Illustration by Mike Ellis
1. Collect the right kind of data.
Education is plagued by “confused metrics,” says William F. Tate, dean of Washington University’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. The state collects data that purports to show the quality of education and level of student learning, but the numbers don’t really do that effectively. “It is almost quackery,” he says. MAP scores, for instance, compare groups of students over time, meaning you can only tell whether one year’s sophomores scored higher than the previous year’s. Instead, Tate argues, we need a system that rigorously tracks the growth of each student over time.
Lana Stein, a former political science professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, notes that lower-income school districts have high rates of mobility, meaning they’re judged on the results of students who’ve been in district classrooms for just a short time.
Some states, like Ohio, are measuring “value-added education,” which seeks to quantify teacher impact while accounting for such variables as students’ ability, family environment, and past schooling.
2. Think neighborhood improvement.
The stability of a student’s environment outside of school is a key variable in academic success. “We can dump a lot of money in schools, but if a neighborhood is dangerous or unstable,” a school will not improve, says Jason Reece of Ohio State University’s Kirwan Institute. He is part of a group of academics that recently produced “Child Opportunity Maps.” (See below for details.)
Reece recommends that schools in distressed communities look for partners to offer a comprehensive package of “wraparound services”—job centers, food banks, and health clinics.
3.Consolidate school districts.
St. Louis County has a “crazy quilt” of school districts, says Stein. The Normandy Schools Collaborative, for example, serves 23 municipalities in addition to its namesake city. District sizes range from 1,000 students in the Valley Park School District to 21,000 in the Rockwood School District.
“Effective school districts are municipalities that are expanding their borders and their tax base,” Tate says. He points to the success of Parkway and Rockwood school districts, noting that political leaders should consider more elastic borders.
In North County, where the state has intervened in unaccredited school districts, educators are discussing the possibility of a new form of governance. “It’s feasible that the state could create a consolidated school district with a portfolio of magnet schools and other choices,” Tate says. Although the addition of specialized magnet schools is one possibility, it could mean that some communities would lose high schools, and historically many communities have been resistant to redrawing boundary lines. Trying to reform bureaucracies is like “poking a hole in water,” Stein says.
4.Encourage collaboration between schools.
Tension between traditional public schools and charter schools is another factor. One of the biggest headaches for charters is finding suitable buildings. Closed-down parochial schools are sometimes available, but shuttered public schools are usually off-limits because public school systems are reluctant to sell assets to the competition.
Joe Neri, CEO of IFF, a development company that helps new charter schools find homes, points to laws that govern charter schools in Chicago. Since the early ’90s, Chicago Public Schools has been authorized to create its own charter schools. Failing schools could be closed with the understanding that any contract for an outside school operator would come with control of the building, if desired.
The standoff between charters and public schools in St. Louis is counter-productive, Neri argues. Instead, he suggests, the region needs to embrace a mindset that says, “They are our kids, and we want them to be successful”—no matter where they go to school.
5. Provide affordable housing in strong school districts.
As many real-estate ads indicate, there’s a strong correlation between a neighborhood’s residential property values and a school district’s success. Communities such as Baltimore have seen some success in education simply by ensuring that affordable rental housing is available in the best school districts, notes Reese. This approach can only help a limited number of low-income families, he adds, but it’s a powerful remedy to inequality.
6. Discuss issues of inequality.
Alex Cuenca, a former middle-school teacher who now educates social-studies teachers at Saint Louis University, says that schools should discuss inequality and take a stand on the issue. In light of recent events in Ferguson, some schools encouraged discussions of St. Louis’ fraught history regarding race and class, whereas others wanted “to tamp it down and move on,” Cuenca says.
Teachers need to have the autonomy to go beyond textbooks, he suggests: “Students need to make sense of our city and the worlds we have constructed.” Unless we teach today’s students to critically think about inequality, he suggests, the next generation will inherit the same problems.
MAPPING OPPORTUNITY
In November, the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University released a series of interactive maps showing the “geography of opportunity for children” in 100 U.S. cities. Layers on the maps reveal how health, education, and crime vary by neighborhood. The results show vast inequalities across St. Louis.
Here, as elsewhere in the United States, race and opportunity are closely linked. The poverty rate for African-American families is more than double that of white families. “That’s just not fundamentally fair,” says lead researcher Jason Reece. Compounding the problem is the fact that poverty typically means access to lower-quality schools and healthcare, making escape from poverty an uphill struggle.
One other key finding: The fortunes of older suburbs are increasingly divergent in
St. Louis and the rest of the nation, says Reece. Although many suburbs continue to prosper, suburbia is now home to pockets of concentrated poverty that were previously seen only in the urban core.
To view the maps, visit diversitydatakids.org, click on “Child Opportunity Maps,” and select St. Louis.
