Five days after Erroll Davis took over as superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools in July 2011 state investigators released a report detailing systematic cheating in the district and a culture so compromised Davis didn’t know who to trust.
Two days later he vowed to fix that culture and transform the district. This week, after 15 months on the job — and with his two-year contract extension scheduled to be voted on by the school board in December — Davis said: “My sense is we still have a lot of work to do.”
The superintendent, a former chancellor of the University System of Georgia who came out of retirement to take the job, has weathered criticism over his redistricting of the school system; his rejiggering of bus routes; and, most recently, his replacement of the principal and five administrators at North Atlanta High.
His continued rehabilitation of APS, which has 100 schools and 55,000 students, will be guided by a five-year strategic plan that Davis, his staff and the board spent a year developing.
A primary initiative is raising the 52 percent graduation rate that is the lowest among 12 comparative urban school districts in the nation. The highest graduation rate in that group is 70 percent, Davis said. “Our first step is to get to the middle of that group within five years, to about 63 percent to 65 percent. Then we’ll move up from there.”
A key to that will be recruiting and retaining better teachers and administrators, he said.
The school system continues to purge the nearly 180 educators implicated in the cheating scandal. For months APS attorneys — and, at times, Davis himself as a witness — have pursued the termination of the employees in tribunals. The blanket argument is the district has “lost confidence” in the educators.
About 40 were principals who had to be replaced on short notice. Some replacements have since quit; others’ contracts were not renewed. The turnover continues, but now APS is in a better position to recruit top talent, Davis said.
“We are trying to hire 29 principals right now,” he said. “That’s about five years’ worth of principals.”
Two recent principal hires brought about 200 applicants. That’s a good sign, Davis said.
“I think we have had a turnaround in terms of the number of people who are willing and interested in working for Atlanta Public Schools,” he said. “They want to come and take part in the changes that are taking place.”
The redistricting this year as part of the strategic plan aligned the district into nine clusters drawn up to increase the likelihood that students and their parents will move together in groups from pre-K through elementary, middle and high school.
When students move through the system together, so do their parents, resulting in strong PTAs. “What we find is the data shows that if we have better parental engagement we will have better schools,” Davis said.
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