Commentary
Traditional public schools fail urban students
Alternative approaches are working
Peter Plastrik and Margaret Trimer-Hartley
Two big factors driving the Detroit school district's financial crisis won't be solved by cleaning up the books.
First, the district's schools don't work. They produce stunningly bad results -- far more dropouts than graduates, and graduates who aren't academically ready for college or careers. This failure generates the black flight from the city and into charter schools and nearby suburban districts.
Second, governance of the district is unaccountable for results. The faces may change -- new board members, new superintendents -- but the culture doesn't. It's a culture of low expectations and denial of the brutal facts of performance. There is no capacity within the district's leadership to redesign the school system to radically improve student achievement.
Big city school systems across the country -- Washington, D.C., New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles -- are mired in persistently poor performance.
Large-scale innovations in school design and school governance point the way to better education in those communities.
Even in Detroit -- where the education and political establishment clings to the old, failing model it controls -- these innovations are taking root.
The first innovation is in the redesign of schools for low-income African-American and Latino students so they will beat the odds by staying in school, graduating and going to college.
This kind of restructuring isn't about engaging in curriculum battles, buying new textbooks or toughening high school graduation requirements. Such actions alone won't make a significant difference in urban school graduation rates or student learning.
What does work and what is already being done here and elsewhere is a radical makeover of schools to engage low-income, at-risk students in learning and give them the nurturing and support often missing at home.
This redesign creates a new kind of school that uses teachers, curriculum, performance data, community resources, time and technology in new ways to engage students and make schools accountable for learning.
The general admissions schools we work with -- University Preparatory Academy (UPA), a K-12 system with 1,600 students, and University Prep Science & Math, a 6-12 charter system that opened this year with 162 sixth- and seventh-graders -- are just two examples of the model working in Detroit.
They are small schools of 125-500 students with small class sizes of 16-18 students. They offer every child powerful and enduring relationships with teachers and provide mentors from the world of work and other parts of the community. They customize student learning, tailoring lessons and projects to each kid's skill level, learning style, maturity and interests, rather than using one-size-fits-all curricula and textbooks.
At UPA and the science and math academy, every teacher is expected to know his or her students as well as they would know their own children. A big part of their job is to dig deeply, ask questions and figure out who their students are, what makes them tick and what makes them trip.
"We have ongoing -- daily -- discussions about whether we are doing enough to meet the needs of all of our students -- the low and high achievers and the unengaged," says Shawn Hill, principal of the science and math middle school. "The day that we pass the buck, give up on a child or stop asking what else we can do is the day we should close the school."
The most successful urban schools are designed to not only meet the needs of children who come to school hungry, tired, abused, angry or otherwise unprepared to learn, but to overcome them. Rather than write kids off because they are not motivated by traditional schooling, these schools use nurturing, sustained relationships to figure out what will excite them.
They know that the problems students and families have in high poverty communities are not excuses, but they are reasons why traditional school strategies don't work.
In addition to individualization, high-performing urban schools also hold high expectations for all students and usually offer college preparation as the expected path for all. There is no general education track. The schools rely heavily on partnerships with businesses and other institutions in the community to provide students with internships and experiences in diverse real-world settings.
These schools come in many varieties from college prep to science or arts-focused. They have different grade configurations, instructional approaches and student discipline codes. But no matter what their twist, a growing number of schools -- mostly charters -- that embrace the new model are performing much better than urban districts, and some are even reaching suburban-school level results.
New forms of governance
The second innovation in urban education is in school governance. Effective school governance systems allow schools to focus on student achievement and support site-based decision-making rather than central control.
Education reformers in Detroit and elsewhere have broken the iron grip of locally elected school boards and freed themselves from meddlesome and meaningless politics and personal agendas.
When Adrian Fenty became mayor of Washington, D.C., in 2007, he immediately got the City Council to abolish the city's elected school board.
"There are a lot of things you can do to improve urban education," Fenty says, "but getting rid of the school board is at the top of the list. When you have nine people who are going to vote on every little thing, let alone the controversial things, nothing's going to get done."
Responsibility for the new schools rests in many hands, including mayors in New York (1.1 million students) and Chicago (400,000 students), as well as authorizers of charter schools outside of traditional districts -- universities and community colleges, county governments, Indian tribes, state legislatures, state boards of education and nonprofit organizations.
• In Michigan, the second largest school system, with 30,000 students, is not a traditional district, but the 58 charter schools authorized by Central Michigan University.
• In Los Angeles, the nation's second largest school district, the mayor and school board created a nonprofit that controls 10 schools (18,000 students) that were in the school district until their teachers voted to join the new partnership.
• In New Orleans, a post-Hurricane Katrina shakeup by state government left the traditional school district with only a small fraction of the students it used to have and put the rest into the care of charter schools authorized by the state, or "recovery district" schools run directly by the state. Now charter schools serve a majority of the city's students.
• In Houston, two charter school networks, Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and YES Prep, plan to launch 55 more schools by 2017 and capture total enrollment of 30,000 students, 15 percent of the city's market.
• In Dallas, Richland College created an accelerated learning charter high school for students to earn an associate's degree and high school diploma at the same time.
Detroit charters' role rising
In Detroit, 40,000 students attend charter schools -- meaning about 25 percent of schooling for city children is governed by charter boards and the dozen universities and other entities that authorize them. This market share will grow as state barriers to more chartering in Detroit erode and/or the city's mayor receives some authority over schools.
Governance innovations are not a panacea, but they have two important virtues. First, they can establish oversight that is strategically focused with clear, measurable goals, rather than the often conflicting and confused edicts that come from political boards.
Second, the new operators can be more directly held accountable for the results of the schools. Mayors who run school systems face judgment at the polls every four years. Charter school boards must renew their contracts every few years. A scheduled day of reckoning is not a guarantee that these schools will perform well -- but it's a start toward accountability.
It seems likely that the Detroit district's new no-nonsense financial czar, Robert Bobb, and new funds in the federal stimulus legislation will set the system back on its feet, at least temporarily. But it will take innovation -- big changes in school design and governance accountability that produce dramatic improvement in results -- to get the system running permanently in the right direction.
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