Omaha paper reviews Hamilton County Benwood model
5/17/2010
| Omaha World-Herald
Read the article
Published Monday May 17, 2010
Education fix has detractors
By Joe Dejka
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER
Clara Sale-Davis speaks fondly of the former school superintendent in Tennessee who took aim at bad principals and teachers and ran them out the door.
“What it did,” said Sale-Davis, who works for a Chattanooga foundation that aided in the effort, “is it got the rats off the sinking ship.”
President Barack Obama hails the Chattanooga school turnaround, launched in 2001, as a model for the nation. But will it work in Nebraska and Iowa schools?
Chattanooga officials swear by the changes that were instituted. But a Chicago professor said similar changes in her city have yielded “a mix” of results, and an education professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln called labeling schools and booting principals “wrongheaded.”
What's clear is that Chattanooga went beyond removing principals and teachers. Foundations pumped millions of private dollars into the failing schools. Educators revamped the curriculum with an emphasis on basic reading and math skills. Teachers mined test data to drive instruction. Successful teachers got bonuses.
Chattanooga made use of tools that Obama would like to see adopted in all states, such as the system of measuring a student's academic growth over time rather than on static test scores, as Nebraska and most states do.
Obama's initiative likewise envisions a principal's removal as a starting point for comprehensive change mirroring the Chattanooga experience.
Fifty-two Nebraska schools got a taste of Obama's strong medicine for schools earlier this month when the Nebraska Department of Education labeled them as “persistently lowest-achieving schools” based on test scores and graduation rates. State education officials in Iowa singled out 130 schools.
The two states together are eligible to receive up to $35 million in federal stimulus grants if the states take one of four actions set forth by the Obama administration, ranging from removing principals to shuttering schools.
On the list were six high schools in the Omaha metropolitan area: Omaha North, Omaha Benson, Omaha South, Omaha Central, Bellevue East and Thomas Jefferson in Council Bluffs.
What touched off the changes in Chattanooga was a 2000 newspaper story listing Tennessee's 20 lowest-performing schools, said Dan Challener, president of the Public Education Foundation in Chattanooga. Nine of the 20 were part of Hamilton County Schools in Chattanooga.
Community leaders, embarrassed, responded by creating a partnership of the schools, the Public Education Foundation and the Benwood Foundation.
Jesse Register, then superintendent of the Hamilton County Schools, set about to change the attitude in the schools, said Sale-Davis, a former Texas principal who now is director of the Chattanooga partnership, called the Benwood Initiative.
“He knew that bad teachers had been allowed to collect in urban schools,” she said, “and he also knew that bad teachers could survive there because they created a safe culture for themselves.”
At the time, Challener said, there were no national models to follow. No Child Left Behind, which would prescribe its own changes, would not become law until 2002.
The superintendent “reconstituted” schools, meaning teachers had to reapply for their jobs. As many as 20 percent to 30 percent did not come back.
“In many cases, that was their choice,” Challener said. “In some cases, they weren't invited back.”
Some principals chose to leave, and the superintendent moved some who didn't yield results, Challener said.
The district focused instruction on reading and math. Successful teachers got bonuses.
The local Urban League put together a strong after-school program, and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga created a new master's degree program available to teachers at no cost.
The Public Education Foundation and the Benwood Foundation contributed a total of $7.5 million, although Challener downplays the money.
“People often say it's a matter of money,” he said. “It's really about rethinking what your goals are and having the fortitude and the endurance to see it happen.”
Student test scores went up, he said. The percentage of third-graders passing the state's reading and language arts exam increased from 53 percent in 2003 to 78 percent in 2008.
Susan Swanson, who facilitates the Benwood Initiative for the Hamilton County Schools, said the schools are still “fragile.”
Some have slipped occasionally in academic performance, but they are “vastly improved” over where they started, Swanson said.
“Are they at the same levels as some of our suburban schools? Absolutely not,” she said.
The importance of replacing teachers gets overplayed, Swanson said, but bringing in a high-performing principal is “absolutely essential.”
The Chicago Public Schools pursued similar and even more drastic action when Arne Duncan -- now the U.S. secretary of education -- was serving as the district's chief executive officer under Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.
Barbara Radner, director of the Center for Urban Education at DePaul University in Chicago, said results of that overhaul have been mixed.
“What Chicago is probably best known for is removing everybody -- everybody out,” Radner said. “That has so far not turned out to be a miracle.”
Six years ago Daley launched the Renaissance 2010 initiative, aimed at closing poorly performing schools and creating 100 high-performing schools that operate under charters or performance contracts.
That program, Radner said, has “plateaued, if not hit a pothole.”
One study of Renaissance 2010 found little difference between achievement between the old and new schools, though researchers expressed optimism that, over time, achievement would improve.
Radner said she thinks the intent of the Obama administration's overhaul is to make sure states have authority to intervene in struggling schools.
In Nebraska, a legislative bill that would have beefed up the state's power to intervene in low-performing schools was withdrawn before coming to a vote. The bill, offered by Education Committee Chairman Greg Adams, would have required school districts to grant access to state intervention teams. Under the bill, the teams would develop progress plans, and districts that failed them would risk losing accreditation.
Marilyn Moore, an associate superintendent of the Lincoln Public Schools, said her district will have a hard time determining the impact of removing the principal from Elliott Elementary School. Poor math scores put the school on Nebraska's list of “persistently lowest-performing schools.”
The principal was transferred to another school to make Elliott eligible for federal stimulus grants.
Moore asked: “If, three years from now, Elliott's student achievement is sterling, is it because we changed principals or is it because that new principal had six million dollars to work with over a three-year period?”
Larry L. Dlugosh, chairman of the educational administration department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said labeling schools and removing staff is “senseless and painful” and a “wrongheaded policy.”
“It's tragic that a school, or especially a school principal, is singled out as a reason for persistently low performance, and that's not the reason at all,” Dlugosh said.
“The reason is more likely poverty, lack of resources.”
Contact the writer: 444-1077, joe.dejka@owh.com