In 1989 the nation's governors emerged from a gathering in Charlottesville,
Va., with a vow that breathed new life into beleaguered urban schools:
We promise to educate all the children, not just the easy-to-educate
children.
What followed were five or more years of policy thrashing before settlement
on a central strategy for achieving this goal: It was agreed that all
students would undergo standardized testing and everyone -- students, teachers,
and administrators -- would be held accountable for results. That strategy
has produced some upward movement in test scores and drawn important extra
dollars from the politicians. The problem is that it may not be enough.
Time is running out on the urban school reform movement. And not lifting
inner-city schools out of the miasma of underperformance places an enormous
drag on efforts to reinvigorate America's cities and turn them into attractive
and livable communities for a thriving middle class.
While there have been some successes -- measured mainly by rising test scores -- any
honest report card must note that they've not been striking enough to
attract many middle-class taxpayers back into the inner cities. If the
gains don't come faster, political leaders may simply allow urban school
districts to slip back to their accustomed pattern of quiet failure.
What's holding urban schools back, however, is not a failure of will,
goals, or effort. Rather, it is a host of opposing forces. They start
with resistance from successful suburban districts that feel they do not
need to be forced into the same straitjacket of testing-and-accountability
reforms needed by the urban districts. Yet testing is a statewide matter;
if it's necessary in Detroit, it has to be done in Grosse Pointe, too.
Although accountability systems often produce embarrassing headlines about
under-performing urban schools, inner-city superintendents like them anyway,
because they keep funds flowing and the political spotlight on their problems.
Budget cuts are another trend that could cripple the rehabilitation of
urban schools. These include the recent teacher layoffs in Buffalo, N.Y.,
as well as reductions in summer school programs that have proven to be
effective for inner-city students, who suffer disproportionately from
what educators call "summer loss."
Unfortunately, the list of negative forces goes on. One is the urban
district problem of revolving door leadership, which produces sudden shifts
in education policy. That's a primary reason why the largest public-private
effort ever made to improve schools -- a $1.1 billion investment in 2,400
urban schools led by philanthropist Walter Annenberg -- reaped only small
victories, according to a June 2002 report. The best it could claim were
some rises in expectations and improvements in teacher quality.
Finally, the biggest challenge to urban school reform is the awful pull
of poverty, especially concentrated poverty. One-third of the children
in large Northeastern schools live in poverty. In high-poverty schools,
students are a full three grades behind the students in low-poverty schools,
according to a recent U.S. Department of Education report. These discrepancies
are measured as early as fourth grade.
No one knows how much time urban districts still have before both politicians
and the public give up on them. That may cause discontent with inner-city
schools to spill over into the streets, with a demand for more radical
solutions, such as vouchers, as an escape mechanism for parents determined
to help their children. At risk is not only the momentum generated by
the 1989 Charlottesville summit but even the central pledge of President
Bush's education policy, "no child left behind." Signs of trouble
already exist.
Running out the clock. The most lethal of the opposing forces
is probably the pushback from suburban districts. Not only are wealthy
districts such as Scarsdale, N.Y., rebelling against testing designed
to identify the low performers, but governors of disparate states such
as Vermont and Nebraska are opposing the Bush reforms, saying the costs
appear to exceed the benefits. If the suburban schools win independence
to set their own standards, that means urban schools will be granted lower
standards. Lower standards will allow their problems to fade from view.
How long would the president hold the line if his own party members stepped
back from their commitment to urban renewal? The reform movement could
die a slow, quiet death.
A noisier way of running out the clock is playing out in Philadelphia,
where earlier this year the governor decided to take over the schools.
This decision has led to political chaos, with street demonstrations and
seat-of-the-pants reforms that appear to lurch in new directions every
month.
Knowing there's a deadline makes learning the lessons of the successful
districts an urgent task. Michael Casserly, executive director of the
Council of the Great City Schools, which represents the big urban districts,
put together a "Beating the Odds" study that shows payoffs for
reform efforts. Last year, for example, 62 percent of urban districts
registered math gains in all grades tested. Districts such as Charlotte,
N.C., Sacramento, Calif., and Houston made gains that outstripped statewide
gains. What's happening in these districts that isn't happening in districts
such as Detroit, which is slipping further behind?
The best lessons. In Charlotte-Mecklenburg County, educators enjoy
the benefits of a city-suburban combined district. To counter racial learning
gaps, Charlotte educators increased the budgets of high-poverty schools
by one-third, creating smaller classes. In addition, educators introduced
a school-rating and staff-bonus system hinged on the progress made by
each racial group. There were also dramatic payoffs in campaigns to steer
more African-American high school students into advanced placement courses.
Sacramento, says Casserly, is an example of a district with stable leadership
pursuing carefully paced, bottom-up reforms where everyone -- parents, teachers
and administrators -- signed off on the goals and the methods. This is a
district where the unglamorous work of aligning curriculum and improving
professional development began paying handsome dividends: In some grades,
the reading and math gains are nearly double the statewide gains.
Of the three districts, high-poverty Houston may hold the best lessons
for the struggling urban districts with similar demographics. What happened
there propelled its school superintendent, Rod Paige, into President Bush's
cabinet as secretary of education.
The Houston story starts off as the Texas story, with a numbers-driven,
statewide testing-and-accountability system that held every school responsible
for educating all racial groups. From the beginning, however, Houston
used that system as a tool to scour the schools for low performers. School
profiles revealed side-by-side schools educating similar children but
producing dissimilar results. Some principals didn't have to be fired;
they quit out of embarrassment.
To help principals survive the unflinching accountability, Paige gave
them new powers to run their schools and the resources to run unprecedented
experiments in preschool. This provided inner-city children with an early
dose of academics that many preschool activists consider premature for
young children. But it worked.
Paige appeared to truly understand the finding of the National Reading
Panel that reading isn't just a matter of phonics vs. whole language.
What's needed, the panel said, is a year-by-year sequencing system that
uses phonics to move children from sound associations into reading literature.
That reading program was mandated in every school, which helped solve
some of the continuity problems generated by the fact that poor families
change living arrangements more often than middle-class families. High
mobility typically lowers school performance.
Within a few years, Paige's district -- which was 66 percent poor, 54 percent
Hispanic, and 33 percent African-American -- was headed in a direction few
had thought possible. In almost every grade and every subject, Houston's
progress is greater than the state average. The numbers are stunning.
Between 1993 and 1999, the number of low-performing schools dropped from
48 to 18; the number of schools rated as exemplary rose from zero to 11.
Most significantly, minority students in Houston began outscoring minority
students in far wealthier neighboring districts.
Voucher debate. Aside from the efforts in Charlotte, Sacramento,
and Houston, the tools used by urban educators aren't always the tools
thought to be most promising only a few years ago. For instance, most
conservative educators assumed there would be no urban successes without
vouchers. A voucher experiment got off to a promising start in Pensacola,
Fla., but then sputtered as other endangered schools managed to escape
the list of failing schools. In Cleveland, a poorly planned voucher program
that seemed to miss the neediest students has produced negligible gains.
Smaller voucher experiments produced modest gains only for African-American
students.
Milwaukee, site of the nation's largest experiment in public vouchers,
is rated a success in a societal sense, with more parents willing to forego
fleeing to the suburbs. But the definitive study on academic gains there
has yet to appear.
Charter schools are proving to have a far more significant impact on
school reform than voucher programs. In cities such as Dayton, Ohio, 15
percent of the students attend charter schools, which has triggered closures
of some regular public schools. There are similar numbers in Kansas City,
Mo. Nationally, about 2,400 charter schools educate nearly 600,000 students.
But those schools have yet to prove they are clear academic winners. And
poor oversight of charter schools in states such as Ohio has allowed an
aura of fiscal irresponsibility to taint the charter movement.
A key reform tool favored five years ago was abolishing social promotion
in urban districts. That was championed in Chicago after Mayor Richard
Daley in 1995 took over what had been dubbed the worst school system in
the country. Indeed, holding back students and requiring summer school
for underperforming students had a quick payoff in rising test scores.
But in more recent years, test scores have either plateaued or moved
in dips and rises. And the Consortium on Chicago School Research reports
that sixth-graders who are retained -- and especially those who are retained
for two years -- made smaller academic gains over the next three years than
comparable students who won social promotions.
The problem in Chicago is the problem elsewhere -- sustaining the gains
from year to year. Making students proficient in basic skills is proving
to be a lot easier than closing learning gaps with suburban districts.
Educators call that "picking the low-hanging fruit." But unless
Houston-level gains start appearing in other cities, overall urban reform
will remain an elusive goal.
