Andy Smarick, a partner at Bellwether Education Partners, believes rather than fixing urban districts, they should be dismantled and rebuilt. He shared his ideas at Friday’s Hot Lunch series sponsored by the Donnell-Kay Foundation.
Public education is a set of guiding principles, such as: availability to all children; tuition-free; non-discriminatory; and preparation for success in career and higher education.
But these principles can be operationalized in countless ways. How we bring them to life is up to us. A good analogy is democracy. That too is a set of principles: suffrage for all adults; one person, one vote; secret ballots; and fair counting of results.
But it can take many forms. In the U.S., we elect a president and Congress separately. In the United Kingdom, the prime minister is part of their legislature.
The problem with urban public education is that we have been led to believe that there is but one real way to deliver public schooling: the district. In fact, many people believe that “the district” and “public education” are synonymous.
But they are not. The district is just one way to deliver public education.
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We can do something different. We can protect the priceless principles of public education while ridding ourselves of this delivery system.
But it’s more than “can.” It is “must.”
The traditional urban school district is broken.
It cannot be fixed.
It must be replaced.
In the early 1960s, we realized something was terribly wrong with the outcomes of our urban districts. President Lyndon B. Johnson made fixing inner-city schools a focal point of the Great Society. The Coleman Report, commissioned in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, found that our urban schools were unable to compensate for out-of-school factors, such as parental education and poverty – meaning that a child’s demographics were predicting her future.
And so for 50 years, we’ve tried to fix the urban district.
We’ve tried increasing funding. Since 1965, Title I has sent about $400 billion to low-income schools. The federal government has also created countless other programs. Local districts greatly increased their spending. State legislatures increased funding even more. More money came from philanthropic contributions.
We’ve tried accountability. We’ve measured and publicized the performance of urban districts for ages now. Minimum competency testing in the 1970s then standardized states tests in 1980s and 90s. It reached its pinnacle with NCLB in the 2000s.
We’ve tried competition via inter-district choice, charters, tax credits, scholarships, and more. In many cities, a quarter, a third, in some approach half of students are choosing non-district schools.
We’ve tried human-capital strategies. We’ve tried different types of superintendents. We’ve had Teach for America and TNTP provide new teachers and a wide assortment of supports. We’ve had countless principal training programs.
We’ve tried interventions. Some states took over urban districts. More took over failing urban schools. NCLB forced states to put failing districts on improvement plans. Restructuring forced these districts to seriously intervene in their lowest performing schools. SIG has provided billions to urban districts to implement serious reforms.
The list of school interventions is jaw-dropping: needs assessments, staff surveys, conferences, professional development, turnaround specialists, school-improvement committees, training sessions, principal mentors, teacher coaches, leadership facilitators, instructional trainers, subject-matter experts, audits, summer residential academies, tutoring, research-based reform models, reconfigured grade spans, alternative governance models, new curricula, improved use of data – and it goes on.
What do we have to show for 50 years worth of these efforts?
After a half-century of work, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NAEP), most large urban districts struggle to get 15 or 20 percent of their eight-graders reading proficiently. Even supposedly stellar urban districts – winners of the Broad Prize – have the most dismal performance.
Those who know the urban district the best agree with my grim assessment. For example, the recently departed superintendents of Philadelphia and Chicago both left their positions saying that the district is broken.
But is there an alternative?
Yes, and it’s at our fingertips.
The traditional urban school district is broken.
It cannot be fixed.
But it can be replaced.
About the author
Andy Smarick is a partner at Bellwether Education Partners, a nonprofit organization working to improve educational outcomes for low-income students. He most recently served as deputy commissioner of education in New Jersey where he helped lead initiatives including Race to the Top 3 applications, the launching of new teacher evaluations and an overhaul of the department’s charter school authorizing.
I see you’ve really thought out the solutions. What were those again? Perhaps the reason you hate public education is that it is public, not private. Libertarianism and competition free market reforms don’t always transfer to institutions for the public good. Should Social Security invest in Wall St.?
Albert, I’d recommend you listen to the Podcast or perhaps grab a copy of Andy’s book on Amazon. He outlined a pretty interesting solution at the DK Hot Lunch for how to transform the education-sphere to the benefit of all students and good schools (including good district schools). He also spoke pretty frankly about being “model-agnostic” and how he’s for good schools and against bad schools regardless of their affiliation as a district, charter, or private school. It was a pretty interesting talk and I’d encourage you to download and listen.
There are many advocates of the ‘dismantle the traditional district paradigm.’ They are to be found across the ideological and educational theory spectrum. So Andy, you have a receptive audience. What you offer is to charterize urban schools http://educationnext.org/the-alternative/ . Curiously, your proposal is limited to urban schools. Am I to understand that there is something fundamentally wrong about urban public schools that is in part responsible for the continuing poverty of some urban districts and neighborhoods?
If so, it begs the question that suburban school districts are doing something right by their students. The model of reform you detail in the link above is a model of well, frankly, I have a hard time characterizing it. It’s just a maze of Rube Goldberg mechanisms. You try to support your model by riffing off of a well-worn observation that we no longer live in an Industrial Revolution world. Except that we do. And your solutions are just a jumble of clichés that make no sense.
You are the Deputy Commish of Ed in NJ, eh? Good to see the Peter Principle is alive and well. From your link above: “The real question is what happened in the places where the four systemic innovations were most faithfully implemented? If you follow smart chartering policies and practices, what can be accomplished?” Ah, good move Andy. You dismiss the negative data about charters and try to change the rules of the game. Well done. But you aren’t fooling anyone but Bill and Melinda Gates and others who fall for this crap.
Your analysis is about the most cynical I have ever read. You indict urban districts for failing students, you offer a scrum of alternatives, and NOWHERE do you bother to explain why urban districts fail. You cite cities that have offered more charters without noting why those cities did so. In New Orleans, the city was devastated by a hurricane with the loss of many students to surrounding states and districts. The reformers saw this as an opportunity to swoop in and claim that charters were the answer to decades of political corruption and economic and racial devastation. And you have the utter gall and temerity to present the NOLA experience as some kind of paradigm of success for the dismantling of public education? The other cities you cite have experienced their own failures of leadership and internal politics but it’s not just about the schools, per se. Hey, don’t take it from me, take it from Harvard http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news-impact/2012/04/watch-the-new-orleans-askwith-forum-live/
Andy, I’m genuinely curious. Replace it with what? And how? And with what funding?
Jeffrey,
I remain utterly amazed that you and some others here seem to think public education=large urban school districts with centralized command control structures that were designed 100 years ago.
I think it is totally fair to debate what the best public education system or system of public schools should look like but I don’t think our default should be the current system. It was designed for a different era and will not get most kids to be college and career ready in the current context.
Van,
I remain utterly amazed that you and some others seem to think that the reason that kids aren’t college and career ready, although a whopping 23% of them live in poverty with all its attendant woes*, is somehow the fault of the schools and the obviously horrible teachers who work there.
*malnutrition, lack of medical care, lack of dental care, transience, sharply limited vocabulary and background schema upon entering kindergarten, unsafe neighborhoods
I think Jeffrey Miller already may have already said it best – but it seems that Mr. Smarick is not accounting for the impact of poverty and systemic discrimination on the communities which urban districts reside. We’ve spent so much time trying to achieve some twisted sense of EQUALITY between wealthy white suburban districts and poor black and brown urban districts that we never actually have necessarily sought or achieved EQUITY. Poor communities and the kids who come from them require MUCH more money and resources. When we start taking Dr. King’s message about combatting poverty as a matter of justice rather than of wealthy white liberal charity seriously – we’ll solve the problem. It’s not rocket science.
Van, I get your critique of my observations. I would first like to ask you and everyone else here to just take a step back from our laser-like attention to reform. Observe the landscape.
You and others characterize public education as ‘command and control’ while you advocate a more open, decentralized infrastructure. Such a move requires as well a paradigm shift towards increasingly localized accountability structures. This appears to be a wise move as there seems to be a critical distance function to hold the system accountable. The move towards charters, given that mindset, appears likewise, a wise move. Allow increasingly localized choice in educational offerings and we achieve an optimized result with student testing and achievement results. This shift appears to me to rest upon a critical assumption that human children will learn more and better if they and their parents are provided more choices to tailor schooling to the perceived needs of said children.
Behind the philosophical scenes, is an assumption that a capitalist market model is preferential to a command model. Another assumption follows that what is true for economics must also be true for other sectors of the human experience. If capital markets and choice have increased the general welfare of humans, it follows that in the human endeavor called education, the same rule must or at least, or perhaps should, follow. Yet another (hidden) assumption is that we can reduce many sectors of human experience to variations of what we perceive as choices to be made as life proceeds.
The present model of education, I would agree, has its roots in a 19th Century model. When I said that we are still living in that system, I did so with my observation that modern exhortations of educational reform be enacted to keep pace with industrial and technological and economic changes. We, who live in 2013, like to pretend we live in some kind of special time in human history; that we live in a time of exceptionalism. Old rules no longer apply; we must invent our way out of a trap of history or suffer some kind of future repercussions. Is this so? If the old paradigm suggested that we need schools for the Industrial Age then, we are just the same in advocating education for the Digital/Space/Post-Industrial/Post-Modern/Nuclear or ‘Whatever Age’ we think we are currently enjoying. Get my drift? It’s the very height of intellectual hubris to declare we moderns exist above the jetsam of history. We are as caught in the flow of change/stability as any other time period despite even how the written word as allowed us to examine the past.
The present Establishment Reform Model for education is where you dwell, Van. You and I and all of us here really sincerely want our kids to do better than their parents, to do better than us. It’s an ethos of Western Civ and the American Dream. The critical question is, how do we ensure/insure(?) this happens. During the past 150,000 years or so, homo sapiens went from living in caves to living in outer space. Not bad. We are the only species in the entire history of life on this planet to do that. Now, all of the sudden, American humans are deficient in their ability to go one step beyond themselves. We complain. Oh man, do we complain about how the schools suck and how the system is old and broken. The hand basket to hell is ever carrying us closer to our national doom.
Maybe we could take a page from Reagan’s playbook of leadership and focus upon what HAS worked, how we HAVE overcome obstacles to make life better for people on this world. At the same time, we need to also take a page from Carl Sagan’s playbook of environmental stewardship and focus upon what we NEED to do to manage a sustainable world wherein all have opportunity to lead the kind of life our educational systems purport to provide. We cannot simply focus upon schools as the locus of change for a better life for our children; it requires much more. Yes, a good education correlates with life success but what constitutes a good education does not happen solely within the brick and cinder block walls of an institution.
Part Two.
Van, let’s try out some thought exercises here.
> The modern world was built upon the precepts and discoveries of the old. Industrial schools as you may characterize them, allowed us to live in a post-Industrial world and travel to the Moon. The great American Middle Class arose from Industrial Age schooling. Why are we somehow different now?
> The current experiments with charters aren’t going all that well. My Harvard link is but one of a plethora of research-based findings as to the middling effect of choice in modern education.
> Standardized testing may have a redeemable quality: in showing us how lame modern Establishment Reform/NCLB has been in changing everything from SAT/ACT scores to NAEP.
> Modern Establishment Reform (MER) efforts focus on punitive measures to force compliance with Establishment goals and precepts. Teachers and students will suffer consequences for deviations from scripted texts. The irony is that the very post-industrial, post-modern world the Establishment Reformers desire cannot be called into existence through scripted curricula or standardized texts. The genius of America has been as often as not, found by going off-script. The freedom to think for one’s own is the freedom to invent the unconventional, the useful, the needed. The beautiful. The inspirational.
> School choice is a misguided attempt to foster that very diversity of invention and discovery that has been the hallmark of American and Western history. Can our present school structures do better? Of course. There is great value in the classic comprehensive school. Specialized high schools have their place for students of exceptional skill but even they require a balanced approach to human experience and learning. Trouble is, for too many Americans, schools that are meant to offer a comprehensive sampling of life’s offerings fail the funding test. More importantly, the neighborhoods from which many poverty-stricken students emerge have no structures to compensate for the poverty of money, cultural literacy, social awareness, historical continuity, and emotional engagement with one’s own life’s worth.
> You want to change the school system, Van? OK, I’m with you. But let us first ask better questions, challenge cultural assumptions, and assume we are fallible in our findings and prescriptions before we perform experiments with the lives of human children.
It is a good time to remind Smarick, Van Schoales, and others that public education is PUBLIC. It exists in the public sector, funded by taxpayers, and the “command and control” structure is to ensure that representatives, elected by those taxpayers, control the expenditures of money and ensure that all the appropriate laws are followed.
That is the key legal function of the “command and control” structure of public education. Now, there may be different ways to configure that “command and control”structure. But, it almost is as if “analysts” from the non-public sector, be it non-profit or commercial, think that castles can be built in the air and any fanciful structure and that there is no need to be concerned about public accountability. That is crazy.
is okay.
Correction;
The second to the last sentence should read:
But, it almost is as if “analysts” from the non-public sector, be that non-profit or commercial, that castles can be built in the and any fanciful structure is okay and that there is no need to be concerned about public
accountability. That is crazy.
Those interested in this discussion ought to listen to this: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/clip/4088865 wherein Richard Elmore (Harvard) states that school improvement is “palliative care for a dying institution” and it has to do with how the digital age is breaking down hierarchical institutional models and that learning will “migrate away from schooling.” I think he’s onto something, and it brings about the question of equal access to resources that educate, not just schools that educate. Well worth the eight minutes to view.
Joanne,
I totally agree with you about having public education really serve the public good. The current school system is clearly not serving the public will well. The command and control was designed and is managed to try to standardize schooling across the city….and control teachers. It was a powerful innovation to public education in 1900 but no longer is meeting our current expectations. It is odd to hear you defend the design of the system in one breadth and then claim that DPS is unaccountable and opaque. The critiques of DPS now are not new. I have heard them for nearly twenty years over a long list sups. The problems have less to do with who is running the system and more to do with the systems and structures in the dna of urban school school districts.
Do you think schools are more or less public than the fire dept is in Denver? Should we have a fire board that is elected or a publicly elected water board? I think people confuse transparency and public accountability with school boards. There is little evidence that schools boards are the best way to manage an effective public school system in most cities today.
To those who believe that a playing field tilted toward the privileged and the lucky as is the American public education system is most effective, they need only to examine public education in Finland or Singapore. There are no private education systems and those countries far outperform this country. Most important, poverty is far less a problem in those countries while in the U.S. over twenty percent of youth live in poverty that interferes with their school performance. Rather than focus on ways to improve the impoverished conditions in which the poor live, teachers are singled out as failing those those students. Quick fixes are accepted without verification of effectiveness. Thus has testing been embraced as the latest quick fix. Quick fixes rather than well-researched solutions will produce what they usually do, failure.
Van,
You have redefined what I said. That is not okay. I am not defending the Denver Public Schools nor did I say that “public education must serve the public good.” This is what I wrote:…, “and the “command and control” structure is to ensure that representatives, elected by those taxpayers, control the expenditures of money and ensure that all the appropriate laws are followed.
That is the key legal function of the “command and control” structure of public education. Now, there may be different ways to configure that “command and control”structure.”
Terms like “public good” are too general and can be used to fit agenda. One of the reasons I did not pursue an teaching certificate nor a degree in education is that jargon, such as you use, obscures and makes it easy to “know how to say nothing well.”
A problem must be defined accurately if it is to be solved. That is what you learn if you minor in Math.
So Joanne,
What are you proposing? How would you like to see Denver public education organized and managed? I always find it puzzling when folks like yourself appear to be equally critical of the current administration of DPS and those on the outside that are pushing for all sorts of reform from teacher evaluation, tenure, training, school design, district governance etc, etc.
Knowing you were a math minor, I’m guessing that you learned that you do need a great definition of the problem along with a proposed solution. I do agree that I may not be clear enough on the problem in a blog format. You should read Andy’s book, he does a nice job of both defining the problem and a solution though I’m guessing you may disagree with with his initial frame.
Ah yes; the world’s easiest job is being a critic. Before criticizing, stop to think: what will be the impact of your criticism? Continue to be negative WITHOUT any facts and eventually people will stop listening. Further, it has an adverse effect on those who we really want to perform well. We prefer to take a positive approach. All school districts face societal issues that require a three-way effort between schools, students and parents. Parents often do not realize the extremely positive effects they can have, but if they don’t participate in a positive and respectful way nothing will change. My advice? Get involved, be positive and objective, and help make continuous improvement.