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.
the editorial posits the notion of “erratic governance” as if it happened in a political vacuum and as if the SAB is somehow the end game of it and not part of the continuing pattern.
The fact is that our local mayors first waited too long to establish control over the schools–Harmon was all but handed the district as a part of the legislative deseg settlement, but he refused it–and then when asserting control have only added to the administrative and political confusion surrounding the district. The starting point to this was the disasterous Slay board of his first term, followed by the hiring of a corporate down-sizing firm in the place of a qualified superintendent.
At the end of the process, today, Slay stands beside a “school board” with a CEO that has exerted no real administrative pressure or guidance over the district, whose first real move is to remove the only superintendent that has a real presence in both the district and the city over the past 8 years, all as a part of a strategic planning process that is a joke.
What has happened to the St. Louis Public Schools is sad, sad, sad, and the mayor, among others, should accept some level of accountability for it. His leadership has been atrocious, and his platform for educational reform doesn’t seem to consist of anything more than platitudes about charter schools, with little recognition that there are good charter schools as well as bad, just like there are good public schools and bad.
Moveover, the lack of leadership leaves a vacuum for the sort of contentless ideological drivel posited above that suggests that city parents–we know who they are right–can not produce learners and successful students. The fact is that there are public school districts with comparable populations that are succeeding and that is the role of local school districts and schools to help students succeed even if they enter into the district with a couple strikes against them.
“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.”
This should be titled “Blame the Parents First”
“It hasn’t worked. It never will work. St. Louis cannot import a savior of public schools.”
What the? PD not calling for money $$ to be thrown at the schools?
Let’s face it, as the schools go, the city goes. This entire “project” needs to be shutdown and retooled. Anyone associated with the current school system needs to go.
please. it is this “do or die” thinking that has added to the chaos of the last eight years. it was inevitable that the public schools would have to contract. the question was how to do it.
on another note, it appears that the SLPS search process has yielded three top names: Kelvin Adams from New Orleans, Eric Becoats from Guilford, NC, and Donnie Evans, of Providence, RI.
Quick, who can google the fastest?
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This was a main topic of John McCain’s speech, and is exactly what needs to be done. Also, the City needs to stop playing the race card with its candidates, and I’ve noticed that once again, whites, asians, hispanics, Bosnians, and other minorities of the community did not get a shot at the candidacy for this position, and it’d be nice to see that EEO laws are fully complied with by the city. What also needs to happen is to stop bussing students into the county schools. They take with them the money that desperately needs to be invested in the city schools, and if we get some good stewards of money into the leadership of the SLPS, things will quickly turn around. Getting that to happen, I’m afraid, is another story…
PC Superintendents, Principals and Teachers are the root problem. Until discipline is installed in St. Louis pUblic Schools and good student behavior rules, instead of enabled chaos, it will be a continuing failure, no matter who they pick.
Think about a proper learning environment and you start to get the picture. Here a a few tips: No talking or disruptive behavior in class (NONE)…the teacher teaches and rules. Homework is done the next day or an F is given that “student”.
A type of reform school is intiated for the “non-students” to more clearly understand why they are in school in the first place. Of course, there is NO payment or prize for just attending school, as has been done in the past. Rigid enforement of the above standards of behavior who start to weed out the problems from the ailing school system and resore some degree of confidence in its mission.
If, and only if, that was done, I think that we could guarantee success for those that wish to be students and removal of the thug culture would ensue.