It Takes a City: Getting Serious About Urban School Reform

A Forum — May 14, 2001

Paul T. Hill, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and research professor at the University of Washington’s Daniel J. Evans School of Public Affairs presented an overview of a five-year study of education reform efforts in urban schools that led to two of his most recent books, It Takes a City: Getting Serious About Urban School Reform, Brookings Institution Press and an earlier book, Fixing Urban Schools (Hill, Brookings Institution Press, 1998) which looked at local and state leaders (Baltimore, Washington, Hartford, Cleveland, Boston and Chicago) taking on school-wide city systems. Fixing Urban Schools offered a practical guide to various education reform strategies such as: charter schools, voucher systems, imposing standards, decentralization, large-scale retraining of teachers, comprehensive school redesigns and school contracting. It concluded with suggestions about how to build hybrid proposals for reform and assess the potential value. It Takes a City defines the realities of reform in urban schools; outlines and analyzes three new strategies for reform; shows how public, non-profit, philanthropic, and for-profit resources can be combined to manage and sustain promising reform strategies; and analyzes the local politics of reform.

According to Hill, there is a great deal to worry about in urban education reform. In big cities where the majority of children enrolled in schools are comprised of low-income African-American, Hispanic, and non-Hispanic immigrant children:

• average test scores for students, by age 17, are no higher than average scores for white 13-year-olds;
• only half the students stay in school through graduation; and
• students are less than half as likely as children outside of big urban schools to enter four-year colleges.

Hill’s research was guided by the following two questions: "How can city leaders who are forced to take over school systems make a real difference? How, moreover, can educators and lay leaders in other cities turn troubled local education systems around before takeover becomes a necessity?" Hill’s study found that no reform effort alone provides everything schools need to improve. "Every reform effort has something to offer, but not all components needed are there to sustain comprehensive education reform," said Hill. He suggests that powerful reform efforts must include three components: 1) incentives for school performance, 2) investments in school capacity, and 3) arrangements for school freedom of choice.

In It Takes a City, Hill looked six cities that had reform efforts that contained more than one of the three components listed above: Boston, Memphis, New York City District #2, San Antonio, San Francisco, and Seattle. Reform initiatives included: instituting student performance standards, school control of dollars, school performance agreements, hiring of staff, use of whole school designs, reconstitution, extra spending and non-routine initiatives to raise teachers’ skills, use of outside vendors for professional development, effort to attract teachers from new sources, and new union agreements on work rules. Despite the scope of some of the initiatives, none of the proposed reform efforts was sufficient by itself to transform a whole school system, said Hill.

Most cities taking on education reform face major implementation problems—"some of them fatal." Examples of reform "inhibitors" include: the superintendent leaving, getting fired, or dying; teacher resistance; supportive union leader getting kicked out; or money earmarked for reform running out. Hill’s research found that reform efforts did create activity at the district level, but not much change was getting down to the classroom level. Hill finds it disturbing that many districts have not kept records of their achievement toward their reform goals. This is a critical function says Hill. "No one has a clue about this. Schools don’t track their progress of reform. No one expects it to work—it’s just something to keep people busy. There may be aggregate monitoring of student performance, but not much at the school level."

Because of the inherent difficulty in reforming existing systems, Hill recommends three strategies building on the principles of performance incentives, capacity investments and school freedom of choice:

The CEO-Strong Schools Strategy. Under this plan, the superintendent would operate as the head of a decentralized district. As the chief executive officer, the superintendent would ensure that teachers and principals have everything they need to implement the reform effort. The superintendent would have the authority to issue rules or require schools to hire staff or use the services of the school system’s central office if it would improve performance. This plan would require an annual performance agreement between the superintendent and the school. The CEO-superintendent could replace principals and teachers who fail to meet performance expectations. This scenario also gives the superintendent the power to move money and free up administrative staff and faculty.

The Diverse Providers Strategy. A local school board would aggressively use its state-delegated power to provide for publicly-managed schools and public schools run by independent providers. Each would have similar performance agreements and freedom of action. Schools would receive funding on a per pupil basis and have little restriction placed on spending discretion—except for contractual commitments. Small amounts would be held by the school board to support oversight of individual schools. Funds would be controlled by the schools. Parents could choose schools, and schools would admit students through a public lottery with no student exclusion. The school board would be obliged to shift contracts from low-performing school providers, encouraging better service.

The Community-Partnership Strategy. The Community Partnership can be seen as a further development of the Diverse Providers approach. This strategy would also include multiple public and private partners and would be a genuine community-wide system in that all the community’s resources, not simply its schools, would be available in an organized way to meet children’s educational needs and their general well-being. It would license many entities to provide K-12 instruction, including conventional public school systems, contractors of the kind described under the Diverse Providers Strategy, unconventional educational and cultural options, including museums, libraries, arts agencies, church supported systems willing to operate under First Amendment constraints and dispersed "cyber schools." Community Partnerships would go beyond Diverse Providers in three ways. A community education board would (1) encourage non-school educational resources; (2) preserve a portfolio of education alternatives for the disadvantaged, and (3) broker health and social service resources to meet children’s needs.

Hill concluded by stating a need to break down the hermetic seal between public schools and the community. "You can’t prepare young people to become educated and effective citizens through a bureaucratic system. High schools have to validate themselves to young people. High schools are ivory towers." Hill believes that current city school systems are inflexible political systems, hard for a superintendent to get control of and change. "Central offices are full of warlords who are funded by federal funds and supported by federal policy." Unfortunately, cities lack a set of strategies to deal with these problems. The Federal government could be called upon to use its bully pulpit to intervene in city politics in order to give reform efforts a fighting chance, concluded Hill.

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