Will it take a hurricane?

Note to Readers:  To their credit, the editorial board of our local Rochester news daily (D&C) has decided to focus its attention on our failing city school district this year (last in the nation by some measures). They have reported on successes in other cities, pointing to models that we might follow.  Last month, our local school board trained its sights on its latest scapegoat, the now former school superintendent Barbara Dean-Williams. Within days, the D&C summarized the systemic failures in an editorial, It’s Time to Declare an Emergency. Here’s my response, which was printed the following weekend: 

The Sunday editorial, It’s Time to Declare an Emergency, finally said what needed to be said.  It is indeed time to declare a state of emergency. Our city’s school system is broken and hiring another superintendent of schools without addressing the core challenges is nothing more than lining up the next scapegoat.  

What will it take for the school board to wake up?  

What it took in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina.  The storm, which took 1800 lives, also wiped out most of the city’s infrastructure and scattered its citizens all over the region.  Many have not returned. 

In it wake, the Recovery School District (RSD) turned all of New Orleans schools into Charter Schools. By 2014, the percentage of students testing at grade level had improved from 35 to 62 percent. Before the storm, 62% of New Orleans students attended schools designated as failing.  By 2016, that number had dropped to 6%.

David Osbourne, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute, tells the story of New Orleans schools in a book, Reinventing America’s Schools. His book outlines core principles of leadership and management that have succeeded not only in New Orleans but also in Denver, Washington, D.C., and Indianapolis. He outlines seven key strategies that are common to the school districts of those cities and others.  Among them are decentralizing control by giving school principals autonomy to develop best practices; empowering parents by providing them choices of different kinds of schools, with public money following them; and, creating incentives and consequences for performance through competition.

The 20^thCentury model of public education created unified school districts that were critical to the development of human capital that made the United States the most innovative and competitive economy in the world.  Although that system continues to work well in many districts, particularly suburban districts where parents are engaged and intolerant of failure, it has stopped working in large bureaucratic inner city school districts burdened by federal and state mandates that haven’t translated to classroom achievement.  

In each example provided in Osbourne’s book, there was one person who was the prime mover.  One person who was unafraid.  One person who led the charge.  In some cases, it was a mayor.  In others, a member of the school board or the superintendent of schools. I am left to wonder who will lead the revolution in Rochester.  And, what will it take to break us free from a bureaucracy that perpetuates failure? A hurricane? 

WHO WILL LEAD?