When the Opportunity School District comes knocking, Atlanta Public Schools hopes to be able to say, “Thanks, but we’re good.”
Atlanta faces the greatest risk of losing schools to the governor’s proposed state takeover district, which voters have to approve next year as it requires a constitutional change. The genial wording of the amendment just about assures passage.
Schools become candidates for absorption in Gov. Nathan Deal’s Opportunity School District if they have three years of chronic under-performance as determined by the state’s intricate performance Index. Based on Deal’s models, the New Orleans Recovery School District and the Tennessee Achievement School District, it also helps if the schools are concentrated in an urban setting for coordination and maximization of resources, oversight and staffing.
Performance and geography put Atlanta firmly in the sights of the OSD. At a public meeting Tuesday, newly hired APS Chief Schools Officer Donyall Dickey warned parents, “Forty-four out of our 73 schools or 60 percent of our schools are either in one of two categories: OSD eligible if the button were to be pushed today or at high risk for OSD eligibility.”
Atlanta hopes to fend off state takeover by jump-starting the improvement of those schools, but Superintendent Meria Carstarphen didn’t pretend a turnaround of that magnitude would be easy or that she’s made great strides after one year leading APS.
“I only got one year to fix what is arguably a 30-year problem,” she told parents. Her inaugural year was spent stamping out fires, she said, including a chaotic payroll system. She also focused on identifying and helping students damaged by the infamous APS test cheating scandal.
“At the end of the day, I can you this — we went through and found every single child, all 4,000 of them still in APS who need remediation and support from this school system. No one knew them by name. No one could tell me where they were. No one could tell me what happened to them. What resources did they get? Did it even make a difference?”
Aided by grants for a half-million dollar review of the district by the Boston Consulting Group that included surveys, focus groups and interviews, Carstarsphen said she is now honing in on strategies. She did not minimize the hurdles.
“I don’t know why as a community we don’t understand that Atlanta Public Schools is effectively broken. We have the lion’s share of every problem you can possibly imagine in urban public schools. But I am here. This is my community,” she said. “They are my babies and my children and I expect of myself to do a good job with or without the support of anyone else. I believe in Atlanta. I believe in Atlanta Public Schools. I have met this staff. I know our children are beautiful and can deliver if we hold them to the right expectations.”
Among the problems identified by the consultants: uneven instructional quality across APS, a weak leadership pipeline and the unmet social needs of at-risk students. “We don’t have the strategy completely finished yet, but what we are hearing from people and what we learned from the research is pretty clear: that APS lacks, and I mean lacks consistent high-quality instruction even in our lowest performing schools, and that there’s a need to close these serious achievement gaps and provide additional instructional support,” she said.
Carstarphen said APS needs principals with track records of improving or turning around low performing schools. While the district has attracted some great principals, she worries about burning them out. “Once we get them here, we’ve got to care and feed them so they can stay strong and not get burned out in these tough situations.”
While there are benefits to making the school day or school year longer, Carstarphen cautioned, “Unless you are improving the quality of what is happening, just keeping them in school longer and giving them bad instruction are not necessarily going to move things faster.”
And even quality instruction falters if students do not come to school with the ability to be engaged. After ticking off all the challenges facing kids, from poverty to mental health to poor nutrition, Carstarshen said, “What our families need Atlanta Public Schools to do is to be a significant high-quality service provider, and we can hardly teach them to read, much less do all these other things.”
That’s why it will be essential for city services and the community to step up, she said.
“I didn’t break it,” she told parents. “Some of you all didn’t break it, and probably most of you all didn’t break it, but it is our problem to fix.”
Despite all the challenges the children bring to the classroom, Carstarphen cited an even bigger challenge for APS. “Culture is the biggest challenge for Atlanta Public Schools. Every great strategy we have gets eaten for breakfast because of the culture sometimes.”
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