Debate raging on Cleveland school reform plan

There’s an interesting debate being waged about the school reform plan  underway by the city of Cleveland, Ohio, and its Mayor Frank Jackson.  Cleveland’s schools have been under Mayoral control for several years.

The debate was started by Diane Ravitch who wrote in a blog posting in Education Week very critical of the city’s approach, which relies on a charter school strategy, school choice, and turning over many of the schools to private operators.  Here’s the beginning of Ravitch’s take on the situation, which is titled, “Desperate Times in Cleveland and Ohio:”

“I recently went to Cleveland to speak to the City Club, where civic leaders gather every Friday to hear from people in different fields. I wanted to talk with educators as well, so I spoke to the Cleveland Teachers Union on the evening of Feb. 2, and to district administrators on Feb. 3, before addressing the City Club.

On my drive from the airport with Jan Resseger, the minister for public education for the United Church of Christ, we passed through several neighborhoods. First, Shaker Heights, an elegant suburban enclave with outstanding schools. Then East Cleveland, a very different suburb, marked by blocks of boarded-up apartment houses and sealed homes, as well as empty lots where vacant houses had been demolished. These were once-functional neighborhoods that had died. So devastated was the landscape, I thought I might be in a Third World country. In central Cleveland, many houses had windows covered with plywood, and many retail stores were empty. To put it mildly, this city is economically depressed.

After I spoke to the teachers, one came up and introduced herself as a 4th grade teacher. She said: “Thank you for giving me hope. I wish I could give some to my students. They have no hope for the future.” That was the saddest thing I heard on my visit.

Cleveland has a level of urban decay that is alarming. Yet its municipal leaders have decided that their chief problem is bad teachers. Surely, I thought, the teachers didn’t cause the flight of employers from the city, the collapse of its manufacturing base, and the massive loss of home mortgages.

But sure enough, Cleveland—and the state of Ohio—plans to attack its economic woes by creating more charter schools and supplying merit pay to teachers able to raise test scores. The leaders want to make it easier to fire teachers and to remove seniority. That’s the mayor’s plan to reform education in Cleveland. Mayor Frank Jackson, like Governor John Kasich, thinks that school choice is the remedy for the education woes of Cleveland and Ohio. So, of course, they both want more charters.

Cleveland has had mayoral control since 1995, so if mayoral control was the answer to urban woes, it should have happened here. It hasn’t. Cleveland is one of the poorest, most racially segregated, and lowest-performing districts in the nation. According to data in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Cleveland’s school population is 85 percent black and Hispanic, and 100 percent of its students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

Ohio has made a big bet on charter schools. It has an aggressive and entrepreneurial charter sector. About 100,000 of the state’s 1.8 million students are enrolled in charter schools, but charter enrollment is far higher in the state’s “Big 8″ urban districts. About 25 percent (give or take a point or two) of students attend charters in Dayton, Youngstown, Cleveland, and Toledo.

The average public school teacher in Cleveland is paid about $66,000, while the average charter school teacher in that city receives about $33,000 a year. That’s a big cost saving for the city and state. Most charters are non-union, and teachers have no job protections or employment rights. It appears that charters have a business plan in which they keep costs low by teacher turnover, low levels of experience, and low salaries.

For the full Ravitch blog posting, go here

In response, Terry Ryan, writing on the pages of the Ohio Gadfly Daily (and picked up by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute) labeled Ravitch’s article a “drive by shooting.”

Here’s the opening paragraphs of his response:

Diane Ravitch’s blog earlier this week on “Desperate Times in Cleveland and Ohio” was troubling in how much it got wrong. Specifically, she totally misconstrues what Mayor Frank Jackson’s bold school reform plan is trying to do and who it is trying to help. According to Diane’s post, Jackson’s plan is nothing more than an attack on hardworking teachers and an effort to enrich for-profit charter school operators (namely the Akron-based, for-profit White Hat). This assertion is simply wrong.

I live near Dayton – another struggling former industrial power that is a shadow of its former self – and spend a lot of time in Cleveland meeting and working with some of that community’s fantastic civic leaders, philanthropists, educators, and business people who are trying desperately to save their city. There is no doubt that Cleveland is hurting and it is bleeding families and children. The city has 30,000 fewer children today than it did just a decade ago, and many of the children left behind are struggling academically. In 2010-11, 56 percent of students in Cleveland attended a school rated D or F by the state. This is despite the fact the district spends a little more than $14,000 a pupil.

Because Cleveland is shrinking, its schools are facing a serious fiscal crisis. The district faces at least a $64.9 million budget deficit in 2012-13, and without additional cuts and or revenues the district’s five year budget forecast shows a shortfall of close to $300 million by 2016. Despite the fiscal challenges, Cleveland has seen the emergence of some truly high-performing schools. Some of these schools are innovative district-operated schools like Campus International, a high-demand K-3 school housed on the Cleveland State University campus, and MC²STEM high school located at the Great Lakes Science Center. The district also has some successful “traditional” schools, like Louisa May Alcott Elementary (which we featured in our 2010 report on high-performing, high-need urban schools).

Other high-performing schools in Cleveland are charters like the Breakthrough Schools network, in which student achievement rivals and even surpasses that of the highest performing suburban schools in Ohio. In fact, in 2010-11 nine of Cleveland’s top 15 schools were charters. While Mayor Jackson’s plan puts a priority on partnering with such high-flying charter schools, NOTHING in it favors for-profit or low-performing charters, and certainly the plan is no gift to White Hat or any other management company, as Diane alleges.

For Ryan’s full posting, go here.