D.C. Turns Away From Tradition in Trying to Turn Around Failing Schools

By Dan K. Thomasson Scripps Howard News Service

WASHINGTON — Governors and mayors across the country are taking school matters into their own hands as they strive to return decaying inner-city institutions to their one-time prominence. It is a major undertaking often requiring a strong break with tradition and the willingness to face a political and ideological confrontation with those wedded to the old ways.

In Philadelphia, the nation’s eighth-largest school district, teachers actively target the lowest-performing of their students and strive to connect with parents on an individual basis. Their efforts have managed to drive up substantially the number of students who reach proficient and advanced levels on the Pennsylvania state tests. It has been a struggle between a Democratic mayor and a Republican governor who compromised, with the mayor receiving the funding he needed to improve the situation and the governor the control he needed.

Indianapolis has taken a major step to improving its situation with a strong mayor, Bart Peterson, who uses the threat of increased charter-school enrollment to badger improvement in the public system. Key to this effort is the Democratic mayor’s authority to create the charter schools himself. He has done so without hesitation, greatly improving the graduation rate. Critics claim, however, that the proliferation of charter schools could further weaken the traditional ones. That may be true in places like Washington and elsewhere, but the very threat of them seems to have stimulated a response from district school boards and administrators.

Now inner cities across the nation are paying close attention to new Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty’s ideas for turning around the disastrous District of Columbia public-school system, where the only solution until now has been to throw more money at the problems. The result has been steadily deteriorating facilities and underachieving students.

If Fenty is correct in an approach that includes doing away with the job long thought to be the cornerstone of a good system — a strong superintendent — it could have an enormous impact on urban districts similarly plagued with lack of motivation, violence, poor test scores, parental detachment and beleaguered administrations. Furthermore, it probably would change the thinking of education schools in universities and colleges, where the traditional superintendent concept has been considered a key to any hope of reform in the world of public teaching.

In the growing trend by government officials to do something spectacular to shake up their downtrodden schools, most of which are heavily populated by minorities, Fenty fired the superintendent and replaced him with a school chancellor, who sees a much stronger teaching force with one-on-one instruction as salvation for the 55,000-student system. A Korean-American, Michelle Rhee, the founder of a New York-based teacher-training organization, has been tapped to fill the position in a move that already has stirred some controversy in the D.C. Council partially because of the secrecy surrounding the mayor’s plan and the fact she has not had experience managing such a big operation.

Rhee would be the first non-black nonblack to run the system in 40 years. That was before there was wholesale flight to the private schools and suburbs, largely because of the increasingly poor taxpayer-supported system. Even a black luminary such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson sent his children to private institutions rather than subject them to the vagaries and poor instruction of the public schools. While relatively well known in education circles, Rhee has just three years of experience in a school system. Yet her approach to improving the teacher base seems more logical than anything else yet tried.

The situation in this town, like that of nearly every urban sprawl in the nation, stems from a variety of reasons — not the least of which is the proliferation of private prep and charter schools, recalcitrant teachers unions and relatively little support from parents. The private and charter schools siphon off the cream of the student crop, leaving the public classrooms full of often- uninterested, unmotivated youngsters. As in Washington, once- superlative older core-area schools throughout the nation suffer by comparison to strong, viable public institutions in surrounding suburban districts.

At the heart of the failure of inner-city schools to serve their students is the lack of economic viability of the parents and grandparents who raise them. Far too often, the children have only one parent at home — a parent who is struggling to support them and has little time or inclination or ability to provide to give them the educational backing they need. Until that cycle of poverty and despair can be broken, it is problematic whether any effort to return these schools to viability will work — certainly not traditional methods.

Dan K. Thomasson is former editor of the Scripps Howard News Service.

(c) 2007 Deseret News (Salt Lake City). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.