Lessons from the Cities:
Urban schools find ways to build on the strengths of city kids
By SUZIE BOSS
Soon after he was elected mayor of Chicago in 1989, Richard M. Daley started hearing a disturbing rumor: "Nobody cares about our schools." He didn’t have to look far to find supporting evidence.
The Chicago district had been rocked by strikes, budget crises, fiscal mismanagement. School bond issues had failed. Although a major school reform effort was already underway, the high school dropout rate was approaching 50 percent.
"People had lost faith. If we didn’t change the schools, nobody would be here," the mayor told a conference of the Education Writers of America (EWA) in Chicago earlier this year. "There would be no one left to teach. The young families were moving out. If this was going to be a city for all, we had to do something." In 1995, the state legislature agreed to give Daley control of the 427,000-student district. His hand-picked reformers introduced changes intended to boost achievement, improve accountability, encourage teachers to try new ideas to help students learn, and increase parent involvement at the local school level.
Chicago children have responded positively. Standardized test scores have been rising steadily. The pool of students performing at the bottom continues to shrink. More families are moving back to the city.
The ambitious approach to school reform has earned widespread attention as the "Chicago Model."
Similar stories are starting to play out in other big cities. In Boston, Newark, Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, and elsewhere, failing urban school districts have been wrested from local boards by state legislatures, courts, and mayors. Although specifics vary from one city to the next, the goals everywhere are similar: Help children achieve higher academic standards. Restore public confidence in schools. Prevent flight to the suburbs. As Boston Mayor Thomas Benino told the EWA gathering, "We’re finally dealing with an issue that people have walked away from for years." In April, when Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer took over his city’s troubled schools, he told Time, "The No. 1 issue facing cities isn’t crime or jobs anymore, it’s public education."
Suddenly, it seems, everybody cares about city schools and city kids. "The heat is on" in urban districts, acknowledges Paul T. Hill of the University of Washington and author of Fixing Urban Schools, published in 1998. The recent upheavals in urban school districts, he writes, "are intended to break political gridlock, lessen the iron grip of bureaucratic routine, and make room for people who might have new ideas."
A national invitational conference on urban education last year underscored the importance of these recent efforts to improve city schools. Although participants engaged in spirited debates about the best solutions, "There was a consensual sense of urgency for advancing the current momentum to achieve reform success," report Margaret C. Wang and Herbert J. Walbert in their conference summary, Education in Cities: What Works and What Doesn’t.
From the vantage point of the Northwest, it’s tempting to view these takeovers and makeovers as dramas that play out only in bigger cities with bigger problems. The Northwest, after all, regularly earns praise for its livable, progressive cities. Many urban districts in the region are making steady progress on academic measurements, and some individual schools regularly produce exceptional results. The challenges facing a mega-district like New York, with a million students, or Detroit, where last year there were 1,000 vacancies on the teaching staff, seem a world removed from the classrooms of Anchorage, Boise, or Portland.
Even though the Northwest’s largest urban districts operate on a smaller scale, they are no strangers to challenges. Portland has struggled to maintain quality in the face of a long-term funding crisis. Anchorage must attract teachers able to work with diverse students who speak an estimated 85 languages. Seattle battles persistent achievement gaps between White and minority, rich and poor students. "Any city over 100,000 needs to pay attention to its schools," cautions Chicago’s Mayor Daley. Today’s city kids, for better or worse, will shape the future of America’s cities.
Ideas about urban education are often transplanted from one city to another when leadership changes. Before Rudy Crew took over as chancellor of New York schools in 1995, for example, he was superintendent in Tacoma, Washington, where he put the 31,939-student district on the path to reform.
Two years ago, Arlene Ackerman left Seattle to take on the challenge of turning around schools in Washington, D.C. Friends and colleagues from her 30-year career in education tried to warn her away from the task. In Seattle, after all, she was second-in-command to then-superintendent John Stanford. The retired army general was making progress on his promise to create a system of "world-class schools" on Puget Sound. In the D.C. district, Ackerman found all the ills of urban schools, only greatly exaggerated: physically unsafe facilities, schools that had failed to open on time for three years running, students performing well below grade level, a shortage of qualified teachers, and a burdensome central office bureaucracy.
But as Ackerman has settled into her new job, she has remembered John Stanford’s sage advice. Although the popular Seattle superintendent died last year, the lessons that he taught about how to educate city kids continue to ring true—from the Northwest all the way to the nation’s capital. "Start with a vision that anyone can embrace. Articulate a plan for change. And you must not make excuses." City kids can’t afford to wait.
"...we have not given up on our big-city schools and you shouldn’t either.
Optimism fuels action, and action fuels progress. The more Americans believe this, the more victories we will have in our urban classrooms."
—Michael Casserly
Executive Director, Council of the Great City Schools, in USA Today
