Meria Carstarphen, the new superintendent of Atlanta Public Schools, has so enchanted her school board that you expect the nine members to waltz into meetings singing the "West Side Story" ballad, "I've just met a girl named Meria, And suddenly that name/Will never be the same."
You could almost hear the music swelling when, upon Carstarphen’s hiring, APS school board chairman Courtney English announced, “This moment represents a time for the city to believe again. We’ve been through a dark time, and that time is over.”
When Atlanta’s 48,000 students show up in 24 hours for the first day of school, they will not be singing. The superintendent is a remote character to students. Most Atlanta children probably don’t know Carstarphen’s name.
Far more important to the story line of those students will be the person standing in front of the classroom, their teacher. While it matters what Carstarphen does, it matters more what she enables her principals and teachers to do.
Her job is more than recruiting top principals and teachers; she has to ensure they’re trained to succeed in urban classrooms by providing them with the ongoing support necessary to deal with the challenges.
Carstarphen’s choice for her deputy, David Jernigan, can help. Jernigan comes to APS from KIPP Metro Atlanta where he oversaw eight KIPP schools. Considered one of the nation’s most successful urban charter school networks, KIPP relies on strong school leaders who are carefully selected, trained and then freed to direct, manage and staff their campuses.
Atlanta already made the mistake of casting a school chief as a savior. When Beverly Hall arrived in Atlanta in 1999, she found hopeful parents, community, a collaborative school board and a supportive business community — all the basic elements that research says must be in place for a superintendent to be successful. Instead, the pressure in APS to defy the odds pushed principals and teachers to cheat on state exams to meet escalating performance targets, leading to criminal indictments last year against 35 educators, including Hall. A dozen face trial on Aug. 11.
It’s essential the school board, parents and the business community recognize that improvements will not come easily or quickly, no matter how capable the charismatic Carstarphen may be. As Stanford education emeritus professor Larry Cuban has said, “Turning around a failing company or a school district is no work for sprinters, it is marathoners who refashion the company and district into successes.”
Atlanta educates a lot of poor children. Although 76 percent of APS students are on free and reduced lunch, the district doesn’t have an impressive track record with low-income students.
In the latest performance grades from the state, 13 of Atlanta’s 58 elementary schools ranked among the bottom 5 percent in Georgia, earning grades ranging from 37 and 53.1 out of 100. Clayton County enrolls the same number of students as Atlanta and has even greater poverty. Yet, only two of Clayton’s 39 elementary schools were in the bottom 5 percent.
Carstarphen has to get her most effective teachers into her least successful schools. She has to help parents understand the value of school, an effort she’s already making with her “Day One. Be There” campaign. And she has to untangle the central office thicket that provides camouflage for needless bureaucracy. She has to either find or develop more principals in the mold of Stephanie Johnson at Maynard Jackson High School and Betsy Bockman at Inman Middle.
If Carstarphen can do all that, the Atlanta school board won’t be alone in singing her praises.
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