Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Don’t know much about history.
Don’t know much about biology.
Don’t know much about a science book.
Don’t know much about the French I took.
But I do know a little bit about English. And I’m here to tell you, when it comes to the St. Louis Public Schools (SLPS), the epic struggle that’s beginning to reverse decades of decline is missing a pronoun.
It’s the one known as “we.”
Never was this more obvious than in late April, when Mayor Francis Slay held a jubilant press conference announcing the opening of three new charter schools next fall. The Post-Dispatch rightly noted the irony that the exciting news was released “on the very day that the city schools chief was poised to announce the closure of yet another three public schools.”
Coincidence? Who knows?
This much is certain, however: It wasn’t teamwork.
Slay has become enamored of the charter-school movement, so much so that his office has made its recruitment, support, and nurturing a major priority of his administration. The mayor’s city website features a section devoted to charter schools.
This is not irrational. Nary a day goes by that the mayor of St. Louis doesn’t hear complaints about two facts of life in his city: high crime and low results from public education.
It is hardly lost upon him that the two major entities totally outside his control are these: the police department and the public-school system.
It’s only logical that Slay would battle to control the institutions that directly address the areas for which he is held accountable. He rightly struggles in Jefferson City to get St. Louis autonomous control of its police (an outcome uncertain at press time).
As for public education, Slay and aides have spoken wistfully about wanting to control the school district, but little effort has been made to change the structure legislatively. Slay did successfully back a slate of school-board candidates in 2003. That didn’t work out so well.
So now the mayor has turned his focus to the educational panacea of the moment, i.e. the charter-school movement, and he’s had enough success that more than 10,000 students now attend charter schools in the city. Correspondingly, enrollment in the SLPS has dropped to about 25,000.
The mayor—who has referred to city schools as “lousy”— is not merely failing to support the SLPS. His frequent property-tax giveaways through corporate-welfare deals reduce its income. And now, he’s outright opposing it by fostering an alternative public-school system over which he can have considerable influence.
But this also isn’t working so well.
It turns out that there’s one small flaw in the highly touted charter schools: They aren’t performing as advertised.
For the most part, kids are scoring no better in charter schools than in traditional public schools, and when you compare charters to the city schools that are most like them—magnet schools—many are doing substantially worse.
By law, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) tracks proficiency-test results in communication arts and math. Consider some of the 2010 numbers:
• Of nine charter schools for which there is 2010 data, seven had communication-arts proficiency scores that were less than the city schools’ not-great-but-improving 30.7 percent.
• Similarly, seven of the nine charter schools scored below the city schools’ 37.7 percent collective proficiency rate in math.
• If you break out scores by grade level, then there are 98 categories to compare. The SLPS outscored charter schools in 71 of them.
• No charter school could wave at the numbers of the city’s most successful magnet schools, such as Metro Academic and Classical High School (100 percent proficiency in communication arts, 81.8 percent in math) or Kennard Classical Junior Academy (90.1 percent and 88.2 percent, respectively).
It wasn’t supposed to be this way when the charter-school movement was hatched nationally less than a quarter of a century ago. The idea sounded great: Create public schools—founded by parents, teachers, activists, or others—that are free to operate with more freedom and flexibility than traditional public schools.
The ideal was for the charter schools to operate as innovative, nonprofit small businesses, ones that would provide greater creativity—and accountability—than educational bureaucracies (especially large ones like the SLPS). But in real life, it doesn’t always work.
For example, a central premise is that the ability to close a failing charter school makes it more “accountable” than a public school that can’t be closed. But if it’s your child involved in that disrupted education, the accountability isn’t painless—unless you’re raising guinea pigs.
Defenders will say that some charter schools have shown marked improvement, and that being so new, they should be cut a little slack. But go to the Center for Education Reform’s website (edreform.com), and it’s all about “excellence” and being “accountable” and producing “innovative schools that are able to meet the individual needs of our children.”
There’s no language on such websites about doing as well as traditional schools about a quarter of the time. There’s nothing suggesting that charter schools are a long-term experiment for which time, patience, or slack are essential.
This is supposedly about reform and about “improving education for all children” right away.
Actually, it’s a reflexive response to the undeniable struggles of school districts across the nation, especially large urban districts such as the SLPS. It is understandable that parents and the public at large (and hence politicians) are craving solutions.
Where charter schools have excelled in “communication arts” is in their ability to convince people that they are a superior alternative to traditional public schools. Parents are buying the rhetoric of the charter schools, not the record.
Why else would three new charter schools be opening next fall in the city of St. Louis when the ones that exist are clearly performing no better than—and often worse than—their SLPS counterparts?
If charter schools were as successful at educating kids as they are in recruiting them, then this wouldn’t be a problem.
But they aren’t. And it is.
Every time a kid leaves the SLPS for a charter school, the district loses $7,409 in state and local funding. But the savings to the district is not proportional, because the fixed costs of running the school district remain the same and thus must be spread around a smaller student population.
So the SLPS is taking a huge hit from the growth of charter schools in the city, with no end in sight. What’s particularly troubling about this is that it comes at the first time in many years that the SLPS is actually making some progress toward turning around its recent miseries and even returning to accreditation.
The district’s overall DESE proficiency scores are far below where they need to be, but the progress of the past three years is noteworthy. The overall communication-arts score has risen from 21.6 percent in 2008 to 27.5 percent in 2009 to 30.7 percent last year. In math, the corresponding increases were from 17.6 percent to 19.6 percent to 37.7 percent.
In 2010, the students of every grade level improved on their test results from the previous year (e.g., the fourth graders of 2010 performed better than they did as third graders in 2009).
The progress didn’t happen by accident. In 2007, over the objections of many, the state Board of Education took over the SLPS with the appointment of a Special Administrative Board (SAB). I was one of the people who argued publicly that disenfranchising the school board (albeit a dysfunctional body) was an act of bad governance.
I was wrong. Way wrong.
The SAB—consisting of president Rick Sullivan, Melanie Adams, and Richard Gaines—has performed splendidly in overhauling the management of the SLPS. (Adams, by the way, was appointed by Slay, Gaines by the aldermanic president, and Sullivan by the governor.)
Taking over the failing district turned out to be a matter of accountability. And it was a lot less painless to actual students than, say, the sudden shuttering of a failed charter school like the Ethel Hedgeman Lyle Academy, whose nearly 800 students had to be rescued last April, ironically enough, by the SLPS.
The SAB’s best move was to hire Kelvin Adams as superintendent. Adams, profiled in these pages in March, appears to be as good as it gets in the world of public education. Recently, he put together the district’s first balanced budget in years. Both Adams and the SAB are on board for the next few years at least, providing the district with stability that is a prerequisite to being accredited again.
Adams seems to have the right temperament to handle the thankless task before him. He’s chosen not to overreact to the infringement of the charter schools, for example, and now the SLPS even wants to sponsor some of its own.
I’m not so sure about that: I think the magnet schools—attended now by almost half of SLPS students—offer the very attributes that charter schools seek: freedom of movement within public education, innovation, special curricula, and the like. They do so without dismantling the SLPS.
The magnet schools are mostly still performing far below an acceptable level, in part due to socioeconomic factors that are also holding back the performance of charter schools in the city. For example, a high percentage of SLPS students come from single-parent homes. That doesn’t assure failure, but it’s a factor that doesn’t make life easier on the schools.
Don’t expect things to change overnight.
At the end of the day, the best remedy for what ails education—public and private—is better parenting. It’s great to talk about holding schools accountable, but until parents and the students themselves are held more accountable, it won’t matter how the schools are structured.
No miracles are on the horizon for the SLPS, but the district is taking small steps in the right direction. As it goes, the city goes. As the city goes, the region goes.
So there is one other step that the mayor, and the rest of us throughout St. Louis, could take as well. It involves a pronoun.
We could start thinking of the school system as ours.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
