, the prospects of graduation are especially dim. One-third of young Latino men who made up the San Antonio district’s Class of 2009 weren’t promoted to senior year of high school five years later, while the promoting power rate for young Latino men in South San Antonio and Harlandale were, respectively, 62 percent and 70 percent.

Meanwhile his fellow city leaders, notably on the seven-member council, seem far less-engaged in addressing the aspect of the nation’s education crisis affecting their municipality and its consequences on the growth prospects of what has been up to now, one of the nation’s fastest-growing metropolises. While Castro’s fellow councilmembers moved last month to approve his plan for the city to run early childhood programs, they haven’t been as engaged as the mayor in robust conversations about how to overhaul traditional districts or even in whether to move into the arena of authorizing public charter schools. This is understandable. Given that neither Castro nor the council oversee traditional districts, and the need for both to master the other aspects of their respective jobs (especially keeping crime low, managing city finances, and attending to other quality of life issues), it is hard to put more than scant attention to systemic reform.

Castro can’t simply use his bully pulpit alone in order to transform education in San Antonio and improve its long-term economic prospects (as well as that of the children and families in the city). So he (along with City Manager Sheryl Scully, who runs San Antonio’s day to day operations) needs to follow the path paved by current and former counterparts such as Michael Bloomberg in New York City, and Richard Daley in Chicago, and take full control of at least one of the district’s serving the nation’s seventh most-populous city.

As Dropout Nation has made clear over the past few years, mayoral control has largely proven to be a successful approach to advancing reform. Certainly the fact that citizens can hold one person responsible for the success or failure of a district instead of having to deal with often unaccountable school boards (which tend to be servile to National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers affiliates) is one reason why it works as a form of school governance. The bigger reason lies in the fact that putting the city’s too executive in charge of schools immediately engages city government in doing what it takes to overhaul schools. Mayors have to wisely pick school chief executives, who will have plenty of time (so long as the mayor remains in office), ensuring that those school leaders stay on the job for superintendents in traditional district arrangements. In New York City, for example, Joel Klein remained in charge of Bloomberg’s effort for eight years, while Tom Payzant in Boston held his job for 11 years.

But this focused attention on schools extends beyond the mayor. As any councilmember in the Big Apple can attest, district budgets, school closures, and even teacher quality issues can become important discussion points both within city hall chambers and in community meetings. This is because anything a mayor touches ultimately becomes a matter for city legislators to consider, shape, and approve. This engagement of city councilmembers extends to the wider community, with residents demanding that all city leaders do more to fix failure mills in their neighborhoods and expand school choice and Parent Power options throughout the community.

This can be seen in Washington, D.C., where the takeover of the school district overseen by former mayor Adrian Fenty during his only term in office has led members of the otherwise clownish city council to be more active on education policy. Before resigning his spot as council chairman after his fraud conviction this past July, Kwame Brown managed to generate robust discussion about rewarding high-quality teachers, spurring family engagement, and expanding the number of middle schools that serve the District’s student population. His predecessor, Vincent Gray, has gleaned the experiences he has had in dealing with the efforts undertaken under Fenty (whom he ousted from from the mayoral job two years ago) to continue the reforms — including the path-breaking IMPACT teacher evaluation system — Fenty and his schools czar, Michelle Rhee, had put together.

This isn’t to say that engaging city councilmembers in systemic reform has no adverse consequences. As seen in New York City, mayoral control means that affiliates of the NEA and AFT also become more-engaged in lobbying those city officials and using their vast war chests to preserve the decline in influence that comes with the end of school board control. The very intimidation the two unions use in beating back reform efforts in state legislatures also becomes an issue at the local legislative level. And given the prevalence of graft and corruption in many cities, one can expect city councilors to try to turn schools into their own nests for corruption.

Yet this stepped-up engagement is an important thing. For one, given the important economic and social role districts play in communities and municipalities, it makes sense for city councilmembers to be as concerned about schools as they are about potholes and sidewalks. When city councilors focus on revamping dropout factories, they are are addressing one of the most-critical culprits of rising crime and declining tax bases.

It also makes fiscal sense, especially for districts themselves. One of the reasons why traditional urban systems such as Philadelphia, Camden, N.J., and Bridgeport, Conn., generate so little in local tax dollars, even when their tax rates are higher than suburban counterparts, is because of the dysfunctional fiscal policies — including tax abatements given to developers for costly real estate schemes that siphon off dollars from district coffers. In those cities, politicians who run the rest of government can ignore the fiscal needs of the school district, whose operations they don’t oversee. This disconnect between district and city finances (along with the result of state governments taking over as much as 80 percent of annual district expenditures) results in city leaders failing to concern themselves with either school funding or with district operations.When city councilmembers must address school budgets, they are then forced to be more-thoughtful about whether they should hand off tax breaks to developers that do little to improve local economic profiles for the long haul, and actually end up damaging schools.

Ultimately, mayoral control can spur councilmembers to become the strong reformers needed to advance the transformation of American public education. If not for mayoral control in New York City, Eva Moskowitz likely wouldn’t have become an activist for advancing reform during her time on the city council, and certainly not bothered to play a more-active role in expanding school choice by launching the Success Academy chain of charter schools. Mayoral control can actually serve to breed even more reformers who have the political savvy and passion for helping all kids succeed needed to sustain reform. And, at the end of the day, it will take city legislators and strong mayors to overhaul failing urban districts.

For Castro and other reform-minded mayors, handing failing traditional districts into the hands of city leaders would certainly help bolster the city’s economic, social, and quality of life fabric. And it will lead other city leaders to take active roles in creating the conditions that help all kids succeed.

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Can Alabama’s Takeover of Birmingham Lead to the Hollywood Model?


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By any measure, the Birmingham, Ala. school district is a shambles. Despite a 28 percent decline in enrollment between 2000 and 2010, and the shutdown of 21 schools in that…

Photo courtesy of the Birmingham News

By any measure, the Birmingham, Ala. school district is a shambles. Despite a 28 percent decline in enrollment between 2000 and 2010, and the shutdown of 21 schools in that time, the district has failed to cut its headcount. The percentage of support staff has increased by 97 percent during that period, while 120 administrators still remain on staff. Birmingham also keeps 23 staffers more than $100,000 a year on the payroll. So it wasn’t shocking that district fell afoul of Alabama state education officials after it failed to meet state requirement to keep $17 million in reserves (equal to one month’s of expenses). In June, after rejecting a plan to lay off staffers, the state education department moved to take over the district’s fiscal controls.

This hasn’t sat well with the district, which has unsuccessfully challenged the state’s takeover, and has attempted (and failed) in its effort to fire the current superintendent, Craig Witherspoon. The board’s recalcitrance has gotten so ridiculous that state Superintendent Thomas Bice has decided that board meetings will only be held under his lead or that of new school czar. It also hasn’t sat well with supporters of the district’s status quo, especially the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (which has asked for an investigation into the state’s move to hire a former state superintendent to head up its fiscal overhaul and investigation into finances), and others, who failed to convince the city’s general government, which has no control over the district’s operations, to hand over $15 million in order for the district to meet the state’s reserve requirements. Add in questions about the future of Birmingham’s accreditation, and whether the district’s board president is even a full-time city resident (and thus, allowed to hold his seat), and it is clear that the district is just in wretched shape.

But while Birmingham’s fiscal malaise has gotten the most attention, it is its academic failures that are the most-disconcerting. Just 64 percent of the district’s eighth-graders who made up the original Class of 2010 made it to senior year of high school, a mere five percentage points better than a decade ago, according to Dropout Nation analysis of the latest data submitted to the U.S. Department of Education; the district’s graduation rate has declined by nearly two points (from 57 percent to 55 percent) in that same period. Young black men fare particularly poorly in the district, with just 58 percent of them being promoted from eighth-grade to senior year, compared to a 72 percent promoting power rate for young black women schoolmates. And although just 14 of the district’s 56 schools didn’t make Adequate Yearly Progress, this hints little at the low quality of education provided by the district to the children in its care. Just 6.2 percent of Birmingham’s high school students took at least one Advanced Placement course in 2009-2010, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights database, while only 12 percent of them are taking trigonometry, statistics, and other forms of advanced mathematics. For Birmingham’s students, nearly all of them black and plenty of them struggling economically, there is little likelihood that they are being prepared adequately for an age in which knowledge means more economically and socially than the ability to work with one’s hands.

State education officials can’t just sit pat with taking control of Birmingham’s fiscal operations. It is clear that the district’s status as both an academic and fiscal going concern is in question. While Birmingham isn’t necessarily in as bad shape as Detroit or Philadelphia, the district has continually ignored the need to provide all of its students with high-quality teaching and instruction. The district has struggled with its primary mission for at least a decade (and likely longer). And while Witherspoon deserves credit for pushing to provide all students with college-preparatory curricula (especially in expanding International Baccalaureate coursework in the district’s high schools), the reality is that he still hasn’t done a good enough job of taking on the dysfunctional central and school-level bureaucracies that are among the key reasons for Birmingham’s struggles. Nor could he even if he wanted. When a district has reached Birmingham’s level of dysfunctional, no superintendent can fully take it on without some outside intervention.

So the need is to take radical steps toward overhauling Birmingham. Given the woeful history of state takeovers (and the overhaul woeful results from district and school restructurings), it’s important for Alabama to get this right. One possibility could lie with handing over the district to the city government, placing it under the control of Mayor William Bell and the city council. But the city government’s own history of corruption — including the 2009 conviction of Bell’s predecessor, Larry Langford, for bribery and other malfeasance — likely makes the conversation a non-starter at the state capital (even though state government has its own sordid recent history of graft and sleaze). The more-promising possibility lies in the state embracing the Hollywood Model of Education and effectively breaking the district apart. One possibility could include the state spinning off the district’s worst-performing schools into a separate operation similar to the successful Recovery School District model in New Orleans; under such a plan, schools could end up being run on their own by a board of directors that consists mostly of families, who, along with community members, can spur the overhaul of the failure mills and dropout factories that have long littered their communities. This could also be done for the other schools in the district, effectively transforming the district’s central bureaucracy into the role of handling and contracting out services such as maintenance and school lunches.

Such a move will require two key steps. The first: Passing a Parent Trigger law that would allow families to take control of failing schools. The second?  Pass a law allowing for the creation of public charter schools. That is something the state has been unwilling to do. Earlier this year, an effort by Gov. Robert Bentley to pass a charter school law fell to seed amid opposition from Birmingham and other school districts, along with the NAACP’s Iron State affiliate, and the National Education Association unit. The fact that neither Bentley nor leaders in the Republican-controlled legislature showed almost no leadership on advancing the legislation, all but made certain that charter schools wouldn’t come into reality this year. Thanks to Bentley’s decision earlier this month to not put another charter school proposal before the legislature, there is even less hope for charter schools becoming a reality next year.

But there is still plenty of opportunity for reformers in the state, including the Alabama branch of Black Alliance for Educational Options, grassroots activists tired of the obstinate opposition to reform from the NAACP and others, and city business leaders, to leverage Birmingham’s struggles to provide children in that district — and throughout the state — with the education they need to write their own stories. Considering the district’s woes, reformers should immediately run a campaign demanding Bentley to once again put charter schools on the agenda. They should go even further by advancing a package geared toward overhauling Birmingham schools that includes a Parent Trigger provision, the launch of a school voucher program similar to that in New Orleans that was recently expanded to serve the entire state of Louisiana, and development of a school data system that provides more-helpful information to Birmingham parents tired of keeping their kids in failing schools. Given the public embarrassment that is Birmingham, reformers can easily force Bentley’s hand, and that of Bentley’s allies in the legislature.

Birmingham’s children and families have been poorly served by the district for far too long. The state’s takeover of the district should only be the start of a much more-expansive reform effort that gives these families and other taxpayers schools worthy of their dollars and our children’s lives.

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…And Frank Jackson’s Successful Action in Cleveland


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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…

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.

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Philly May Embrace the Hollywood Model — and Other Districts Should Do the Same


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Perhaps Philadelphia School District boss Thomas Knudsen and the state-controlled school board read the proverbial writing on the wall — or merely checked out Dropout Nation‘s commentary earlier this year…

Perhaps Philadelphia School District boss Thomas Knudsen and the state-controlled school board read the proverbial writing on the wall — or merely checked out Dropout Nation‘s commentary earlier this year on the traditional district’s flagging fortunes. But the district’s proposal this week to effectively dismantle the district bureaucracy and move toward a decentralized system of schools akin to the Hollywood Model of Education is the right thing to do for the City of Brotherly Love’s children. And other districts should consider doing the same.

Forced largely by the prospect of deficits of as much as $292 million a year by the 2016-2017 school year, Philly plans to shut down 104 failure mills and schools that have lost students over the past decade. The remaining district schools would be essentially transformed into public charter schools by handing them over to a collection of “achievement networks” similar to what is being proposed in cities such as Cleveland. As for the central bureaucracy? it would be reduced to a “lean” office charged with working with charter school operators and networks to achieve cost savings by more-efficiently providing bus services and managing capital resources. The control over school budgets (and, more importantly, the assignment of teachers whose incomes and benefits consume most of those dollars) would be controlled by the schools and the organizations that manage them.

As one would expect, the American Federation of Teachers affiliate there and other groups that support keeping the traditional model in place aren’t too thrilled by the plan. There is also no guarantee that Knudsen and the School Reform Commission will actually turn the plan into reality. The Los Angeles Unified School District proved how easy it is to turn ones back on reform efforts within the past two years as it abandoned plans to hand off some of its schools to charter school operators and community groups; same with Detroit, which has offered up several similar plans.

But this time, the conditions are ripe for Philly to follow through — and not just because there’s no elected school board in place. For one, Pennsylvania state officials are likely tired of the embarrassment of its two decade-long control of the district, which has included the presence of now-former superintendent Arlene Ackerman. For current Gov. Tom Corbett, who has struggled to push for expanding school choice throughout the Keystone State, allowing Philly to use a model similar to that of the Recovery School District that has proven to be successful in New Orleans could end up making it easier for him to push for launching vouchers and expanding charters elsewhere. More importantly, there is clear recognition by all but the most-obstinate education traditionalist that the traditional district model no longer works for either taxpayers or children. As Dropout Nation noted last month in its look at Philly (and Fairfax County, Va.), few poor and minority kids are getting the strong college preparatory curricula, high-quality teaching, and cultures of genius they need for lifelong success.

Knudsen and the school board deserve credit for recognizing reality. Other districts should follow. As Dropout Nation has made clear ad nauseam, the traditional district model is not only ineffective, it is obsolete in helping all children — especially those whose futures have been squashed by the districts charged with educating them, but want to get back on the path to high school and college graduation. It’s not just about those districts that have been failing kids for decades. Even those districts that are providing high-quality education should consider ditching a model that does little to allow high-quality teachers and school leaders to do great work and foster cultures in which all children can learn. Abandoning the traditional district model would allow for the transformation of American public education that would allow all children to access schools fit for their lives.

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