Morning Shots

On Monday, the Washington Post ran this story about the dramatic turnaround among DC’s Catholic schools, which were in dismal shape 10 years ago.

The story leads with this:

Many Catholic schools in the District seemed moribund in 1995. Paint was peeling, and enrollment and test scores were dropping. Advisers urged the archbishop of Washington to shut or consolidate several schools serving low-income neighborhoods.

Cardinal James A. Hickey refused. "I won’t abandon this city," he said. Instead, Washington’s Catholic schools began a series of drastic changes in 1997. New administrators armed with research on what worked in urban education put many schools under the same office. They told teachers that they would be judged on how much their students improved, required them to use common math and reading curricula and adopted learning standards that had worked well in Indiana, 500 miles away.

It was one of the most radical realignments of Catholic education ever attempted in a U.S. city. Ten years later, principals and teachers at the 14 schools in the archdiocese’s Center City Consortium are celebrating a sharp turnaround in student achievement and faculty support. The consortium serves about 2,400 students through eighth grade, nearly a third of whom receive federally funded tuition vouchers.(emphasis added)

With the fifth anniversary of NCLB upon us, it might be a good time to take a good long look at the successes of school systems, whether private, parochial or public, and use those lessons to see how NCLB can be improved. Joanne Jacobs has a good roundup of commentary about NCLB+5, but I thought that looking at places like the DC Catholic School consortium can offer some real life lessons.

Lesson 1–Data Matters. Even some of NCLB’s harshest critics have to grudgingly concede that NCLB now provides a wealth of data to examine. The

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Minority students are falling behind in the public school system. The graduation rate for Missouri’s white students is 87.4 percent; for black students it’s fully 10 points lower—77 percent. Black students don’t do so well as their white peers on the Communication Arts section of the Missouri Assessment Program.  They lag behind on the Mathematics section of MAP too.

But the gap is much larger in St. Louis than in Kansas City.  In Kansas City, the graduation rate for black students hovers around the state average.  In St. Louis City, it’s an appalling 58 percent. One important reason is Kansas City’s charter school advantage. Kansas City has a vibrant system of 18 charter schools. St. Louis, in contrast, has only 7. Many of those charter schools serve minority students, giving them additional opportunities and discourage them from dropping out. Policymakers in St. Louis and Jefferson City should find ways to expand charter schools in St. Louis so that minority children there have the same opportunities as minority children in Kansas City.

Missouri’s urban public schools don’t do a good job of preparing minority students for life and work.  And unfortunately, many minority families in St. Louis and Kansas City can’t afford homes in suburban school districts, nor can they afford to send their kids to private prep schools or tutoring as many wealthier families do.  Minority teens who aren’t doing well in the public schools may feel that the only alternative is to drop out.

But some Kansas City schools are beating the odds.  For example, Don Bosco Education Center and Hogan Preparatory Academy have black graduation rates above Missouri’s average.  At Don Bosco Education Center, the black graduation rate is a respectable 86 percent.  Hogan Preparatory Academy has an outstanding black graduation rate of 98.3 percent.

These aren’t traditional public high

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Five years ago, President Bush signed into law No Child Left Behind. As a new Congress prepares to debate the law’s future, the White House is working to build support for renewing it without any serious reforms. Last week, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings remarked that she was looking only at proposals to “perfect or tweak” it.

But the Bush administration’s satisfaction with No Child Left Behind is surprising because the President’s original education agenda was very different from today’s law. President Bush once advocated limiting federal power in education. During the 2000 campaign, he pledged that he did not want to be “federal superintendent of schools” or the “national principal.” He promised not to “tinker with the machinery of the federal role in education” but to “redefine that role entirely.”

After entering the White House, Bush unveiled the original No Child Left Behind plan. One of this plan’s main pillars was to give states and school districts control in exchange for strong accountability. “The federal government must be wise enough to give states and school districts more authority and freedom,” the White House explained. “And it must be strong enough to require proven performance in return.”

The president proposed a “charter state” option for “state and districts committed to accountability and reform.” This would have allowed participating states and districts to enter into five-year agreements with the secretary of education to free them from federal mandates while still requiring public school to be transparent about results through student testing and extensive public reporting.

Yet Congress scrapped much of President Bush’s original plan. The 1,100-page bill that emerged established new federal requirements and boosted funding for elementary and secondary education programs by approximately 26 percent. All that remained of the “charter state” option was a small provision to grant states

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