The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools? by Dale Russakoff

Author:Dale Russakoff [Russakoff, Dale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Decision-Making & Problem Solving, Sociology, Social Science, Educational Policy & Reform, General, Child Development, Family & Relationships, Education, Political Science, Public Policy, Cultural Policy, Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780547840512
Google: Sxl0AwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2015-09-08T20:51:58+00:00

Every Monday, Anderson gathered with her leadership team in her tenth-floor conference room, where the agenda often involved replacing dysfunctional district practices with management systems that emphasized accountability for each desired result. On the walls around them were aging posters and plaques created by past superintendents, under whom much of the dysfunction originated. The most prominent poster featured a smiling, bright-eyed girl sitting extra-tall at her desk, chin tilted up in expectation. “There are no sad faces when education works,” read the caption. It was signed by Eugene Campbell and Charles Bell, the superintendent and school board chair during the era of self-dealing and neglect that led to the state takeover.

One morning, the topic of the leadership meeting was Newark’s abominable high school graduation rate of fifty-four percent. An analyst had discovered that a significant number of students dropped out because they didn’t learn until it was too late that they had failed too many courses to graduate. Anderson and her team were adopting a computerized system they called Grad Tracker to alert district leaders and high school principals as soon as a student failed a required class; principals would be responsible for taking immediate steps to ensure the student made up the credits and got back on track.

Only one person at these meetings had taught or worked as a principal in the Newark schools—Roger Leon, acting director of academic affairs, who grew up in Newark and graduated from Science High. A Newark teacher or administrator for almost thirty years, Leon doubled as an unofficial anthropologist for Anderson, called upon regularly to explain the origins of policies and customs that made no sense to the systems-minded newcomers.

“Roger, I call you an encyclopedia, so don’t disappoint me,” Anderson said during a discussion about Grad Tracker. “What was the system before?”

Leon, a small, bespectacled man respected throughout Newark for his twin skills as educator and political survivor, explained that when a student failed a required class, there was a point person in one of the district’s regional offices who alerted the school’s director of guidance, who in turn was responsible for ensuring that the student recovered the missing credits. Anderson asked why that didn’t work. “The point person retired and the director of guidance position no longer exists,” Leon said.

“Oh! That’s sustainable,” Anderson said, slapping the table in exasperation. Although Leon’s anthropology lessons were invariably disconcerting, Anderson relished their gory details: “I feel as if a hundred mysteries have just been solved. Or revealed.”

Later, in an interview, Leon said the old approach drew on research suggesting that struggling students often made progress when they got one-on-one attention from an interested staff member. “If you failed a class, there was supposed to be a plan in place for you to recover credits, and someone who cared about you was supposed to monitor it,” he said. “It would’ve been a good system, but no one followed through. No one was accountable.” Once again: somebody didn’t do their job.

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