More School Closures Coming to DPS

More School Closures Coming to DPS

Are more schools closures coming to Detroit Public Schools? On the eve before voters of Detroit go to vote on a new bond proposal for DPS, it seems as if Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb is planning to close up to 70 more schools and lay-off up to 4,000 DPS workers by 2011, as part of a new five-year deficit elimination plan, according to a letter he sent to State Schools Superintendent Mike Flanagan April 1. Under the $500.5 million bond Proposal S, however, the district wants to rebuild eight schools and renovate 13 others. The bond is a loan involving an added 3.62 millage (tax) using lower interest rates authorized by President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus initiative.

But Bobb has not yet laid out plans for $418.5 million in direct grant stimulus funds intended to retain staff and better academic achievement. His 2010 operating budget indicates that money is not included in the listed revenues. At a City Council hearing Oct. 27, a group of DPS social workers scheduled for lay-off Oct. 30 decried the plight of Detroit’s children under Bobb’s slash and burn policies. “We believe DPS is putting our children’s lives at risk, compromising their mental health, safety and security,” said Angela Gardner-Street, one of 41 social workers facing the chopping block. “What people do not know is that there is rising conflict and chaos in the schools, escalating violence just last week including the riot at Mumford where police maced the students, a shooting at Southeastern High School, and the rape of a girl at a school bus stop. We hold the front lines after these crises occur.”

Another social worker said a nine-year-old student committed suicide last week. Others said the merging of schools across the city as others close is a prime cause of the chaos. “The consultants Bobb has hired and paid all these millions of dollars have not come out to see what is happening in the K-8 day treatment program where I work,” Leonard Zabawski, who earned the Social Worker of the Year Award for Wayne County Region D, said. “Over 100 students with disabilities will be left with one social worker.” The Detroit Free Press has reported that Bobb has spent $42 million on consultants since taking over, and plans to spend another $93 million in the coming period.

So with 70 more schools set to close by 2011, why in the world are Detroit voters actually going to the polls to vote for Proposal S that will reopen at least a couple of the buildings that got shut down at the end of last school year by building brand new buildings of those schools (i.e. Finney) and remodeling others. It is clear that something isn’t right about Detroit Public Schools and no matter who is in control of the district, Bobb, the State or an elected Board, it seems that information such as this is not being shared with the public until after the fact. All DPS and the State of Michigan have to do is look at the City of Chicago, otherwise known as our brother or sister city, to see that school closures don’t improve academic standards when students are leaving one failing school for another.

In fact a majority of Chicago students affected by school closings were sent to schools that were low-performing, just like those they left behind—moves that had no significant impact on performance for most students, a study released by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research, which examined the academic effects of the closings on students at 18 elementary schools shut down between 2001 and 2006. To measure the impact, the researchers compared students age 8 and older with their counterparts in schools that had similar characteristics but continued to operate. The schools had a combined enrollment of 5,445 students at the time of their closing. “Certainly, when schools were closed for academic reasons, the idea was to try to change their educational prospects and what they might obtain. Unfortunately, we didn’t find that,” said Julia Gwynne, a senior research analyst with the consortium and the report’s co-author. “The main reason why that seems not to have occurred was because most students did not attend schools that were substantially better than the ones that were closed.”

A Chicago-style strategy is a feature of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s push for the nation to turn around its lowest-performing schools. Mr. Duncan was the chief executive officer of the Chicago public schools from 2001 until December 2008, when President Barack Obama nominated him as education secretary. School closings are one element of the so-called “turnaround” plans Mr. Duncan has promoted as secretary, which also include measures that would replace principals and teachers in persistently failing schools, which DPS finally did this summer to some degree or another but in some cases DPS sent a principals and staff from one failing school to another failing school in most regards. Also Bobb and his turnaround time did not take into account in many cases, the number of years a principal was at a failing school in order to measure the progress if any that school was making under the principal since that principal took over the school.

Nonetheless it is fair to compared Chicago Public Schools to Detroit Public Schools in so many ways especially since Arne Duncan has said he is having nightmares over what is taking place in Detroit’s schools. Still Monique D. Bond, a Chicago schools spokeswoman, said by e-mail, “It would be difficult to measure a student’s academic achievement based solely on a school’s closing” noting the district believes the consortium’s study is a “fair analysis.” “We need to review the data to get a better understanding of its findings, which will help to inform us as we move forward with considering our future school closing policies,” she said.

The 405,000-student district still closes and consolidates schools, but moved in 2006 toward more frequent use of a turnaround strategy that keeps students in their current buildings but replaces principals and teachers, an approach DPS adopted before the end of last school year under Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb. Still in Chicago, among the students displaced, 40 percent were enrolled in schools that were on probation, and 42 percent were enrolled in schools where Iowa Tests of Basic Skills scores were in the lowest quartile in the city, according to the study. Just 6 percent of displaced students were enrolled in schools with itbs scores in the highest quartile, the study shows. “If the findings are correct­—for Chicago, at least—we have to question the value of closing schools and creating the dislocations that would attend those school closings for little or no constructive result,” said Daniel L. Duke, a professor of educational leadership at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.

Mr. Duke, who runs a university program that prepares leaders to turn around low-performing schools, said placing strong leaders who are supported by teacher-leaders and central-office employees has proved to be an effective strategy for many of the schools the program has worked with. While students who went from one low-performing school to another did not see achievement gains, the study says, those who transferred to some of the district’s highest-performing schools did show progress. The announcement that specific schools were closing had a negative impact on student achievement, the study suggests. The announcement was often made in January, a few months before students took standardized tests. In the year that closings were announced, students in schools slated to close fell 1½ months below the expected achievement level in reading and more than a half-month below the expected level in math, based on an analysis of itbs scores.

That negative effect was temporary, however. A year later, the displaced students were achieving again at their expected levels, the study says. Julie Woestehoff, the executive director of Parents United for Responsible Education, a Chicago advocacy group often critical of Mr. Duncan’s initiatives as district chief, said the study’s findings are more evidence that the district’s reform strategies are not working. The group has called for the end of Renaissance 2010, a district program that closes low-performing schools and replaces them with charter and charterlike schools run by private groups, something that many people in Detroit feel is the next wave to take place with DPS schools.

“When Arne Duncan announced this program, he said it was going to lead to dramatically better education for the children. We were hoping that would be true,” Ms. Woestehoff said. “There hasn’t really been any payoff from all the money that has been spent and all the disruption that has been caused to communities and especially to students.” Chicago’s school closings returned to the spotlight this fall after a high school student was brutally beaten and killed in a fight near a South Side high school. Local activists have contended that the school closings created a dangerous mixture of students from rival neighborhoods. Mr. Duncan said earlier this month that blaming school closings for the uptick in violence was “absolutely ridiculous.” ("Outcry Against Violence," Oct. 14, 2009.) Chicago school spokesmen did not respond to requests for comment about the study.

The displacement of students after school closings also had an impact on student-mobility rates and participation in the district’s summer school programs, according to the study. Students were more likely to switch schools again not only in the summer after that first year in the new school, the researchers found, but also during the school year. Third, 6th, and 8th graders were less likely than their peers in similar schools to attend summer school in the summer after their schools had closed.

Rebecca Herman, a managing research analyst for the Washington-based American Institutes for Research, said policymakers should especially focus on making sure that students affected by closings are being placed in higher-performing schools, and ensuring that those schools are equipped with supports to help them take on the new students while maintaining quality. Particular attention should also be paid to the transition period after announcements of school closings are made, she said. Ms. Herman, who was the lead author of a federal guide on school turnarounds, said the Chicago study leaves some questions unanswered. For example, were there “differences in [students’] motivation and support for excelling in school that would help explain these findings?” she said. “If you wanted to apply this policy broadly,” she added, “how would you motivate those 94 percent of students [who did not enroll in top-scoring schools] to go to a school farther away and provide support for them?”

Andy Smarick, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, both in Washington, said the study shows the complexities of school turnaround efforts. “What really jumps out is what school you go to after the school closes is extraordinarily important. The important lesson here is that closures are only one piece of a broader strategy that a city has to develop,” he said. School administrators must take into account student-transfer policies, geographical considerations, and the impact on the grade levels affected, he said. Successful school administrators are able to show parents and the larger communities the closings are part of a bigger improvement plan, Mr. Smarick said. “I think a lot of people mistakenly think turnarounds are easy or that turnarounds often succeed. Sometimes there are institutions, whether they are schools, businesses, or nonprofits, that are just broken, low-performing, and they can’t be fixed,” Mr. Smarick said. “That is unsettling for people to think about when we are talking about schools.”

So with Detroit Public Schools slated to close 70 schools by 2011, how will the district go about deciding which schools to close and at the same time how will the district take into account student-transfer policies, geographical considerations, and the impact on the grade levels affected as Mr. Smarick mentioned when closing these 70 schools. It is clear that simply closing failing schools and sending students to another failing school is not the answer to education reform but something has to be done. Also simply closing failing schools and opening up charters in those schools is not the answer either but perhaps a combination of solutions needs to be drafted and put into place if DPS is to improve. Detroit Public Schools is years behind some of the alternatives Chicago has tried to fix its failing school system but perhaps it is for the best because the Chicago model should serve notice for DPS administrators, teachers, parents and students for how to fix failing schools in the district by avoiding some of the mistakes that Chicago Public Schools made in deciding to close schools and placing students in others schools.

Education reform is critical in not only Detroit but throughout America and a one model fits all approach won’t work because different school districts, cities, towns and states require different approaches. Therefore it is now or never for many school districts, cities, towns and states to find out what works in their area and make sure they strengthen it while replacing what doesn’t with different alternatives that will improve academic achievement in all students. The time is now to fix DPS but closing more schools might not be the answer to fixing the districts academic problems and simply sending kids from one failing school to another is definitely not the answer either. Lastly sending administrators and staff from one failing school to another failing school is not going to help our youth either so now is the time for educational think tanks who care about educational learning and student achievement to get together and create the new vision for educational reform that DPS and other urban districts all across America need now more than ever.