Reform School Confidential

...Unprecedented public, business, and press support led to the 1988 reform legislation that set a cap on the size of the administration and reallocated money to the schools...

...The administration, on the other hand, was doing fine...

...Almost everywhere else, a diplomaearned with a host of questionable pedagogical courses, a few weeks of practice teaching, and virtually no testing of subject knowledge-still equals a license to teach...

...She had learned to type, slowly but cannily, by matching When she needed to know what something actually said, she asked her coworkers to read for her...

...Even Urbanski admits that the epic reform hasn’t changed the way teachers teach...

...Thus administrators have been able to wait out “reform” until public interest wanes...

...Theirs are still the experiments educators point to when they ask for more time to fix the system...

...The small district was the poorest and arguably the worst in the state...

...Beside me was another justgraduated clerk named Peggy, who had gone to D.C.’s Coolidge High School...

...Bill Clinton obtained a one-time-only basic literacy test for Arkansas teachers back in 1983...

...A third of the mostly hispanic student body couldn’t do coursework in English, and its dropout rate, the highest in the state, was just barely higher than the rate at which its teenaged girls had kids...

...The number of black students who averaged a B or better through four years of high school is the lowest in five years...

...Figures like these, I think, help explain why half of Americans now claim to support educational vouchers...

...When John Silber’s Boston University (BU) finally obtained a 10-year contract to run the Chelsea schools over the fierce objections of the teachers union and school administration, it was a little like winning a vacation home in Love Canal...

...When the Consortium on Chicago School Research recently polled thousands of Chicago teachers, 57 percent of them reported that the restructuring has had no effect on what they do in their classrooms...

...Parents freaked, but absolutely nothing happened to that teacher...

...Yet what was good for students was a pain in the neck for their teachers, who would have to revise their ancient lesson plans...

...In fact, all this harping over administration sort of bores him...

...only 3,000 ran for the empty seats...

...But in the unreconstructed Rochester schools, as in most others, administrative dicta spewed forth on everything from what days to read Silas Marner to assignments on the weekly cafeteria detail...

...So empowered were teachers by the changes that administrators actually sued for being cut out of the supervisory process...

...Now come closer and see how reform has changed Farren Elementary, where geography-it’s nestled into the world’s largest housing project, Robert Taylor Homes-has traditionally been destiny...

...But perhaps the most damaging thing isn’t what that establishment inflicts, but what it fails to sharepower with the parents who have the most to gain and lose from the quality of their children’s schools...

...In Rochester, for example, state-level reform recently changed the way students would learn math...

...In Chelsea, Massachusetts, it’s a disease unto itself...

...could receive as much as $70,000-but they’d damn well have to earn it...

...Yet a peek behind the press releases suggests that this new trick is nothing against one of the oldest: bureaucratic inertia...

...F”ing school reform To be sure, from each of these hope-freighted reforms have sprung some triumphs: Spry Elementary’s makeover, the rising elementary scores in Rochester and Chelsea...

...Has reform come to the rescue...

...And then they lost them...

...But by last year, a third of the ‘council members had quit, frustrated...

...So they battered out a historic agreement...

...And Urbanski’s union, to collective amazement, agreed to waive some seniority rights, tie pay in part to performance, and give officials a little help in weeding out incompetent teachers...

...And while the payoff for doing so can be astounding, administrators tangled up in the details of running a school tend to find apathetic moms and dads more convenient...

...The greenback attack In the world according to liberals like Jonathan Kozol, the key to school reform is in the bank: money to hire good teachers, money for innovative programs, money for books, money to relieve students’ socioeconomic disadvantages...

...And that’s apparently what Chicago Superintendent Ted Kimbrough intends to do...

...When William Bennett called Chicago the “worst school system in the country” back in 1988, he was stepping onto a pretty sturdy limb...

...Chelsea focused on leveling the playing field for poor kids...

...By cutting bureaucracy and loosening central office control, principals and teachers can be more responsive to the needs of their particular kids...

...Weren’t they giving them good health care, a rich assortment of afterschool programs, and, for once, accountable teachers...

...Administrators have to work on and with these parents...

...But when it came to the classroom, he had a plan that would warm Hillary Clinton’s heart...

...Only half of Rochester high schoolers passed the state’s Regents math and English test, down from more than 60 percent two years ago...

...From Chicago and Cincinnati to Washington and San Diego, decentralization of school administration is the latest banner of the reform crusaders, and its premise is a sound one...

...Easily...

...Half the students dropped out before graduation, and high school achievement scores ranked in the lowest 1 percent of American schools...

...They’d mentor weaker teachers, develop curricula, plan special programs and events...

...Today, Spry’s classes are smaller and its test scores are inching up...

...from the reform process can prove far more toxic I:O change through their votes in elections and on bortd issues than by their “meddling” in a third grade class...

...The results of that underfunding are now being felt acutely: The reading and math scores that leapt up in the first years of reform recently sank beneath pre-takeover levels...

...Chelsea’s current crisis is an extreme manifestation of a standard problem in education reform...

...It abolished a longstanding position of bilingual program director, deputizing a nonhispanic teacher to take over the vestigial work...

...Rochester empowered its teachers...

...Yet four years after the historic contract was signed, oversights like those have proven pivotal, because Chelsea parents didn’t just express their hostility with noise...

...In fact, everybody seems happy except the students at Clay School across town...

...It may not be tomorrow, or even next year, but, as Chelsea’s parents indicate, citizens excised...

...The dampened hope in Rochester, Chelsea, and Chicago should make liberals not just furious, but determined...

...Teacher quality is an educational necessity that liberals are particularly shoddy at confronting...

...Rochester taxpayers now demanded teacher accountability...

...Heady with 1 his new control, the first thing the Spry council did was dump that Bad Old Principal for someone more responsive and aggressive...

...Then came reform...

...Yet before we start dismantling public education, perhaps we should check out why even these tremendous efforts have failed-explanations rooted, not in money or theory or intention, but in an educational establishment that has managed to thwart the most righteous of reforms...

...They were petrified...

...One heard a lot of stories like Peggy’s back then, as it began to dawn on America how broke the public education system was, especially in the cities and among the poor...

...Rochester’s goal was to beef up the quality and status of teachers...

...Correspondingly, teachers worked to the rule, got raises like clockwork, and earned the minimal respect they deserved...

...They would go to students’ h’omes, stay late, and tutor individually...

...But mostly, we just have some plain old bad teachers, and nothing ever happens to them...

...There, the disenfranchising of parents has sabotaged one of the most promising and well-intended reform movements in the country...

...Here, the city reports that 100 percent of the student body is low-income, and test scores are among the city’s lowest...

...It was a swell idea-indeed, probably the most important in educating underprivileged, at-risk kids, who currently make up about a third of America’s public school population...

...parents get frustrated with inertia and arcana...

...There was a tradeoff, of course...

...As the state panel observed in fluent educationese, “The university seems to have underestimated the need for continuous socialization of important issues with various constituencies...

...The university’s hand-picked superintendent, Peter Greer, has already taken the hint...

...No comprendo, teach So even a “reformed” education establishment manages to keep bad teachers on the payroll, strangle creativity, and lavish on itself funds meant for kids...

...What went wrong...

...Rochester, New York...

...Of course, with a million bucks of his own money countering the education lobby, Ross Perot did manage to secure merit pay in Texas...

...More than half of Chelsea parents couldn’t even understand BU’s various projects, let alone participate in them...

...There were illiterate honor students, kids who graduated after missing months of school, teachers who couldn’t spell competence, let alone demonstrate it...

...Only this time around, the casualty list may include, besides all those Peggys unleashed into the economy, the ncltion of public education itself...

...which usurped the central office’s power and gave local councils comyou can only hope that the semi-literate ones also have a predilection for pedophilia...

...A few years back, the overcrowded, underfunded Spry was the fief of a Bad Old Principal whom parents routinely complained about to an indifferent central office...

...Thanks to the same state and union requirements that make getting rid of poor instructors arduous and expensive across the country, the head of Rochester school personnel estimates that only about 2 of more than 2,000 tenured teachers have been removed-or “counseled out”-every year since reform began...

...We had a middleschool teacher hit a kid...

...Until we do, there’s little guarantee that the next Brilliant Ideas for reforming our schools from within won’t be more wasted efforts...

...But Silber’s perestroika overlooked one thing...

...They pay lip service to the notion but work doggedly to keep the masses from messing with their plans...

...Not surprisingly, tiny Farren does have enough funds to support two handsomely paid assistant principals...

...But there, in that comer of the map, you have all the significant statelevel reform in teacher training and evaluation since A Nation at Risk...

...Failing to translate reports or hire hispanics seems rather forgivable in the context of a huge reform plan...

...Rochester’s throw-money-at-it approach was not without a guiding, and good, idea: freeing the hands of teachers to do what they’re supposed to do-butt into the lives of kids and make them learn in whatever way works...

...The upshot...

...To purchase the necessary paper and paper clips, Principal William Auksi had to shift the money from programs for kids with remedial learning problems...

...Rather, the polls lay bare our lack of faith in the public schools’ willingness and ability to transform-a faith strained to breaking by some of America’s most celebrated an’d ambitious reform efforts...

...Every day, thousands of students arrived at school to find neither a teacher nor a substitute in front of the class...

...Students learned, if they were lucky...

...But the teachers wouldn’t use them...

...Last year, the Urban League summed it up: These are the same “crisis conditions” as in the bleak days preceding reform...

...As expected, the conservative Silber took on the patronage-laced administration with ferocity, and by 1990, with a salary boost as sweetener, he cajoled the teachers union into merit pay...

...But it was probably no accident that Kozol, when researching Savage Inequalities, didn’t spend much time in Rochester...

...Meanwhile, the Rochester teacher’s union has rejected all pay-for-performance criteria in its contract, essentially reneging on its original agreement...

...Rochester paid its teachers like accountants...

...And with each came the expectation that there’ d eventually be fewer Peggy stories to tell...

...This year, Farren’s supply budget was cut 95 percent...

...It’s always been like this...

...I don’t want to be arrogant or grandiose,:’ John Silber said at the time, “but I don’t think it’s utterly fanciful to say we’re testing the future viability of American primary and secondary education...

...Before long, I realized that she was also functionally illiterate...

...and research, refinancing and retooling, Coolidge students’ reading scores are exactly the same as they were...

...and to include families, whatever the class differences and difficulties, in a learning process that precedes and transcends the classroom...

...So let’s...

...A perusal of the restructuring plan shows what it really means isn’t dismantling, but renaming-as the “Central Resource and Training Center...

...How do administrators get away with this rearguard action...

...Let’s ditch the whole idea...

...There are still almost as many dropouts as graduates...

...At this point, it would be a blessing if BU just left,” says Juan Vega...

...Even sadder was the fizzling of one of Rochester’s most promising ideas...

...In their early days, these three cities held the keys to real reform...

...Today, mention of the district’s modest improvements in elementary reading and math scores still pops up from time to time in the education press...

...Instead, he says, “We need to ?ocus on the classroom...

...And the university was fairly clumsy with its symbolism...

...Fortunately, renegade Rochester Teachers Union leader Adam Urbanski and Superintendent Peter McWalters, a former Peace Corps Volunteer and veteran teacher, didn’t think thai: was the wisest way to reach at-risk kids...

...It didn’t work...

...While pay can’t be tied inextricably to performance until the wonks create the perfect test or the administrators fill classrooms with uniform percentages of good kids and bad, allowing teachers to teach with no real-world standards has predictable consequences...

...Chicago, Illinois...

...News put it, the hottest place on America’s education map...

...Finally, Chicagoans’ frustration erupted...

...But as Rochester parents understand viscerally, there is another issue here-one of expectations...

...Today, after all the reports Katherine Boo is an ediror ofThe Washington Monthly...

...This fall, hispanic parents actually threatened to keep their kids out of school, while BU muttered about taking a hard look at the practicality of its long-term investment in Chelsea...

...As the schools’ new leaders went on cross-country speaking tours to discuss their plans, parents fumed that none of the all-important hearings BU held to air its plans were in Spanish, nor were any of their reports translated...

...Here in D.C., those stories begat blue-ribbon commissions, tens of millions of dollars in new funding, and perhaps as many new programs as there are schoolsfrom Afrocentric education to early-learning centers to magnet schools...

...But why...

...Earlier this year, he resigned to run a private school in New Jersey...

...Goaded by a “Call to Action” by the Rochester Urban League and funded by hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers and local corporations like Eastman-Kodak and Bausch and Lomb, chilly Rochester in 1987 became, as US...

...Parents across the city quickly organized “diplomatic corps”-local parents who’d esposed of parents, who know what’s best for their kids, the power to fire principals and set policy for individual schools...

...Every high school and middle school teacher had agreed to counsel 20 pupils and get involved with their parents-a plan to ensure that in reformed Rochester no child would slip quietly between the cracks...

...It’s not really a profound faith that this country’s St...

...When Silber attempted to speak to parents about the schools’ financial problems, he was drowned out by jeers...

...That task isn’t very difficult when your student body is middle class and raised in families that value learning...

...It’s just a big monster,” charges Juan Vega, member of the Chelsea Commission on Hispanic Affairs, of the reform effort-not seeming to realize that it was all supposed to be done for his kids, not to them...

...Parents are happy, teachers are happy, students are happy...

...little else will get them dismissed...

...Now the corps don’t exist anymore, the teachers aren’t making their visits, and you can almost hear the cracks wid’ening...

...The challenge is students who are poor, usually urban, possibly hungry, and brought up a world in which education isn’t necessarily a priority...

...On one level, the stories of these efforts reinforce what many Americans apparently believe: We’ve tried public school reform...

...It’s just a fact of life,” one administrator reassured the Chicago Tribune at the time...

...And in the context of so much bad news about public schools, it’s tempting to be grateful about good news, however small...

...wrong, we have a moral obligation to address the politically hazardous sources of public school reform’s continued failuretenured incompetence, administrative protectionism, parental detachment and alienation...

...There is a good lesson there, but not perhaps the one the central office wants to convey...

...But the trouble with toasting Rochester, Chicago, and Chelsea for slender gains is that they had the leadership and the motivation ito be a lot more than least bad...

...But BU was anything but daunted...

...But some teachers refused to visit their poorer students’ homes...

...An astounding 17,000 people-mostly parents-ran for 4,300 seats on the newly empowered school councils in 1989, and more than 300,000 people turned out to vote...

...Well, if you think you can’t fight City Hall, try the school administration, whose “Club Med mentality,” as parent Ron Sistrunk dubs it, has proved as durable as the roaches in the lunchroom...

...Anthonies and Oxford Preps will cure what ails education...

...the new thing, sensibly, was mastering concepts and critical thinking instead of memorizing formulae...

...And when you ask Chicago school officials about the success of their dramatic decentralizing plan-one the Tribune called the most radical assault on the administrative power structure in American educational historyyou invariably hear the story of Spry Elementary...

...Droves of students failed their state math exams...

...Peggy was pleasant and industrious, with a reverence for horror movies...

...In 1982, when she graduated, the school’s average reading levels were more than two grade levels below the national norm-scores among the worst in a pretty sorry school system...

...Once teachers get those licenses, cort teachers into the projects...

...They had enough money,” Auksi shrugs...

...The recent results of the Bush administration’s own National Assessment of Educational Progress show that kids about to graduate from private school don’t do any better than public school kids when you control for family background...

...Teachers would receive a 40 percent pay increase over four years-vet...

...With no incentive to change their ways, they balked, clinging to the old memorize-the-Pythagorean methods...

...Still, the first state study of the takeover, in 1990, sided with the moms and dads, calling the BU contingent “arrogant and devaluing to parents and others who are members of minority groups...

...Convenient, that is, in the short run...

...Rochester respected its teachers...

...Unfortunately, longitudinal studies suggest that the treacly concept of getting moms and dads engaged is almost certainly the linchpin of students’ educational success...

...And without the central office gobbling up funds, they’ll have more money to respond with...

...Reform School Confidential What we can learn from the failure of three of America's boldest school reforms by Katherine Boo When A Nution ut Risk toppled American educational complacency back in 1983, I was just out of high school, working as a typist for the federal government...

...And those are the scores of the slim majority of kids who stayed in school-another statistic frozen in place...

...City leaders, keying into residents’ feelings, cut the schools’ budget dramatically, crowding classrooms and stymieing many of BU’s planned reforms...

...Five years ago, in a school district of 33,000 studentsmost of them poor and almost half from single-parent households-Rochester launched one of America’s most expansive and expensive efforts to rebuild a system whose test scores and dropout rates consistently ranked it as one of the worst in New York State...

...Silber and company, justly proud of their programmatic accomplishments-elementary school reading and math scores had increased, while Chelsea High SAT scores shot up 14 points in a year-treated the unhappy parents as kevetchers: “the ain’t-it-awful crowd,” one BU administrator dubbed them...

...In Chicago, that’s a side effect...

...A federally funded study a year later echoed the charge...

...School boards come and go...

...Another job-preserving technique comes under the heading “eliminat[ ing] administrative impediments”: not cutting staff or streamlining procedures, but researching and writing a series of procedure manuals that include development of “a master matrix . . . of the stakeholder groups...

...They aimed to empower good teachers and get rid of bad ones...

...But today, each of them is foundering, leaving communities, students, even the leaders who propelled them disillusioned...

...Chicago sought to give parents control over the way the schools ‘were run...

...to wrest money and control from bureaucracies...

...In Chelsea, teaching kids would begin outside the classroom, with health care, parent literacy programs, early training in English...

...Office politics If Rochester’s plan was to shower money and power on teachers, Chicago’s plan was to wrest it from administrators and give it to parents...

...But statistics tell a more complicated story...

...What Chris Whittle, in his obsession with uniformity, fails to realize is that good schools leave room for passion, giving people freedom to experiment, adjust, and respond...

...Chelsea, Massachusetts...

...So how good are those teachers...

...In Rochester, that question is irrelevant, since it’s virtually impossible to fire the bad ones...

...In short, the Chelsea plan would hand over to teachers kids who were, in the education catchphrase, ready to learn...

...Central office workers were spending twice as much every month to trim and water the plants in their offices as they handed out for school supplies in the city’s poorest elementaries...

...Perhaps the goal is, as Churchill said about democracy, to be, not the best, but the least bad...

...In fact, at current levels of pay, in five years three quarters of those teachers will make $60,000 just for showing up-a fact that gives Whittle and other acolytes of educational competition real claim to the moral highground, and not just in Rochester...

...The community was more direct...

...From Rochester to Chicago to D.C., even well-intentioned reformers tend to act like summer-stock Coriolanuses when it comes to parent involvement...

...Meanwhile, layers of administratcrs couldn’t even accomplish their most fundamental task: getting teachers into classrooms...

...A few weeks back, weary of school officials’ talk about how nicely reform efforts were progressing, I started wondering how those reforms had played out at Peggy’s alma mater, Coolidge...

...Consider the number-one decentralization “strategy” issued by the administration: “Disassemble the Central Service Center” at the central office...

...Teachers obviously deserve protection from unfair job actions, just as they deserve decent pay and working conditions...

...That’s where the Bad Old Principal now collects his salary...

...In those places in the mid-eighties, some of education’s most committed reformers seized upon a few bold ideas, drummed up some cash, and embarked on a see.ming revolution from within, generating hype and hope in the process...

...If we really believe that funneling public money into private schools i...

...We have teachers who fraternize-I mean, have sex with-teenagers, and they’re still teachers,” says Marvin Jackson, head of Rochester’s District Parent Council and a parent of five...