Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2005 > July > 18 > Entry
School restarts improve results
By Scott Elliott
Dayton Daily News
The school was empty this time last year. Everything and everybody was tossed out.
The principal was gone. Veteran teachers cleared out years, even decades worth of materials. Some needed trucks to haul it all away. Award-winning teachers and stragglers alike hugged and cried and said goodbye.
All of them were out of a job — even the secretary and the janitor.
Welcome to the harsh reality of “restructuring,� the toughest sanction for poor performing schools built into the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind law.
But that scene from Orville Wright Elementary School last summer has turned out to be surprisingly rare. In fact, the two schools restructured in Dayton last summer, and two more on the slate this year, are among a very few to undergo this type of radical change anywhere in the country.
The use of this full-blown approach is sometimes termed “reconstitution.� And the district says the early evidence shows its approach is working.
“What Dayton is doing is much more advanced than most schools being reconstituted,� said Jack Jennings, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Education Policy.
San Francisco was the first city to employ the tactic in the early 1980s. The logic was simple — to define a point at which a failing school would be tolerated no longer. When a school crossed that line, it would get a new principal, mostly new staff members and usually new curriculum.
For the handful of cities that tried it through the 1990s, results were mixed. Chicago started a backlash in the late 1990s when it abandoned reconstitution, saying schools that went through it performed no better.
But No Child Left Behind revived the concept.
The law launched an era of school accountability based on test scores. Schools were required to show “adequate yearly progress� through test score gains. Those that fell short were placed on a state “school improvement list� and given a maximum of five years to turn it around.
The coaxing begins with a carrot and ends with a club.
Schools on the list for one or two years are given money for extra services, such as student tutoring or teacher training. But after three years, “corrective action� is required. In the fourth year, schools must make a plan for restructuring and in year five, they must execute the plan.
The law gives three options for restructuring — the school may be turned into a charter school, turned over to a private management company or reconstituted.
Last year, Dayton chose the third option for Orville Wright and Fairview elementary schools. Laying out the law’s requirements to its teachers’ union, the two forged an agreement that bypassed seniority rules for job transfers and allowed teachers to be moved to other district schools. And the four-person committees that pick the reconstituted schools’ new staffs must include two union members.
“We’re creating the model,� deputy superintendent Debra Brathwaite said. “Last year was the learning curve, but we basically know what to do now.�
Brathwaite said the results are encouraging.
At Fairview, students made big gains on the state third-grade reading achievement test in six months — 48 percent passed in March after 11 percent had passed in October. The gains were solid, if less dramatic, at Orville Wright, which saw 49 percent pass in March compared with 39 percent in October.
Those scores are still low, 75 percent passed third-grade reading statewide on the March test, but Brathwaite said the gains are evidence of the schools have taken an important first step.
“We broke new ground where other school districts hadn’t done it,� she said. “We needed to do it. These schools have been low performing for a long period.�
This year, the same process is under way for Belle Haven and Allen elementary schools. But where Dayton embraced reconstitution, schools in other states found ways to ease its bite.
Nationally, very few schools were even eligible for reconstitution last year. No schools reached year five on the improvement list in 36 states because they have newer testing programs or softer expectations for test gain than Ohio.
In the remaining states, 404 schools should have faced the most severe sanctions. Ohio accounted for 11 of those. Many school districts chose the other options — bringing in a private management company or turning those schools into charter schools.
But even those that tried reconstitution tended toward a milder approach. Michigan rules for adequate yearly progress are so tough that 62 of its schools, or 15 percent of the nation’s eligible schools, faced restructuring.
But for those that picked reconstitution, Jennings’ Center for Education Policy found few that replaced as many staff members as Dayton has. The center, which is an independent group that studies public school issues, found Michigan schools more commonly just replaced the principal or took other smaller steps.
“In most states, they’re approaching this cautiously without bringing broad scale changes,� Jennings said. “What Dayton is doing is worth trying. For years we’ve allowed schools to fail and fail without doing very much.�
Last year, Orville Wright rehired about half its teachers and far fewer returned to Fairview, Brathwaite said.
Superintendent Percy Mack said at the time the district chose reconstitution rather than making the schools into charters or bringing in a management company because this allowed administrators to retain more direct control.
It also permitted administrators to make moves they had largely written off as unworkable because of labor contract rules.
Reconstitution gave the district power to build a teaching staff that bought into the reforms it had chosen for the school. Its union contract normally allows teachers with the most seniority wishing to transfer schools to pick the open jobs of their choice within the district, regardless of the wishes of the principals.
Teachers union President Willie Terrell said he is keeping close watch on the process to be sure principals pick staff members based on qualifications, not on the buddy system.
“Overall, I’ve not had that many complaints,� he said. “I think it worked OK so far. But it needs to be monitored.�
Brathwaite said the new handpicked staffs at both schools worked more collaboratively.
Orville Wright, with more veteran teachers, put several in leadership roles. Fairview had many teachers who were new to the profession or had never taught in a city school district. They were given extra training in using test results to guide their teaching and taught a business planning model. Both schools also made curriculum changes.
When students arrived last fall, they crossed through the same brick doorways but found a very different atmosphere inside. The schools that had been emptied over the summer had been refilled and, school officials hope, renewed.
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