NOTE: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute occasionally publishes guest commentaries on its blogs. The views expressed by guest authors do not necessarily reflect those of Fordham.
In late November, two large urban Ohio school districts publicly engaged in academic goal-setting exercises. They ended very differently.
In Dayton, the interim superintendent announced big hairy audacious goals—goals so dramatic, they seem unlikely to actually be achieved during his tenure. In Columbus, the school board moved in the opposite direction, rolling back what were already decidedly unambitious goals first adopted just two years ago. In their own ways, however, these recent efforts in Dayton and Columbus help illustrate why it is so hard to improve large, underperforming school systems—and how adult politics gets in the way.
Start with Dayton. Two newly-hired district administrators announced a series of new “Power Metrics”—including lifting the third-grade reading proficiency rate from the current 33.6 percent to 65 percent, and raising eighth grade math proficiency from 10.5 percent to 40 percent.
While setting lofty goals for improvement can be admirable, the district did not provide a time frame for when it expects the targets to be reached, raising some doubts about the seriousness of the district’s commitment to accomplishing them.[1] Instead, one of the Dayton officials said vaguely, “We know school transformation takes three to five years, so we’re trying.”
Given recent trends in Dayton, even if the current interim superintendent does get the job permanently, it seems unlikely he would still be in that position when enough time has passed to evaluate whether these ambitious goals have actually been achieved. Without the real prospect of accountability for meeting these goals, it’s hard to believe that this is a serious goal-setting process.
If Dayton has—at least on paper—swung for the fences, Columbus leaders indicated they would be satisfied just to get a walk to first base. In a unanimous vote, the board adopted a set of new five-year academic goals that represent a dramatic lowering of ambitions.
Back in 2018, the district’s draft strategic plan promised to raise the third-grade reading proficiency rate to 56 percent by 2022–23.[2] (The actual proficiency rate was just 36 percent last spring.) In 2021, the board formally moved the deadline out to June 2026 and lowered the proficiency goal to 55 percent. In last month’s vote, board members pushed the finish line back again, to 2028, and further lowered the target, aiming to only reach a 45 percent rate of proficiency.
The new plan also, for the first time, includes a math goal. That’s at least a start. But the board decided to aim to raise seventh grade math proficiency from below 15 percent last year to a still shockingly low 23 percent by 2028.
All of these numbers can make one’s head spin, so here is the bottom line: At this pace of improvement, it will take Columbus at least twenty years to bring the math achievement of its seventh grade students up to the current statewide average and at least fifteen years to do the same in third-grade reading. (Hopefully, the rest of the state won’t be just standing still in the meantime.) In effect, the new goals write off an entire generation of Columbus school children.
It is worth noting that each variant of the Columbus goals—the 2018 draft strategic plan, the 2021 schedule, and the new plan adopted last month—were drafted by different superintendents. And therein perhaps lies the first indication that such goal-setting efforts reveal some of the underlying dysfunctions that makes these goals so hard to achieve.
Indeed, one explanation Columbus district officials gave for lowering the bar was that they wanted to make the targets realistic and achievable. Aim too high, they warned, and you’ve set the new superintendent up for failure—and perhaps firing—depriving the district of the long-term leadership stability it needs.[3] The diverging Dayton and Columbus strategies raise two important and interrelated questions: What sort of medium-term goals are actually achievable for a large urban district serving an overwhelming number of disadvantaged students of color? And, when trying to figure out what is possible, should we benchmark against other dysfunctional, low performing districts—effectively baking low expectations into the goals—or look to the best performers, while understanding that their success might be difficult to achieve even under the best of circumstances?
To start with the first question, it is useful to look at other models from around the country. In particular, Denver, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C., stand out as exemplars of urban education reform so far this century. In each case, a chronically dysfunctional, under-performing school district experienced a burst of achievement growth—dramatically narrowing the gap with the relevant state or national average during a period of substantial improvement lasting between five and ten years.
But producing these gains required forces of nature—for example, Michelle Rhee in D.C. and a literal hurricane in New Orleans. In each case, the improvements required contentious reforms to teacher evaluations (or outright mass teacher firings), the closure of under-enrolled low-performing school buildings, and major political upheaval. In neither Dayton nor Columbus have education leaders indicated any willingness to pursue policy changes on anywhere near the scale necessary to accomplish the improvements in performance their students so desperately need—or to pay the associated political price from angry, entrenched adult interests. Dayton appears to incredulously promise big gain with little pain, while Columbus has simply thrown in the towel and acknowledged that such gains are all but impossible.
An alternative way to establish a reasonable benchmark is to examine other high-performing non-traditional options already available to students in these cities. Both Dayton and Columbus are home to robust school choice markets, with a number of high-quality charter operators that serve similarly disadvantaged student populations. Why not use look to these schools as evidence of what is possible and set the goals appropriately?
Leaders in Columbus reject this comparison, arguing that running a big city district—with over 44,000 students—presents unique challenges that smaller charter operators simply don’t face. This may be true, but it again risks baking political and operational dysfunction into expectations. After all, if reforming the state’s largest school district is akin to trying to turn the Titanic, there is no reason why Columbus students should have to be remain on a sinking ship. If district officials truly believe it is impossible to improve quickly, as their comments in November clearly indicate, why not encourage families to pursue better options elsewhere in the meantime?
By adopting the new goals, the district seems to have conceded its own inability to achieve significant academic improvements over the next half decade. At the same time, however, Columbus public officials (not only district administrators) have done all they can to prevent existing high-quality charter operators from expanding. Earlier this year, the city council blocked an annexation plan from KIPP Columbus, part of the highly regarded national KIPP chain, in retaliation for the school’s effort to fend of what was at the time an ongoing teacher unionization campaign. And back in 2020, the Columbus school board rejected an offer by the United Schools Network, a homegrown highly successful charter management organization, to purchase one of the district’s vacant buildings, even though it has continued to sit as an empty eyesore for years and the district has no real plan to use it.
Indeed, one reason Columbus leaders have dragged their feet on closing more schools, despite sharp enrollment losses, is fear that the building might be snapped up by charter operators, which have the right of first refusal to purchase unused buildings under state law. At the same meeting where the Columbus school board lowered the district’s academic goals, officials also previewed a forthcoming plan to dramatically reduce intra-district choice and have more students attend their zoned neighborhood schools. One major motivation for this shift is that it would allow the district to reduce the transportation it must provide to high school students attending charter and private schools. (Dayton, too, has faced its own share of controversy over transportation services provided to charter and non-public students.)
Having given up on meaningfully improving student outcomes in district-run schools, Columbus officials seem to have now turned their focus on making it as hard as possible for families living within their district to find better options.
Despite their quite different numerical targets, the Dayton and Columbus academic goals share a lot in common. Both appear to be designed primarily to influence public perception—to, in the words of one Columbus board member, “shape narrative” about each district. Both also seem calibrated to serve the employment interests of their districts’ respective superintendents—to help the interim win the permanent position in Dayton, and in Columbus, to have a chance to remain in the job longer than her recent predecessors. Sadly, neither is likely to meaningfully move the needle on student learning in the coming years.
Vladimir Kogan is a Professor in The Ohio State University’s Department of Political Science and (by courtesy) the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. The opinions and recommendations presented in this editorial are those of the author and do not necessarily represent policy positions or views of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs, the Department of Political Science, or The Ohio State University.
[1] In education consultant speak, a best practice is to make goals “SMART,” an acronym in which the final “T” stands for “time-bound.”
[2] The draft plan was never adopted because the interim superintendent who developed it was ultimately not hired, amidst a chaotic search scandalized by an open meetings law kerfuffle. He subsequently left the district.
[3] Regardless of whether one agrees with this rationale, at least this argument makes more sense than the other reason Columbus leaders have given for lowering the bar: the need to “recalibrate” previous goals in light of the Covid-19 pandemic and associated learning losses. However, the latter years of the district’s new five-year plan cover cohorts of students who were toddlers when pandemic hit, years before they would even begin kindergarten. And the 2021 goals were themselves adopted a year into the pandemic, when the transitory achievement impacts were already widely known.
