JEFFERSON CITY • Consultants hired to give Missouri education officials guidance on how to better support troubled school districts offered a grim assessment Monday about the task that lies ahead.
“There is no urban system anywhere in America that is performing at a level that our students deserve,” said Ethan Gray, executive director of the Denver-based Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust.
“There are individual schools and individual school networks that achieve life-changing results for the kids that they serve,” Gray added. But, “We’ve never seen a system do that to scale.”
Members of the Missouri Board of Education listened as Gray and a consultant from North Carolina-based Public Impact explained the daunting nature of improving an entire school district — the very puzzle they’re trying to help state board solve.
It’s uncharted territory, they said. Some school districts have found success in targeting specific schools or groups of kids, such as in New York City, where the school system has revitalized high schools.
But the Missouri Board of Education isn’t interested in creating success for just a few students. Its six members are looking for a new approach to transform the state’s most troubled school systems, whose children are overwhelmingly minority and impoverished.
“Nowhere in the country is there a system, a successful system educating poor urban children of color,” said Michael Jones of St. Louis, vice president of the board.
The challenge led the board to hire the Denver organization, which goes by CEE-Trust, to perform a $385,000 study of Kansas City Public Schools, which lost accreditation last year. The board’s study is being funded by the Hall Family Foundation and the Kauffman Foundation. Its backers include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and its members include St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay.
The undertaking involves analyzing prior reform efforts, researching what has been working in other urban school systems, and interviewing parents, teachers and civic leaders. The meeting with school board members Monday offered an update on that process.
The recommendations from CEE-Trust are due to the state board in January. Though the focus will be on Kansas City, the state board plans to use the approach as a model in how to address underperformance in Normandy and Riverview Gardens.
“I would hope what they come up with in Kansas City would have some universal applicability,” said Victor Lenz, a state board member from St. Louis County.
Under a new Missouri law, the State Board of Education now can act sooner in unaccredited districts than it had the authority to do in the past. The state board is looking for a new approach to address chronic underperformance in Kansas City and in other struggling school systems.
During the presentation, the consultants told board members that Missouri is unusual in that its regulatory system seeks to fix entire school systems, rather than focusing more on the performance of individual schools.
Under Missouri’s approach, school districts undergo an accreditation process. Those who fail to pass state measures could face sanctions, such as falling under the supervision of a state-appointed board.
In addition, a state law that was affirmed by the Missouri Supreme Court in June allows students in unaccredited districts to transfer to better schools. Nearly 2,200 students from the Normandy and Riverview Gardens districts have done so this year.
In the face of those sanctions, some — including leaders of St. Louis Public Schools — have called for a system in which individual schools, rather than entire districts, undergo a state accreditation process.
Advocates of the idea say it would help school administrators and the state to zero in on individual schools that are struggling. At a meeting in St. Louis last month, Missouri Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro said such an idea has merit.
Jones and Lenz said Monday that addressing failing schools in an effective way is the most pressing issue facing state education officials. But it must be addressed with wholesale system change, and not with an approach that benefits just a few hundred children.
The current situation, Jones said, is “morally unacceptable and economically unsustainable.”
Once CEE-Trust presents its report, the state board can direct the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to move forward.
“The key here is we’re really trying to be very thoughtful on how we proceed,” Nicastro said.
