Monday editorial: Last best hope
The Special Administrative Board that oversees the St. Louis Public Schools today is expected to announce the names of the three finalists for superintendent.
At 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, the candidates will meet the public at Vashon High School, making formal presentations about their “expectations for the district” and fielding questions.
The impending appointment could be a turning point for the distressed district. It could also be the last straw. Things shouldn’t work like that, but they do. That’s part of the problem.
For more than 20 years, this community has looked to a succession of superintendents as potential saviors. With each new appointment, permanent and interim (six since 1996), hopes were raised that at long last, the district had found a savior, someone with the chemistry, commitment and insight needed to right a dysfunctional system.
It hasn’t worked. It never will work.
St. Louis cannot import a savior of public schools.
That premise falsely assumes that the problems confronting St. Louis Public Schools are technical in nature and that they could be solved by a brilliant, resourceful, charismatic educator armed with the right teaching regimens and strategies.
The district has plenty of technical problems and educational challenges, but city schools face a larger crisis — a lack of commitment from the community at large.
Until that emerges, St. Louis Public Schools will continue to fail no matter who occupies the superintendent’s chair and no matter what strategies he or she employs. The schools need supporters who are stable, steadfast, imaginative, unselfish, energetic, cohesive and unafraid to aggressively cast off the status quo and reshape the district to meet the needs of its children.
The greatest threat to the district’s survival by far is a permanent loss of faith, not just among families in the district, but also among community, political and business leaders on whose resources a renaissance will depend.
After many years of erratic governance by shifting majorities of elected schools boards, the state took control of the district in 2007; the three member Special Administrative Board was viewed as a vehicle to create stability and implement lasting reforms.
Board members Rick Sullivan, Melanie Adams and Richard Gaines are capable people committed to improving the schools. But they have not demonstrated creative imagination or aggressive innovation. So far, they only have tinkered with improving administrative structures and systems that have served the district poorly.
The consequences are clear: the district is losing students at an alarming rate. Enrollment is down to an expected 28,000 this school year from 44,000 in 2000. Only 21,000 students showed up for the first day of class in August.
Meanwhile, members of the old-guard elected school board — whose failures led to their removal and the district’s lost accreditation — continue to snipe from the sidelines, sourly awaiting a restoration.
The SAB so far has failed to create a vision of a school system on the move, a vision that the new superintendent would build upon.
So once again, the stakes are high for St. Louis Public Schools’ next superintendent. But that superintendent will be a catalyst, not a savior. The test is whether any finalist can articulate a deep commitment and understanding of how to:
• Maintain order in classrooms and in school buildings, solving the teachers union’s top complaint: spineless administrators who refuse to enforce disciplinary policies.
• Root out incompetent and under-performing teachers and administrators using diligent enforcement of personnel policies.
• Replace them with recruits from colleges and universities that deliver the best-prepared teachers.
• Replicate throughout the district the best and most successful schools, the ones that have enthusiastic parental support and long waiting lists.
• Directly sponsor charter schools, joining rather than trying to quash a dynamic (albeit fledgling and imperfect) aspect of public education in St. Louis today.
• Liberate and reward principals and teachers at schools that get results. Keep the central administration out of their hair. Give them control over hiring, staffing and professional development. Even invite them to transform their enterprise into a St. Louis Public Schools-sponsored charter school.
Such a clarifying voice could be the last best hope for St. Louis Public Schools.
(Pictured: Special Administrative Board members Melanie Adams and Rick Sullivan. Eddie Roth/Post-Dispatch)
I’m pretty much in agreement with you. However parents are not. Noting will happen until they are.
First, parents must be taught how to parent. They simply don’t know how.
Teaching parents is not the function of a public school. That can be done
by an independent agency. using grant money, and even tax dollars. It was done in Alaska for an underperforming sdhool distrit. It works. Actually,it is both a short term solution and a long term solution.