If you look hard enough, you can almost see some exceptional public schools in our inner cities, schools where youngsters are learning and being adequately prepared for the worlds of work, citizenship, and future education. But it’s hardly news that in far too many of our urban centers—despite the best intentions of educators and others in the community—the outcomes for most students are abysmal. A large number of these schools are, in the words of United States Secretary of Education Richard Riley, places that “should never be called schools at all.”
The problem is well known, but the scale is sometimes underestimated. Fully one out of four U.S. school children—11 million youngsters—attend urban public schools. Thirty-five percent of those children are from poor families; 43 percent are from minority groups.
What are these young people learning?
Not much, it turns out. After a massive survey, Education Week concluded that “most 4th graders who live in U.S. cities can’t read and understand a simple children’s book, and most 8th graders can’s use arithmetic to solve a practical problem.” Slightly more than half of big-city students don’t graduate from high school in four years.
Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that 63 percent of 4th grade students in non-urban schools reach the “basic” level in reading, compared to 43 percent of students in urban schools and only 23 percent of students in high-poverty urban schools. Moreover, the longer urban children remain in school, the greater the performance gap grows between them and youngsters who attend school elsewhere. The editors of Education Week comment: “Somehow, simply being in an urban school seems to drag down performance.”
This systemic failure of urban education has evoked widely differing responses from would-be reformers. “Inside the system” reform efforts lead many urban superintendents to engage in what University of Virginia political scientist Frederick Hess calls policy churn—“hyperactive reform agendas [that] may hinder performance by distracting schools from the core functions of teaching and learning.” Studying 57 urban districts, Hess found that between 1992-1995, the average district implemented 11.4 different proposals for change.
On the urban school governance front, a desire to shake up the status quo has spurred some states and local officials to undertake seemingly drastic actions. These initiatives include district-led reconstitutions of failed schools (as was done in San Francisco); state takeovers of troubled districts (the favored approach in Newark and Patterson, New Jersey); placing school systems under the control of specially created boards (the District of Columbia and Baltimore) or under the control of mayors (Cleveland and Chicago); and hiring non-educators to manage the school system (Seattle).
Other strategies rely on changing the system through market-based principles of competition and choice. These include charter schools—independent, self-governing public schools of choice that are freed from many bureaucratic requirements in exchange for being held accountable for results; contracting with for- and non-profit providers to offer different school and after-school services, including such well-known firms as Chris Whittle’s Edison Project; and public and private scholarship programs.
Paul Hill and Mary Beth Celio bring an exceptionally informed and thoughtful perspective to the topic of how to fix urban public schools and their governance systems. Their message is primarily directed to a lay audience—mayors, city council members, heads of foundations and cultural institutions, and other civic leaders.
The authors’ starting point is the fact that the fundamental problems of a given school system—bureaucratic controls, group entitlements, and job protections— are typically built into the system itself. In other words, city public school systems are standard-issue government agencies, owned and operated by school boards, staffed by civil servants, and held accountable through mandated compliance with a tangle of government regulations, central office prescriptions, and union contract provisions.
The key to changing these schools involves what the authors call “a thorough rethinking of the way the school system does business.” In order to have coherent and productive schools, a public school governance system must foster strong and distinctive schools that respond to the varied needs of today’s urban families. This approach views a public school as any school that accepts all comers, is paid for with public funds, and is accountable to a public authority for its results (student learning paramount among them). Families should be free to choose among different and autonomous schools.
The book is forthright in acknowledging that attempts to change the governance of urban public schools faces thorny conceptual and political barriers. The intellectual problem is the need for a rigorous and systematic reform philosophy. The political problem involves creating a coalition that has the strength to overcome the enormous inertia of the present system. The book supplies ideas and practical strategies for reconstructing urban education by altering its structures, incentives, and capacities.
On the intellectual front, the authors believe that seven strategies are available to serious reformers:
1. Standards: This approach sets clear and high expectations for what students are to be taught, checks to make sure students are learning what’s expected, and establishes consequences and rewards for those involved in the process.
2. Teacher development: This involves altering the incentive structures that undergird the preparation and continuing education of teachers.
3. School designs: “Whole school models” (such as Edison schools, Accelerated schools, and New American Schools) help broaden the options available to families and allow instruction to be more coherent, rather than assuming that the regnant “one size fits all” system will meet everyone’s needs.
4. Decentralization and site based management: Each school should have control over its resources, program, and operations and the autonomy to do what it must to meet the needs of the youngsters it serves.
5. Charter schools: These schools allow parents and teachers the option of creating strong community-based institutions that are accountable for results.
6. School contracting: This strategy allows districts the opportunity to craft performance contracts directly with individual schools or with organizations that run clusters of schools based on distinctive approaches.
7. Vouchers: This approach eliminates direct public funding of schools and instead gives scholarships to families that can be redeemed at any school.
All these strategies are plausible. But the authors contend—correctly, I believe—that many people tend to act as though they were mutually exclusive. The result is that these strategies are seldom amalgamated into a coherent approach that can deal with the myriad, complex problems urban schools confront.
For example, giving families more choices of schools through private scholarships will not in and of itself produce a larger supply of schools worth attending. A well-crafted voucher program, therefore, should include some provision for a supply of new and different schools. Moreover, these new schools should have control of their operations along with a coherent program that has at its center high expectations for students, with regular reporting of results.
Most of the book is devoted to providing a thorough “cause and effect” analysis of the ways in which the seven strategies can be used in combination—as well as the strengths and weaknesses of each. This examination shows how hybrid strategies can be developed that are much more powerful than any one strategy deployed alone. Particularly useful is their demythologizing of what they call the “ideological hot buttons” of both the Left and the Right, such as claims that standards will undermine local control, or that school choice will stratify and segregate schools.
Their practical political advice to local leaders on how to construct a reform strategy “bold enough to work” is as valuable as their analytic work. Two suggestions in particular are worth repeating.
First, local leaders should avoid a so-called “stakeholder” strategy that engages principals, teacher unions, and the PTA. Stakeholders should be consulted, yes, but only after community leaders have assessed the situation for themselves and developed a hybrid reform strategy, best done with the help of outside experts who can transcend local politics.
Second, lay leaders should make sure educators get beyond the “politics of hope,” another form of policy churn that creates new proposals to replace every failed reform effort, each in turn causing fresh hope until it, too, fails—gradually giving way to cynicism. Confronting the politics of hope means that civic leaders—especially those in the business community—ought not, in the words of the authors, “check their brains at the door when they get involved in public education.” They should be as rigorous and demanding with school officials as they are within their own organizations.
These suggestions—and the others they offer—can be shaped into general guidelines for foundations interested in supporting urban school reform efforts.
The Brookings Institution, which published this book, has also established a technical assistance program to help urban leaders implement some of Celio and Hill’s proposals. The program includes simulation exercises (one is found in the book) that allow reformers to formulate new hybrid reform strategies for hypothetical communities.
This volume is not your ordinary collection of trendy nostrums on how to fix urban schools. It’s a well-written, clear, and coherent proposal that refuses to offer another quick fix for urban schools. Taken seriously, it can lead to the eventual transformation of our urban schools and thus to a solution to the most desperate problem in American education today.
Bruno V. Manno is senior fellow in education at the Annie E. Casey Foundation and former assistant secretary of education for policy and planning.