What can be done to close the achievement gap in the state’s Gateway Cities, the mid-sized urban centers that are home to so many of the students who sit at the bottom end of that gap? Gov. Deval Patrick made clear what won’t do the trick when he spoke on Friday morning to a gathering of leaders from the state’s 11 Gateway Cities. “If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got,” he said.
There seemed to be broad agreement with that, and the gathering of urban leaders in Worcester for a Gateway Cities education summit, cosponsored by MassINC, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, and UMass Dartmouth’s Urban Initiative, was itself a positive development. But freewheeling discussion of the shared education challenges in Gateway Cities is no substitute for taking steps to change the way things have always been done.
The first task is acknowledging the magnitude of the problem head on. A recent MassINC poll revealed surprisingly strong praise for local schools from Gateway City residents. Nearly half of those surveyed gave their local districts an A or B when asked to grade the schools, despite achievement results that badly lag statewide averages.
Students in Gateway Cities fail the 3rd grade English MCAS exam and 10th grade math test at twice the statewide rate and score in the advanced category at half the state average. Gateway Cities educate one of every seven public school students in Massachusetts, and 71 percent of students in these cities attend a Level 3 or Level 4 school, the two bottom accountability categories established by the state to track school performance.
Andrew Sum, who directs Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies, spelled out at the summit how these achievement disparities play out when it comes to college completion rates. Of those who enter 9th grade in a group of the state’s most affluent school districts, 73 percent will eventually receive a bachelor’s degree. Of those entering 9th grade in five of the state’s districts with the highest concentrations of poverty, four of them Gateway Cities, just 8 percent will end up obtaining four-year college degrees. “That is not a gap,” said Sum. “That is a chasm.”
Patrick said he was directing his secretary of education, Paul Reville, to devise a strategy to help Gateway Cities improve student performance. Reville says this could include helping them solicit aid from foundations and philanthropists, whose creative programs are often focused on the Boston public schools and not on the state’s smaller cities. But the most concrete steps Gateway Cities can take were laid out in last year’s education reform law. The law’s focus on the achievement gap makes it a blueprint for school reform in these communities.
“It has tools in it. Use it,” Patrick implored those at the summit. The primary tool the law hands to districts is the ability to open “innovation schools,” which state officials have often referred to as “in-district charter schools.” Innovation schools will operate within school districts but can have the sort of flexibility over staffing, budgeting, and scheduling that leaders of high-performing charter schools say is critical to their success.
“What if every underperforming or middling performing school in a Gateway City converted to innovation schools?” asked state Rep. Marty Walz, who co-chaired the Legislature’s education committee last year, at Friday’s summit.
A good question. Embracing innovation schools sounds like an easy call for districts in desperate need of new strategies to improve student learning. But it’s not quite that easy. Approval of innovation schools involves negotiations with teacher unions and challenging all of those in the system, as Patrick said, not to “do what you always did.”
There are some encouraging signs. Two innovation schools are already up and running – in Revere and in Gardner – and districts across the state are in discussion with state officials about 34 potential new innovation schools, which can either be newly created schools or result from the conversion of an existing school. Of the 34, however, just seven are in Gateway Cities and five are in Worcester. That means there are just two schools being considered for this reform across 10 of the 11 Gateway Cities – the places lawmakers had foremost in mind in passing a law that was titled, “An Act Relative to the Achievement Gap.”
There is an underlying tension in almost every discussion of urban education these days, and Friday’s summit was no exception. Are the pronounced achievement gaps due to the pervasive effects of poverty or outmoded school structures and policies that are now better serving adults than students? “It’s not an either/or,” said Reville, the state education secretary, in a later interview.
He’s right, and we ought to devise strategies to try to address all the ways that kids living in poverty arrive at school with impediments to learning. But tackling poverty and all its ills is a long-term battle. Changing the conditions in school buildings in ways that can improve student learning is something that urban leaders can push for right now.
Whether they’re willing to roll up their sleeves and do it will be an early sign of how serious they are about doing what needs to be done. In this MCAS era, it is the high-stakes test for which they ought to be held accountable.