Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
In his authoritative account of big-city problems and politics, A Prayer for the City, author Buzz Bissinger recounts what city-hall consultant Linda Morrison said when Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell fired her. Even as she exited, she spoke well of Rendell and his exhaustive efforts to salvage the City of Brotherly Love despite its intractable urban pathologies. “I admire him and he has a lot of courage, and he’s the best mayor the city has ever had,” said Morrison. “Unfortunately, that’s not good enough.”
No one is sure, or even saying, that Kelvin Adams is the best school superintendent the city of St. Louis has ever had. Yet even if he is, it’s too soon to tell whether that’ll be good enough.
Adams has heard a lot in the two years he’s been superintendent of the city’s unaccredited school district. Much of it has been complimentary, despite the daunting job and the prevailing atmosphere of urgency and uncertainty. What he hears most often, though, is “The Question.” It comes from parents, teachers, business types, city politicians, state legislators, and—back in January, on a visit to Jefferson City—from Gov. Jay Nixon’s staff. They ask, “How are you doing?”
Adams knows the concern is widespread.
“The question came up a lot in Jefferson City, because to some degree, so goes St. Louis, so goes the state,” Adams says. “I get it a lot here in St. Louis, too. The district is important to the city and to the metropolitan area. Even if people don’t have their children in public schools, they want the public schools to do better. We’re unaccredited. Nobody wants that.”
So how does Adams answer the question?
“I give the same data, the same answer to the governor’s office that I give everybody: We’re far from where we need to be, but progress is taking place,” Adams says. “There are things out there that show we are moving in the
right direction.”
Rick Sullivan, head of the district’s ruling three-person Special Administrative Board, gets the same query. His one-word response: “Better.” Sullivan is more effusive about his superintendent. “He’s honest, hardworking, likable, a great partner for the Special Administrative Board. He is totally dedicated and focused on the students.”
William Danforth thinks Adams is “terrific.” Danforth, Washington University’s chancellor emeritus, was co-chair of the Special Advisory Committee on St. Louis Public Schools that issued its final report to the state in October. After that report, the Missouri Board of Education unanimously authorized the SAB to continue governing the state’s largest school district until 2014.
Sullivan, Danforth, and Missouri Commissioner of Education Chris Nicastro all think highly of Adams and want him to stay on the job to give the district the stability it has lacked during its difficult past. Adams is the city’s eighth superintendent since 2003, with six coming between 2003 and 2006. The district lost its accreditation in 2007. Adams arrived in 2008.
“Everyone is committed to him having a long-term role in the St. Louis public schools,” says Sullivan. “We’re committed to him; he’s committed to the kids. It’s critical.”
When Adams took the job as superintendent of St. Louis Public Schools, the first sentence in the New Orleans Times-Picayune article outlining his plans described his new employer as a “beleaguered district.” Adams knew that, yet he also knew what his previous employer had endured and what was ahead.
Before moving to St. Louis, Adams was chief of staff for the state-run Recovery School District of New Orleans. A reader of the Times-Picayune article about Adams’ departure commented that it “seems as if St. Louis is in worse shape than us. Eight superintendents in five years? And what disaster is the St. Louis school district recovering from? You really think he’s going to ‘greener’ pastures? Congrats to Mr. Adams, but I think he has his work cut out for him this time.”
When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Adams was in his second year as principal of Marion Abramson Senior High School, the largest high school in the Crescent City. “I loved it,” Adams says. “It was the best job I ever had. I’d go back tomorrow. Being a high-school principal is a great job. You interact with faculty, students. You’re working with kids on a regular basis. It’s an influential position. You can see kids grow from ninth grade through twelfth, move on to college, come back, talk about their experience, all the good things. You see the bad, crazy things, too—kids getting arrested, getting in trouble, getting involved with drugs.”
The hurricane changed everything. “After Katrina hit, the district was no longer there,” recalls Adams. He left to work briefly with Southern University at New Orleans before moving to St. Louis in 2006 to work as executive director of human resources under St. Louis Public Schools superintendent Diana Bourisaw. He was drawn back to New Orleans in 2007 to serve as chief of staff under Paul Vallas, the high-profile superintendent charged with resurrecting the city’s public schools. Vallas previously headed up the Chicago and Philadelphia public school districts.
Prior to Adams’ return, the turnaround firm of Alvarez & Marsal—the same company that in 2003 had restructured the St. Louis district’s business and financial systems—was in charge of New Orleans’ public school district. Adams says the firm was in a unique position. “After Katrina, there were no schools,” Adams says. “Alvarez & Marsal didn’t have to pay anybody. About 10 days after Katrina, they fired every single employee in the district. They received their last checks. The hurricane gave them the opportunity to do that.”
Adams is careful to stress that Katrina was a “terrible experience” and the “most tragic thing ever to happen to New Orleans.” Yet it gave the school administration the chance to start from scratch, to get rid of its legacy debt and “look at the district with a new kind of energy.” About 40 percent of the district’s employees were rehired. Around 70 percent of New Orleans’ schools became charter schools—meaning they are publicly funded, but operate under separate authority granted by a charter and are not directly bound by the district’s administration or rules. “The jury is still out on how it’s going to turn out,” Adams says.
As much as he loved being a high-school principal, and before that a middle-school principal for seven years, he does not regret his move to administration. “I had worked with the central office before; I had an idea what it was about. You kind of know what needs to be done,” says Adams. “What you want to do is to have an impact on kids’ lives. That made me want to move to the next step.”
That “next step,” in 2007, meant his return to New Orleans as chief of staff, reporting directly to Vallas. Many saw Adams as Vallas’ heir apparent. He didn’t wait to find out. In 2008, Adams took the superintendent job in St. Louis, having worked there before, having had experience with Alvarez & Marsal, and knowing the district was unaccredited and run by the state. Enrollment had plummeted from 116,000 in 1967 to 27,574 in 2007—a 77 percent drop over the course of 40 years. In 2007, the city had 92 public schools; this year, there are 73.
No hurricane had hit St. Louis, though many of the urban educational problems Adams saw in New Orleans—concentrated poverty, low test scores, high drop-out rates, a negative public perception of the district—met him again here.
In a private conversation a few years ago, a City Hall power broker was waxing positive, rattling off how things were looking up for St. Louis: At long last, the population had stabilized, people were moving downtown, crime numbers were down, home values were on the rise at the time, and neighborhoods were coming back. Then he got wistful. “Just think if the city had the same type of schools that Webster Groves has. Imagine what that would be like,” he said.
Imagine indeed.
People may talk about a failed school district, but the environment where that district exists—its economy, its sense of priorities—shapes that district’s success. Consider some basic demographic data about Webster Groves and the city of St. Louis. According to the five-year average estimates based on 2005–09 data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, the median household income in Webster Groves is more than double that of the city—$73,206, compared to $34,227. Only 3.2 percent of families in Webster Groves are below the poverty level; in the city, 21 percent are. The median home value in Webster Groves is $233,900; in the city, it’s $119,900.
School data is just as disparate. In city public schools, 84 percent of students qualify for free or reduced lunches; in Webster Groves schools, 22 percent qualify. The drop-out rate in the city is roughly 20 percent, while it’s a mere 1 percent in Webster Groves. The graduation rate in city schools is 60 percent; in Webster Groves, it’s 96 percent. The average composite ACT for city public-school students is 16; in Webster Groves, it’s nearly 24.
Adams knows the school district he supervises has more in common with hurricane-ravaged New Orleans than suburban Webster Groves. Missouri Commissioner of Education Nicastro knows that, too. Before taking the state’s top education job, she was superintendent of the Hazelwood School District and before that, Riverview Gardens School District, which currently is unaccredited.
“Back when I was at Riverview Gardens, a friend of mine who was at a different district that was not nearly as diverse as mine told me that his challenge with the students in his district was just not to mess them up,” Nicastro says. “He said my job was different; my job was to save lives. That’s exactly what Kelvin Adams is doing as superintendent of the city schools. He’s saving lives.”
Nicastro recognizes a superintendent’s difficulty when faced with problems that originate beyond school doors. “The numbers the city district have pose challenges that many other districts don’t face,” she says. “That makes his job more difficult. It does not make it impossible. I think he’s doing well. It’s a long road; it’s not a straight road.”
At a recent parent assembly meeting, Adams described an altercation at a city public school that occurred at 8:06 a.m. “School started there at 8:05, so you know the problem came from outside the school,” Adams says. The concern about safety in schools is particularly difficult to address, he adds, because it’s a problem of perception, and there’s no objective way to measure improvement.
Those aspects of the district’s performance that can be measured do show improvement, however marginal. According to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the city school district earned five accreditation points out of a possible 14 in 2010; in 2009, it earned three. The district scored points in the categories of advanced courses, career-education courses, college placement, career-education placement, and bonus Missouri Assessment Program achievement. Attendance numbers are up slightly, though they’re still below state averages. Test scores are generally on the rise, however slightly.
Peter Downs, a former member of the elected school board and a frequent critic of the district’s hierarchy, describes Adams as “well-meaning” and says he has gained confidence since coming to St. Louis and “has grown into the job.” But according to Downs, “It is not clear, however, that has made any difference in how well schools educate children. One has to really strain to say that things are getting better. It is not clear how much difference Adams could make. He operates in a very confined political space, the chief signpost of which is the SAB.”
The elected school board, which appears to be a version of a government-in-exile, meeting monthly yet having little to no power, is headed by Rebecca Rogers, an associate professor of education at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. Rogers credits Adams for providing the district “much-needed administrative stability,” but points to increases in the drop-out rate, failure to reach accreditation despite “incremental” progress, and the continued governance by political appointees rather than elected representatives as evidence that the district is “moving in the wrong direction.”
Adams has plenty to improve within the confines of his struggling district, but the state of public education is not strictly a city issue. Wellston School District lost its accreditation twice before being subsumed into the Normandy School District, and Riverview Gardens remains unaccredited. Other metropolitan districts teeter on the verge of nonaccreditation or financial ruin. It’s not a problem isolated to the city or to the 23 school districts in St. Louis County.
Amy Stuart Wells, professor of sociology and education at Columbia University Teachers College in New York, knows St. Louis well. She is the author of two books discussing the area’s school desegregation program, and is also a St. Louis native who graduated from Parkway West High School.
“Anytime you have school districts divided by race and class, you will have concentrations of poverty in some districts that will have layers and layers of problems that cannot be undone simply by having a good superintendent, a well-meaning school board, or even some great teachers,” Wells says. “All these factors, all these layers of problems, are made more difficult to solve because the constituents in these districts lack the political power to get the changes that are needed.”
Those changes would include more support services, including more preschool opportunities, better healthcare, and counseling. Wells thinks structural changes to district boundaries would improve the situation, though she knows there is “fat chance” of that happening. She has studied the problems of Nassau County on Long Island, N.Y., where there are 56 school districts.
“If you suggest we should not have 56 school districts in Nassau County, that goes nowhere, because the districts are divided by race and class, and each has its own identity,” she says. “It’s the same story all over the country, whether it’s suburban New York or suburban St. Louis: You have separate and unequal school districts.”
The multiplicity of districts leads not only to deficient education, says Wells, but also to fiscal distress. “The system cannot hold,” she says. “What we see in Nassau County is mirrored in St. Louis County. The economy of this system is not sustainable. It’s frightening. The system is going to fall apart; you’re going to have a lot of bankrupt school districts.” The only real way to combat the systemic problems in many districts, she argues, is to form larger districts more diverse in race and class.
Along those lines, one case currently in the courts could have a huge impact on the future of St. Louis’ schools: Turner v. School District of Clayton. The Missouri Supreme Court ruled last summer that under the provisions of Section 167.131 of the Missouri Revised Statutes, students who live within the city’s unaccredited school district are entitled to attend an accredited school in a neighboring county. The case was remanded to a lower court for clarification, and the Missouri legislature is contemplating whether to change the relevant statute to set up a “gatekeeper” mechanism regulating interdistrict transfers.
The outcome of the case could affect not only the roughly 27,000 students attending city public schools, but also the students who live in the city and attend charter, parochial, and private schools, or participate in existing voluntary interdistrict programs by attending suburban schools. In all, an estimated 56 percent of school-age children—approximately 34,000—living in the city attend public or charter schools. If a significant number of the students in the city or Riverview Gardens decide to attend an accredited district nearby, according to the text of the current state statute, the district of origin would be responsible for paying for the students’ tuition
and transportation.
State education commissioner Nicastro, along with Adams, is watching this case closely. “There is an impact on the sending district and the receiving district,” Nicastro says. “We don’t know where it’s headed. There need to be some parameters.”
Elkin Kistner, who represented the plaintiffs in the Turner case, believes an “array of government entities, among them school districts” worry the financial ramifications of the ruling will lead to legislative means of reversing its effect. Kistner believes the ruling clearly states that when a district loses its accreditation, then the district’s money—at least in part—“should go to the districts that are actually accredited and teaching these children, who have a right to attend an accredited district.”
Adams says he is “really, really concerned” about what the Turner case could mean for St. Louis Public Schools’ future. The Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling and the subsequent wrangling in the legislature at least should serve as a reminder that public education fundamentally is a state responsibility, even though it’s largely funded and administered by local districts.
In a way, too, the case is a reminder of a perception problem Adams is trying to solve: the idea that to get a good public education, kids in St. Louis have to move out of the city or participate in the voluntary interdistrict transfer program. But by remaining superintendent and trying new and various approaches, including district-run charter schools, Adams is showing that stability and gradual progress are possible.
There is just no quick fix.
