As readers may recall, the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation keeps one eye focused on education reform issues at the national level and the other trained on K-12 education developments in Dayton, Ohio, where the Foundation had its origins and is engaged in a number of projects.
Dayton is more interesting than you might think for education reformers. It lacks the visibility of a New York, Los Angeles, or Philadelphia yet shares many of the same challenges. Three decades of forced busing and middle-class flight have taken their toll. Dayton's population is now 70 percent minority and disproportionately poor. The remaining families have watched their public schools deteriorate such that they met only three of the state's 27 standards in 2001. Fewer than one in four of the city's fourth graders met state reading benchmarks in 2000 and math scores are worse. Meanwhile, the enrollment hemorrhage continues: from 60,000 students in the 1960s to 21,000 today.
Though small, the public school system has been as dysfunctional as any in the land. While the current superintendent means well and has good ideas, she, like her predecessor, was hamstrung by an ineffectual, quarrelsome, and highly political school board, by a change-averse bureaucracy, by an acute lack of strong middle managers, and by a highly restrictive contract with a teachers union that seems allergic to every sort of serious reform.
Because the system's problems seemed so intractable, parents sought options outside the traditional public schools and, in recent years, reformers (including us) have concentrated on creating other opportunities for needy Dayton children, primarily through a privately funded scholarship program that assisted them to attend private schools (and would have assisted them to attend other public schools had not the suburban districts slammed their doors) and a battery of new charter schools. With close to 4,000 students now enrolled in 13 charter schools, Dayton is as active a center of charter activity as can be found in America. This creates options that benefit children in the short run. But would the competition also leverage change in the traditional public school system with all its woes?
Whether this development can be attributed to competition or not, a sunbeam broke through the public school clouds in November when a slate of four reform-minded women won the majority of seats on the school board. Though they've been in office for just two months, they seem bent on doing exactly what they promised during the campaign: bringing long overdue change to the Dayton Public Schools.
But what form should that change take? How to pay for it? What to do first?
This effort just got a major boost from the Council of the Great City Schools, which has submitted a blunt, hundred-page report titled "Raising Student Achievement in the Dayton Public Schools." (A PDF version can be accessed on the web at http://www.cgcs.org/pdfs/Daytonreport02.pdf.)
This review was requested by superintendent Jerrie Bascome McGill and the previous school board but arrived just in time for the new board to build on. Underwritten by the Broad Foundation, it's a tough, candid, constructive appraisal, worthy of note by all public school reformers, thanks to its sensible ideas, its willingness to poke some sacred cows, and its constructive nature. That the teams preparing it consisted of "peers" from other urban school systems may also make its advice easier to swallow. They're not think-tankers or bomb throwers. They're clear-eyed realists who have walked the walk.
Dayton's public schools have myriad problems, and it's easy to be overwhelmed and discouraged if one tries to tackle them all at once. So the Council's teams focused on five that are especially urgent:
- Dreadfully low student achievement-and the system's failure to focus its energies and resources on raising it.
- Nebulous education goals, blurred priorities and weak, divided leadership.
- No clear lines of accountability or responsibility.
- Plenty of data but no real information-based decision-making.
- A higher level of per pupil revenue ($10,056 in 1999-2000) than other Ohio cities but a smaller fraction (47.7%) of that money devoted to instruction.
What to do? The Council's proposed cure follows from its diagnosis:
- Focus the entire district laser-like on student performance, setting citywide reading and math standards, centralizing curricular and professional-development decisions, and hiring a "reading czar." Cease all school-based "comprehensive reform models."
- Give principals greater hiring latitude but place them and central office staffers on "annual performance contracts tied to meeting academic targets."
- Create an open-enrollment plan whereby parents can choose any public school in the city for their children.
- Strengthen communications and community relations.
- Reprogram a big chunk of the budget into instruction by closing unneeded schools, dismissing surplus staff and imposing operational efficiencies. The bolder of the Council's two financial scenarios for Dayton would re-direct $25 million into instruction while targeting $21 million of federal aid on urgent instructional priorities. This would total more than $2000 per student per year if fully implemented, enough to fund nearly all of the Council's other recommendations.
The Council plainly could have gone farther. Its report might be termed "urban school reform 101." It says little about high schools, for example, and doesn't directly address the major rigidities in the union contracts. Its version of school choice doesn't avail itself of the opportunity to "charter" individual schools, giving them genuine autonomy cum accountability. It says little about collateral possibilities such as pre-school and technology.
But it's a fine beginning blueprint for an earnest new school board and a commendable example of American public education trying to fix itself. It suggests that the problems of urban schools are not so complex as to defy all solutions. There are straightforward, no-nonsense, affordable steps begging to be taken. The hard part, of course, will be finding the resolve-and political ingenuity-to break out of ingrained habits and dysfunctional patterns.
Will this happen in Dayton? So far, the school board is picking from the Council's recommendations, not embracing the whole report. And the president of the local teachers union has already voiced opposition to much of it, especially such needed steps as reconstituting failing schools by reassigning staff members and tying teacher evaluations to student performance.
The new school board and other community leaders plainly have their work cut out. Dayton's education challenges remain enormous. But there are many places like it in America, which is why what happens in that small city should interest education reformers far beyond southwestern Ohio. Our children's future doesn't depend only on developments in big, famous places. It hinges equally on the prospects for education improvement in communities like Dayton. Watch this space.
