Ginger Wheeler of Glen Ellyn, Illinois, is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to The Illinois School Board Journal.
In June 1998, Decatur School District 61 embarked on its school reform journey with help from the federal government.
The Department of Education granted $200 million to New American Schools (NAS), a business-led, non-partisan, non-profit organization based in Arlington, Virginia. NAS in turn granted up to $50,000 to each of Decatur’s schools for the first year of their reform model implementation. More money was to follow as the reform models continued, for at least the next three years.
Between March 2002 and December 2004, The Illinois School Board Journal followed the reform models being implemented in Decatur in a series of articles on school reform.
By 2004, NAS claimed more than 4,000 schools were being impacted by its reform model — presumably with money it was spreading around through grants like the ones made to District 61.
But today, NAS is gone. Like NAS, another reform giant, Quality Educational Systems Inc. (QES), is gone. But the push for school reform is still strong.
“The designs were intended to answer the question, ‘What does the 21st-century school need to look like?’” said Sally Kilgore, a sociologist and CEO of Modern Red SchoolHouse, reflecting on the reforms of 2002. “The federal government has been working to deal with long-term issues: How can we help struggling schools? How can we help economically disadvantaged kids?”
Kilgore, who has worked in education for more than 30 years, recently published a new book about education reform with Karen J. Reynolds, From Silos to Systems: Reframing Schools for Success (Corwin Press, 2011).
Modern Red SchoolHouse, which worked to help schools develop answers from within their own walls and communities, is a much smaller organization than it was in 2002, but it still consults with schools around the country and is in the process of working on improving literacy at the middle school level in Florida. It was one of the designs used by three of the Decatur schools, and the organization is one that survived deep educational budget cuts from 2004-06, when the current models of reform came into fashion.
Revisiting Decatur
Decatur is a community of about 77,000 in Central Illinois with approximately 24 percent under age 18. It lies along I-72 with Champaign-Urbana to the east and Springfield to the west.
District 61 educates about 9,000 students through its 21 public schools, which include three magnet schools and one charter, Robertson, which serves 300 students.
According to the most recent census data, 16.5 percent of the population lives below the poverty level, approximately 22 percent are minority status and of those, 19.5 percent are African-American. In the public schools, however, 56 percent are minority status and 70 percent are classified as “low income.”
Both of Decatur’s public high schools are on academic watch status under federal and state No Child Left Behind laws. Five of Decatur’s 17 elementary schools and both middle schools are on academic early warning or academic watch status. And despite numerous reform initiatives, a stubborn achievement gap exists between white and black students, as it does for many schools across the state with minority populations.
But there are points of celebration. Five of the district’s schools, plus the city’s charter school, were recognized in 2010 by the Illinois State Board of Education with Spotlight awards: high-poverty, high-performing schools that are beating the odds to overcome the achievement gap. Two earned Academic Improvement awards, demonstrating the district’s progress in school reform.
Superintendent Gloria Davis has seen graduation rates increase during her five years in the district, exceeding state standards for all students, but especially for low-income black students. And she’s proud of that.
Bobbi Williams, a principal in Decatur during initial school reform efforts, is now director of special programs for the district’s Professional Development Institute. The Institute works with all of Decatur’s schools, including its private schools and the charter school.
The district’s school reform efforts in the early 2000s seem to have paid off, Williams said. The district allowed each school to select a school reform model and implement it on-site: it was a de-centralized, bottom-up reform system that the entire community embraced. A million dollars or more was poured into consultants, surveys, systems and training like that provided by Modern Red SchoolHouse.
But then, Williams noted, “the funds dried up.”
Shifting focus
A shift began around 2004 in attitudes about school reform. The focus changed as buzzwords like “competition,” “choice” and “merit-pay” for performance came into fashion. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, addressed the National Governors Association in 2005, declaring that he would spend $2 billion of his own money to improve America’s school system. Federal line item budgets for school reform models like those used in Decatur were zeroed out.
That didn’t seem to matter in Decatur. “Those reforms gave us a framework to take on such a huge task as how to reform a school. We took the best we could from those models, and now we can do it on our own,” Williams said.
The district continues with teacher training. Robertson Charter School opened in July 2001. And taking what was learned, the district is in the process of bringing a community-led, school reform process to its two underperforming high schools. Many in the community are optimistic.
The structural part, the adult part, of school reform seems solidly in place, but test scores remain a nagging problem in some of Decatur’s schools.
“Student achievements are the hardest part of a reform model,” Williams said.
Kilgore of Modern Red applauds their initiative and their ability to persevere through three superintendents.
“The whole issue is about the organization. A charismatic leader is not enough. Just getting a bunch of professional development is not enough,” she said. “Transforming how we as a school are learning and building our capacity to work better with students are what you need to help an organization design its own improvement so that the expertise is distributed within the organization.
“It’s not just a series of isolated efforts,” Kilgore added. “Organizations must be committed to reinvigorating the commitment among the school staff and students to turning things around. That’s the dilemma: What’s the organization structure to robustly manage this constantly changing environment?”
And so some school reform questions, as posed by Williams, still remain:
“What do you do when people (students and teachers) leave? What do you do to help people with their job? We have a teacher/protégé mentor program. We work closely to help our new teachers. It’s not just a one-time workshop.”
Sometimes all the best efforts still don’t seem to be enough.