Education Reform Success Stories
In most cities, school boards run the school system. However, in Chicago, New York City, and most recently, Washington, DC, mayors and their appointees are in charge of schools, and apparently with significant success.
After the leadership shift and subsequent reforms, these urban areas saw the academic achievement of minority groups begin to improve. This was the testimony of witnesses before the House Committee on Education and Labor, a July 17th hearing seeking ways to reduce the achievement gap. Guests included mayors, chancellors, and a superintendent, all touting their district’s success after recent education reforms.
These success stories all shared two characteristics: a focus on increasing accountability and recruiting better teachers. Mayor Fenty and his chancellor, Michelle Rhee, argued that a lack of accountability has allowed the District of Columbia to house one of the worst public school systems in the nation despite spending more per pupil than any state. Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein agreed, testifying that they have begun grading their schools and providing theses assessments to parents, holding administrators directly accountable for their performance. Additional transparency measures included shutting down failing public schools and opening up charter schools to create competition, as Chicago’s CEO of public schools, Arne Duncan, added.
Yet, as much as these reforms highlighted accountability, they also focused on hiring better teachers. Rhee in particular emphasized the important relationship between effective teaching and high student achievement, drawing strong agreement from the other panelists. Mayor Bloomberg noted that in New York City schools, tenure is earned after a proven record of accomplishment rather than handed out after years of faithful service, regardless of quality. He added that school unions, often demonized by education reformers, supported these changes and were an important element in the reforms’ success.
But if these examples suggest that successful education reform begins at the local level, what role, if any, should the federal government play? Here, Duncan and Klein offered committee members some advice. Although both praised the government’s efforts with the No Child Left Behind Act, they offered several suggestions for improvement. For one, Klein asked the government to ratchet up accountability measures and enact national standards by which to measure student achievement. Duncan agreed, though he proposed that looser regulation should come with these higher goals, in addition to emphasis on year-to-year improvement rather than absolute performance.
Whether or not the government can successfully implement these suggestions is a different story. If a law sets national standards but focuses on progress, then what is the purpose of benchmarks? A school that improves by 10% over a three-year period but is still 40% away from the goal can hardly be considered successful. Focusing on progress would detract from one of the strengths of NCLB and, as noted above, a crucial component of successful education reform: increased accountability. This is not to say that progress is not important, because it is, but absolute performance is, too.
Unlike this convoluted relationship between the federal government and local school districts, the bottom line of the hearing’s panelists was much more straightforward: we are all in this together. Perhaps the best example of this came from Atlanta’s superintendent, Dr. Hall, arguing that even though a school board still runs her district, the hard work of business leaders and parents has brought about successful reform. It is important to note that in spite of their success, these reformers acknowledged that they still have a long way to go before completely fixing education. And even if there was no discussion on school vouchers and other controversial school choice topics, they have taken an important first step: placing the needs of students first.
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