‘No quick fixes, no shortcuts’

DeKalb superintendent pens op-ed opposing Opportunity School District

 

“Who do you want teaching and looking out for our children?” asks Stephen Green, superintendent of DeKalb County School District (DCSD), in an op-ed released Sept. 26.
The piece comes one week after the DCSD board of education voted to formally oppose a proposed Opportunity School District (OSD), which will be publicly voted on on Nov. 8.
If approved, the Georgia Department of Education will take over 22 DeKalb County elementary schools, three middle schools and one high school. The schools are eligible for state takeover because of College Career Ready Performance Index (CCRPI) scores below 60 for three consecutive years.
On Sept. 19, the board announced it will dedicate $1.9 million to literacy and mathematics initiatives, $500,000 to a new accountability system, $398,000 for a new disciplinary system and $749,000 for the 10 most in-need schools to partner with Discovery Education. In addition, DCSD will require more data recording, planning and parental engagement from school officials.
“I have said it before, and I’ll say it again now: I am opposed to any state takeover of local schools no matter what it is called,” Green states. “For me, the state of Georgia’s effort to take control of 26 DeKalb County schools, and schools elsewhere, is déjà vu all over again.”

According to Green, the Georgia OSD is similar to a potential 2011 state takeover in Missouri he encountered while employed in Kansas City Public Schools. Green’s op-ed refers to the attempted state control as a “conspiratorial smokescreen.”

“The real issue in Kansas City involved powerful, ambitious officials exploiting a political situation rather than working with local school systems to address root causes of underachievement and provide what schools needed to succeed,” Green states. “It was ruthless aggression—like predator and prey. A rapacious state political system wanted to take over the weakest, most vulnerable schools.”

Green calls the situation in DeKalb County “painfully similar.”
“In Georgia, the state wants control of schools it has stigmatized as ‘failing,’ based on standardized testing,” Green states. “This takeover effort comes despite strong evidence that standardized tests can’t fairly take into account—or accurately measure—the extreme complexity of teaching and learning in a district like DeKalb County, with 135 schools and 102,000 students from 180 nations and with 144 languages.”

Green alludes to racial, socio-economic and political “parallels” between the two situations. He states that, while in Missouri, he faced a “predatory commissioner” that perceived him and his district as new and vulnerable.

“Georgia feels painfully similar,” Green said. “The names are different and the titles of the people who to take over are different, but the goal is still the same—seize local control of public education.”

Green states that in Missouri at the nearby Normandy school system, “the state-controlled education experiment failed miserably” and that “students performed more poorly under the state regiment than under local control.”

He also recalls how “too much power and secrecy concentrated in the hands of a detached, uninformed, faceless state bureaucracy ultimately [failed] students, schools and society.”

“Media investigated the Missouri state takeover effort,” Green states. “They found hidden plans and bid-rigging concerns in state dealings with schools. The Missouri Education Commissioner eventually retired, suddenly and sensationally, following a scandal that involved a contract to overhaul public schools.”

Green said he eventually improved Kansas City Public Schools within two years. He was able to improve the district’s overall CCRPI scores, attendance rates and graduation rates.

“Within two years, our district score jumped from 22.5 to 84 points on the Missouri Annual Performance Report, with the highest statewide gains in college/career readiness, attendance rates, and graduation rates,” Green said. “Our overall academic achievement rose nearly 43 percent. The following year, our Missouri Annual Performance Report scores soared even higher – to 94.5 points.”

Green said a “foundation of trust and a sense of purpose” among parents, students, and community stakeholders is the key in finding similar success in DeKalb County.

In his op-ed, Green promises to bring the 26 schools within compliance and beyond. He points out that 15 of the 26 are within five points of the 60-point threshold and that “strong, remedial measures” have been launched in all schools.

“There are no quick fixes, no shortcuts,” Green said. “Turning around schools takes deep, hard, intimate work. It means fighting poverty and all that it brings. It means helping new arrivals to our country anchor lives and hopes to our communities and country. It means giving special needs and pre-school students and others among our most vulnerable the schooling, security and stability that allow them to be at their best.”