MEMPHIS, TENN. • In a Mississippi River town where poverty and academic failure have been hallmarks of urban schools for decades, an experiment is underway that could transform how Missouri and other states approach one of the biggest puzzles in education.
Some of the worst schools in this city have been plucked from the control of the local school board and placed under the oversight of the state.
They include schools such as Aspire Hanley Elementary, a source of pride in the southeast Memphis neighborhood of Orange Mound, where parents said they had been unaware of the school’s academic decline until the takeover announcement in late 2012. Last fall, the campus was given over to a California charter school operator that has delivered smaller class sizes, the school’s first playground and the belief that academics are improving.
The approach is predicated on the controversial assumption that chronic school failure demands a state, rather than a local, response — even if that means usurping elected local control of education.
In Tennessee, the approach takes selected bottom-ranked schools and places them into what’s known as the Achievement School District. Its superintendent reports to the state education commissioner. The district operates some schools directly and matches most others with nonprofit charter school operators.
The goal is to catapult the lowest achieving schools to the state’s top 25 percent within five years by using methods that are sometimes fiercely resisted by teachers’ unions, such as frequent testing and performance pay for teachers.
Tennessee is among a growing handful of states that are experimenting with what’s called portfolio management: when a single entity oversees a diverse collection of schools with a wide array of operators. Control is decentralized, leaving most decisions to educators in schools rather than central office administrators. Operators who fail to demonstrate test score gains after a few years are removed and replaced.
In so doing, the state is chasing an elusive notion in education reform — the hope that not just a few struggling schools, but an entire system of schools, can succeed.
“The stakes are pretty high in what we’re trying to do,” said Chris Barbic, the Achievement District’s superintendent, who founded the high-performing YES charter schools in Houston.
Missouri soon may be no longer just a spectator of this reform effort. A consultant’s proposal presented last week to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education bears some similarities to the Tennessee model.
But it also has distinct differences. Rather than merely giving control of a failing district to a state oversight board — like Missouri did in St. Louis and Riverview Gardens — the proposal calls for abolishing districts entirely once they receive the state’s worst performance rating.
State-run offices would be created in their place to oversee the schools, directly running them at first. The offices would select nonprofit groups to run them long term, under the theory that charter school operators and other organizations could bring innovation to schools where district leaders have not.
It’s one of several plans that would amplify Missouri’s approach to troubled school districts. The issue became even more urgent last summer, after the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the transfer statute. More than 2,200 students in the unaccredited districts of Normandy and Riverview Gardens have transferred to higher performing schools in the region, leaving the two districts in north St. Louis County buckling under a collective $30 million in tuition and transportation costs.
Meanwhile, district officials are struggling to improve academics for the 3,000 children still attending school in Normandy, and 4,100 in Riverview Gardens.
“We need to think about how to rescue those kids,” said Peter Herschend, president of the Missouri Board of Education, during a meeting last week in Jefferson City. “Not how to rescue a district, not how to rescue a teacher or superintendent.”
But as Tennessee has learned, before such a rescue can take place, educators must figure out how to convince parents and communities to accept a radically different approach.
CHALLENGES AND MISSTEPS
In Orange Mound, a scruffy community of small bungalows that was developed by and built for African-Americans in the late 1800s, there was resistance when residents learned the state would take control of Hanley Elementary.
A billboard soon went up at a nearby intersection in protest. People spoke up at hearings and in churches.
“There were various opinions about the motivations behind it,” said Mary Mitchell, a lifelong Orange Mound resident and community historian. “Was this just a political move, or would it impact the children so they could be the best students in the country?”
Failure to fully win over the community at the outset has led to missteps. At Cornerstone Prep, the charter school’s leaders changed the school name and school colors without parent or neighborhood input. Parents later complained of a cultural disconnect at their school, and that students weren’t being treated properly.
When parents at Hanley learned that an out-of-state charter school operator would be coming in, “It caused me to start raising questions,” said Teresena Wright, whose daughter with special needs is now a second-grader at the school. “I didn’t know how my voice would be heard. I didn’t know where to begin.”
Aspire — the nonprofit organization that now runs the school — spent months seeking community support. It flew parents to California to see its schools there. It held a parent pampering day with free manicures and massages in the school gym. Its Memphis staff knocked on doors at apartment complexes, visited churches, held barbecues and spoke at meetings.
The school now has a parent resource center, where parents and grandparents can volunteer and access educational opportunities for themselves.
“I now see the needs in our black community in education being met from the ground up,” said Marlene Henderson, the guardian of a kindergartner, visiting with grandparents in the center one morning.
Parents who are unhappy with Aspire Hanley are free to move their children to open enrollment charter schools or district schools.
But there is a concerted effort to keep them where they are.
Critics of charter schools often charge that they don’t educate the same children as district schools, that they “cream” the population by discouraging special needs children and other challenged kids from applying.
In the Achievement District, all of the charter schools are neighborhood schools that have inherited the existing district’s student body.
“We need to be serving the exact same kids, the same issues,” Barbic said. “If we’re going to beat our chest about how great we are, we have to do it under the same conditions as the district.”
BIG CHANGES
Tennessee used $22 million from a larger federal grant from the Race to the Top program to create the Achievement District. The district’s 22 administrators work out of three trailers in the backyard of Whitney Elementary School.
The grant money has paid administrative salaries, and it helped the district create the data systems and accountability measures now used to manage the schools. When the grant runs dry, Barbic said the district will charge charter schools an authorization fee that should cover administrative costs once the district approaches 50 schools.
The district leaves most decision making to educators at the schools, who determine their school’s calendar, its staffing, its curriculum and what additional services to provide.
Nickolaus Manning, principal of Aspire Hanley Elementary, calls this autonomy a game changer.
“It gives the school back to the community,” said Manning, who came from a different school in the Memphis school system. “You aren’t relegated to a scripted staffing formula … . The work is still tough, but I have the opportunity to do the things we need to tailor to the students here.”
The result is also a streamlined district staff that gobbles up fewer education dollars, leaving more cash for classroom resources and higher teacher salaries.
Stacey Purdy, a teacher at Aspire Hanley Elementary, said it has meant more computers and technology for her fourth-graders, as well as additional support staff to help her on a daily basis — the biggest difference she sees over last year.
“You always had your group of kids you have to move, but you felt so alone, so to speak,” Purdy said.
Rather than apply for jobs with Achievement District schools, most teachers have transferred to schools within the school system, or are working with other districts.
One out of three teachers returned to Hanley after Aspire took over. Most did not apply — common among schools in the Achievement District.
Teachers in the district stand to make between $40,000 and $90,000 a year. While starting pay is slightly lower than what a first-year teacher in a Memphis district school would make, the earning potential exceeds the school system’s pay for those who demonstrate success.
Working in the district means losing out on tenure.
“They felt they were losing the time they had invested in the system,” said April Sullivan, a returning first-grade teacher.
SLOW PACE
The district is growing at a slow pace — taking over a handful of schools at a time. It started with six schools and 2,000 children. This year it has 17 schools with 4,500 children. Next year, it will grow to 24 campuses and about 6,500 students.
The work is concentrated in Memphis, where most public school children are African-American and come from poverty. Of the 85 schools in Tennessee’s bottom 5 percent, 69 are in Memphis. In 2012, just 29 percent of elementary school students in the city were proficient in reading, and 27 percent were proficient in math, according to a state report card.
Test scores from the 2012-13 school year were mixed. Students showed strong growth in science and math. But in reading, scores dropped.
Despite the need for better schools, Barbic is trying to avoid growing too big too fast out of concern that taking on too many schools at once will lead to lackluster results.
“If we don’t think we can grow with quality, we’re not going to grow,” Barbic said.
If a charter school operator fails to meet expectations after three years, it is replaced with another. Schools that show success will eventually return to the school district they came from.
Tennessee’s bottom-ranked schools are not automatically drawn into the Achievement District. Those that aren’t will become part of what’s called the Innovation Zone. State law gives these schools the same freedoms and autonomy as achievement schools. It’s allowed the Achievement District to partner with Shelby County Schools, which merged last year with the Memphis school system.
“There’s no reason we should do this alone,” said Malika Anderson, chief portfolio manager for the Achievement District.
WEIGHING OPTIONS
Tennessee isn’t the first proving ground for a state-run district for troubled schools. The most well-known forerunner is in Louisiana, the Recovery School District, which took in most New Orleans schools following Hurricane Katrina.
Other states, such as Virginia and Michigan, have similar approaches on the books.
In February, Missouri Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro plans to outline her plan to address unaccredited districts and struggling schools in Missouri. In addition to the proposal from the Indianapolis-based consultant Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust, she will be considering plans pitched by the Missouri Association of School Administrators, the Missouri Charter Public School Association, and Kansas City Public Schools.
Last week, several members of the state Board of Education gave a strong endorsement to taking a vastly different approach to failing schools — whether it be the plan from CEE-Trust or others under consideration by the education department.
Questions were raised about pensions and health plans. And Board Member Russell Still of Columbia expressed skepticism that a governance overhaul may not make any difference at all in the very place children learn — in the classroom.
Board Vice President Michael Jones of St. Louis said the system isn’t working for thousands of children in urban areas. Holding on to the ball doesn’t win a basketball game, Jones said. He suggested that the board do something different. “You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take,” he told them.
