A Wrap Up

DPS Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb helps a student with his homework. (photo by Sarah Hulett)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

For the last two weeks, we’ve been looking at education reform in New Orleans to see what, if anything, Detroit Public Schools might be able to learn. We looked at charter schools, special education, and teacher training, among other things.

So, for the last installment in our series, Rebuilding Detroit Schools, Michigan Radio’s Jennifer Guerra and Sarah Hulett decided to turn the attention to you and answer your questions.

SARAH HULETT: Hi Jen

JENNIFER GUERRA: Hey Sarah. OK. So we looked at the comments that came in after our stories aired. Thanks to everybody who wrote in.

SARAH HULETT: And we’re going to spend the next few minutes answering the questions as best we can. Here we go.

JENNIFER GUERRA: First one up is from a listener in Chicago.

AMI HICKS: Hello, I’m Ami Hicks and I’m an adjunct professor at Roosevelt University in Chicago. If you look at any success story about charters and other schools who are helping students achieve, why can’t public schools do the same things: Tutoring, longer class hours, longer school years, Saturday schools, and, you know, the list goes on.

JENNIFER GUERRA: So, basically, what Ami is asking is why can’t traditional public schools be more like charter schools? Well in some places they are, like in New Orleans. That’s this idea of a portfolio school district, where traditional public schools look a lot like charter schools. Most decisions are made at the school building level, and the central office has a very limited role.

Paul Hill is the director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, and here’s how he sums it up:

PAUL HILL: A portfolio district holds all schools accountable for student performance – basically whether students are learning. And it doesn’t care who runs a school. If it’s succeeding it sustains it, and if it’s not succeeding it tries to find an alternative.

JENNIFER GUERRA: Now one of the reasons New Orleans is able to do that is because its teachers union doesn’t have a contract with the district. So the people who run the district can dictate whatever work rules they want.

SARAH HULETT: Detroit on the other hand has a pretty powerful union. The Detroit Federation of Teachers would have to agree things like longer school days, or to work on Saturdays. So that’s something that the superintendent or – right now – the emergency financial manager would have to negotiate in the collective bargaining agreement.

The union’s current contract does include some provisions that move in that direction. There are plans for longer days and years at some schools. They’re developing a new evaluation process to determine teachers’ effectiveness. And there are also plans for teacher bonuses at schools where students make academic gains. So those are all pretty significant steps in the direction of school reform.

JENNIFER GUERRA: We also got a lot of questions and comments about our story on special education and charter schools. This one is from Tom Ackerman. He says traditional public schools have to pay into programs that take care of students with the most severe disabilities. And he wants to know why charter schools don’t have to contribute to those programs.

SARAH HULETT: OK, so we put that question to Jim Goenner. He runs the Center for Charter Schools at Central Michigan University. CMU is Michigan’s largest charter school authorizer.

Goenner says in Michigan, it’s the regional school organizations called ISDs that handle special ed services. Each of them does it a little differently, but he says charter schools are treated the same as traditional schools.

JIM GOENNER: So for example, if the plan in that particular Intermediate School District where the charter’s located says the charter pays for the service, they pay for it – just as any other public school does. If the Intermediate School District says we pay for that service, then the charter gets that service at no cost, same as the other districts.

SARAH HULETT: Alright, last one. It’s from Caroline Grannan, she’s a public school advocate in San Francisco. And here’s what she has to say about charters schools:

CAROLINE GRANNAN: They self-select and really sometimes actively select for students who are more motivated and who have supportive families, because those families are willing to jump through the hoops that it takes to get their student into a charter school. And then the less motivated, more oppositional students and the ones who don’t have family support … wind up in the traditional public schools, and then everyone proclaims the charters superior to the traditional public schools, which is not sound and not fair.

JENNIFER GUERRA: Caroline brings up a good point, and it’s actually a question that was addressed in a recent study that came out while our series was airing. Sarah, you want to talk more about that?

SARAH HULETT: Yeah, the study is from the University of Minnesota Law School’s Institute on Race and Poverty. It found that the New Orleans school system post-Hurricane Katrina has created – and this is a quote – a “separate but unequal tiered system of schools.”

JENNIFER GUERRA: Yeah, the application process in New Orleans is really complicated. Parents not only have to research where they want to send their kids to school, they have to drop off applications at each individual charter school, which takes a lot of time. That is something Paul Vallas is aware of and he’s working to fix it, he says. Vallas runs the Recovery School District in New Orleans:

PAUL VALLAS: Right now we have what is known as the consolidated application process, where you can go to any school and apply to any school using the same standard application form. So what this does is it makes charter schools accessible perhaps to less-engaged parents, or the parent that doesn’t have time to shop around. Eventually though we hope to have a single form where you can apply to multiple schools on the same form and actually have a centralized lottery.

JENNIFER GUERRA: There is a lot to learn from New Orleans, and the way it’s reorganized its school system since the Hurricane. Test scores have gone up since the storm. There’s an urgency, and a commitment on the part of students and teachers and school leaders that you can feel when you walk into a classroom.

SARAH HULETT: There are also some problems, which the folks in charge there acknowledge are working to fix.

JENNIFER GUERRA: But there also some people who say New Orleans is on the wrong track with its almost singular focus on charter schools. And they worry about what the New Orleans experiment means for public education in Detroit and the country.

SARAH HULETT: So the question for school leaders in Detroit is whether the city should copy the New Orleans model…or learn from it.

To see the study from the University of Minnesota’s Institute on Race & Poverty, click here.

The Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives at Tulane University has written a response to the IRP report, which can be found here.

To hear other stories in the series “Rebuilding Detroit Schools: A Tale of Two Cities” and see related photos, videos and information, click here.

Send comments to twocities@umich.edu.

To download this MP3 or listen on a smartphone that doesn’t allow flash, click here.