How to Fix Our City Schools

Common Sense Strategies for Superintendents, School Boards, Principals, and Parents

For forty years, I was fortunate to lead the assessment, evaluation, and accountability departments of nine public school districts, including six of the largest in the nation – Washington, DC, Baltimore, St. Louis, Austin, Atlanta, and the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA). I have just completed a draft of my second book, How to Fix Our City Schools. It is part memoir and part handbook and while I am very excited about finally completing a “good” working draft, the process had made me even more acutely aware of the disappointment I feel about the failures of the last forty years and my fear they will continue indefinitely for future generations of poor and disadvantaged children.

Below is a short introduction to the book and the newsletter. I hope it sparks your interest.

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Most children go to school every day wanting to learn and wanting to have a “good day.” Similarly, most city school teachers and administrators go to work every day wanting to do a good job and hoping the children in their charge will at least learn enough to do well on the end-of-year state tests. However, while many children in large urban schools do well, for many more, our urban public schools are places where they learn to fail.

How do I know that? I have been a senior administrator and chief “data guy” in public school districts around the country for forty years. I have worked in a number of large urban districts, including Washington, DC, Baltimore, St. Louis, Austin, and Atlanta. I’ve seen the numbers, as well as the day-to-day reality of many schools, and neither are encouraging. In 2019, for example, only one-third (34%) of the 4th graders in the nation scored at or above the “proficient” level on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessment. For students of color, the results are even more distressing. While 44% of white students scored at or above the “proficient” level, only 18% of black students and 23% of Hispanic 4th graders scored at or above the “proficient” level in reading and, in spite of teachers’ hard work and good intentions, reading achievement hasn’t improved nationally in over twenty years.

These failures are not for lack of effort. Educators in large urban districts have tried everything under the sun. They have hired more reading and mathematics specialists; implemented “wrap-around” services; developed vacation academies, after-school, before school, and expanded summer programs; paid recruiting and retention bonuses and stipends; designed and purchased new curriculum and instructional materials; implemented phonics, whole language, and everything in-between; developed new and better formative and summative assessments and data systems; created school performance indexes, growth models, earned autonomy and various other accountability methods; added professional development days, more and more instructional coaches, teacher learning academies, model classrooms, and summer training institutes; implemented PBIS, RTI, MTSS, and social-emotional learning (SEL); and on and on.

With so many theories, opinions, and programs, perhaps it isn’t surprising school leaders are no longer sure how to set about improving their institutions. Everyone seems to have an opinion about how to improve schools, and yet there is surprisingly little reliable research to guide school leaders. Administrators find themselves implementing initiatives almost at random. When test scores don’t immediately show progress, they often simply move to the next new panacea or gimmick, bouncing from one program to another – what teachers call “the flavor of the month.”

How to Fix Our City Schools argues that city schools should disdain flashy initiatives in order to focus on improving fundamental instructional practices, in general, and literacy instruction, in particular. Literacy is vital for success not just in English class but almost every subject area of school. It is also the area most likely to improve students’ post-graduation prospects and the number one skill employers cite as desirable in prospective employees. Students who cannot read, write, and communicate effectively face bleak job prospects. If we are going to improve our city schools, this statistic — above all others — must change.

How to Fix Our City Schools is not a primer on educational research or a synthesis of “expert” opinions and theories. Instead, it is part memoir and part handbook. It revolves around the narrative of one senior administrator’s first-hand experience of the profound and seemingly unsolvable difficulties facing our urban public schools.

In Part 1, I tell three stories from my time “in the service”— the first from Baltimore, the second from Austin, and the last from Atlanta. These anecdotes serve to paint a picture of the challenges currently facing public school administrators and teachers, the characteristics of great leaders, and superintendents’ desperate search for the shiny objects, silver bullets, or flavor-of-the-month that will yield higher test scores. Part 2 examines the external factors confronting school and district leaders, the excuses used to justify failure, and provides strategies for overcoming these pressures and obstacles. In Part 3, I examine a number of the most promising initiatives I have seen, take a hard look at why they failed, and identify the components of great schools that are necessary and sufficient. Part 4 focuses on funding, opportunity costs, waste, and answers if urban districts can afford great schools. Part 5 returns to the ultimate topic of the necessary and sufficient components of great schools and what it will take to ensure that all children can read at or near grade level by the end of third grade. The final chapters detail what public school leaders must continue, discard, adjust, expand, or do differently to tip the balance and finally provide the great schools every community and every child deserves.

While nearly every educator understands the components of great schools – what Marzano calls the “opportunity to learn” factors – for reasons that are difficult to fathom, educators have consistently failed to implement them successfully. How to Fix Our City Schools unravels this mystery. Ultimately, students’ wellbeing is at the core of great schools. As one wise principal once told me, “I want my students to go home every day feeling like they had a good day.” How to Fix Our City Schools shows parents, teachers, and school administrators how to make a good day the new norm.