This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: JEFFERSON CITY -- With more than 2,500 students in unaccredited school districts in St. Louis County transferring elsewhere this fall, and the possibility of more transferring out of Kansas City schools, Missouri education officials have hired an outside consultant to help failing districts improve and prevent others from losing accreditation.
With $385,000 donated by two foundations in Kansas City, a group known as CEE-Trust – the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust -- will help the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education develop an action plan, ideally by January, to work with districts statewide.
At that point, the plan would be open for public discussion before the state could put it into action. Education commissioner Chris Nicastro emphasized to the state school board Tuesday that action is needed sooner rather than later.
She noted that if a court rules in a Kansas City case the same way it did in the St. Louis case that prompted transfers this school year, the number of students eligible to leave their home districts could grow to 25,000 across the state.
“I’m not sure that any of us think that is a sustainable model for operating schooling in Missouri,” Nicastro said. “We have to be aggressive in developing this plan for how we as a state are going to address the problem of education for children in districts that are not performing.”
Later this week, the state will release the first evaluation under new school guidelines. Though the department of education does not plan to recommend a change in accreditation status for any district based on the first year of the new standards, the results could provide clues about any possible improvements by unaccredited districts or problems with districts that have retained their accreditation.
Peter Herschend of Branson, president of the board, said that though the outside consultant will be funded by foundations in Kansas City, and the problem so far exists only in the state’s two big metro areas, the solution needs to take a broader view.
“It is imperative that we as a board think statewide and put together a program that positively changes what is happening in districts that are unaccredited and are struggling,” Herschend said. “We have to do a better job than we have been able to do.
“It isn’t a matter of simply saying if we just get some better principals in our buildings or if we can just get some better teachers in our buildings. We have good principals and good teachers in districts that are struggling now. They have not all failed, and yet the districts are failing.”
Nicastro put it this way:
“This is not about St. Louis. This is not about Kansas City. It’s about all of our kids, and all of our kids belong to all of us.
“I see this as an opportunity for us to really come together. This is not a geographic issue. This is not a political issue. It’s a moral issue about what are we going to do for our children.”
Chronic underperformance
In July, the state sought bids from outside consultants to help deal with what it called “chronic underperformance in struggling school districts.” The bid from CEE-Trust – a nationwide group whose members include St. Louis and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, which is funding the effort along with the Hall Family Foundation – said its experience in Indiana makes it uniquely positioned to help Missouri schools.
There, the group said in its proposal, it developed an approach in 2010 to help the schools in Indianapolis, which it said were “suffering from chronic underperformance despite decades of attempted reform.”
CEE-Trust said its resulting report, Opportunity Schools, “is the only state-commissioned report we know of that analyzes the causes of district underperformance and recommends a comprehensive, system-transforming plan for shifting performance dramatically citywide.”
Hiring an outside consultant was one of three items on the state board’s agenda dealing with the transfer situation that moved from theoretical to real in June, when the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law allowing students living in in unaccredited districts to transfer to a nearby accredited district.
Since then, nearly 25 percent of the enrollment in Normandy and Riverview Gardens, the only unaccredited districts in the state besides Kansas City, has signed up to switch. Nicastro told the board that while districts were able to adapt pretty well to the compressed timeline and work through the transfers relatively smoothly, the movement among districts is a short-term solution at best.
She reported on state guidelines that the department issued as the transfer process got started and has revised regularly in recent weeks. The guidelines have no force of law but were designed to help guide districts through the process as the start of the school year approached.
She expressed special praise for Cooperating School Districts, for acting as a clearinghouse for transfers, and for the Children’s Education Allliance of Missouri, for providing one-on-one help for families seeking to have their children transfer.
“I think that many parents were well served by their particular attention and their advocacy,” Nicastro said of CEAM. “That, too, has been a key part of how this whole thing has worked out.”
Mike Jones of St. Louis, vice president of the board, said no one should “underestimate the extra special nature of this crisis and the fact that we avoided a train wreck in getting school open and getting everybody transferred.”
Nicastro said that while many lessons have been learned over the past two months, the biggest one may be that though districts can move quickly to cobble together a transfer mechanism, such an approach won’t work in the long term.
“What this cries out for is a bigger solution,” she said, noting that both Riverview Gardens and Normandy may go bankrupt from having to pay tuition for the students who transfer. That eventuality endangers the education for the students who remain in their home districts, Nicastro said.
“What do you do if the districts can no longer pay the tuition?” she asked. “That is a question we will have to confront, the districts will have to confront and potentially the legislature will have to confront.”
She said a new law that takes effect next week gives the department of education more flexibility and more tools to deal with struggling districts, but not all of its tools have proved to be effective in the past.
“We’ve had experience with special administrative boards,” she said, noting the governance model in place in Riverview Gardens and St. Louis. “That experience has been somewhat mixed. We’ve had all of these different ways of approaching the problems of failing districts, and none of those has seemed particularly satisfactory.”
More cooperation needed
After the board was dissatisfied Monday with the wording of a resolution about how the department could address the issue – it felt too much emphasis was put on the state getting directly involved in operations of failing districts – a revised version won approval Tuesday.
It calls for the state to increase its efforts to improve instruction in those districts and “closely monitor all expenditures, contracts, personnel obligations, legal actions and other matters” related to their operation.
Pointedly, it also directs districts “to make available access to any and all information necessary for monitoring, planning and reporting to the state board.”
That issue is one that Nicastro has alluded to before. In a letter to lawmakers earlier this month, she said that in the past, both Normandy and Riverview Gardens have resisted efforts from the state to gain access to information.
“In both districts,” she wrote, “the ability and/or the willingness of the staff to implement our suggestions and apply training has been limited. Some of our suggestions have been completely ignored. Our efforts to provide professional guidance and support will continue. We hope that new administrations in both districts will be more receptive to assistance.”
Asked about that problem on Tuesday, she singled out Normandy as having dragged its feet in the past. She outlined the state’s approach this way:
“We’re trying to help you, but in order to help you, we have to have good information.”
Nicastro added that the relationship with Normandy has improved recently.
On the transfer law itself, many legislators have expressed the desire to change it when the General Assembly reconvenes in January, though there is no consensus on what alterations should be made.
Asked after Tuesday’s meeting whether her department will recommend specific changes, Nicastro said:
“We’re trying to focus on the bigger picture and not necessarily fixing that law or any other law.”
Herschend added: “The law is a result, not a cause. What we’re after is the causes for the failure in unaccredited districts, then what we can do to eliminate or minimize the causes of that failure.”