A Large Convergence of Challenges

At the very first school board meeting I attended, the superintendent began listing off the overwhelming challenges we face. He started to say it was a "Perfect Storm" but quickly corrected himself and said instead that we face, "A Large Convergence of Challenges." Indeed.

After making the transition from Corporate America to Public Education four weeks ago now, there are several things that have surprised me. Oh sure there's the slow moving bureaucracy, the culture of low expectations and an office building that looks like it belongs in Detroit. All of that was completely expected. But what's been interesting are the things I didn't expect.

Perhaps the most interesting eye-opener for me so far is the interdependency of the issues facing urban schools. Nothing exists as a discrete problem and rarely are there resources available to fix one problem without creating, or at least impacting, another. Take the foundation of a school district--the school buildings. Suppose you have a school building that isn't fully used to capacity. It was built 50 years ago when the district had tons of students, but today it's half or three-quarters empty. Perhaps it's in a run down neighborhood or has a bad academic reputation.

Being a good steward of our public resources, one might try to find a way to use this facility at 100% capacity. After all, that's when the building is most cost-effective. Besides, there are always programs and other schools in need of space.

So your options might go something like this: you could move some of the special programs (like English as a second language or Special Education) into your semi-empty building. Doing so would likely bring down the overall academic profile of the school since these populations tend to have lower achievement rates. Doing so might also affect the overall racial mix of the school, adversely affecting the ability to maintain desegregated schools. Some people might say that you were trying to remove low-performing students from a 'good school' in order to shuffle them off into a 'bad school.'

Another option might be to keep those special programs where they are, but move kids from crowded regular programs into your semi-empty building. The challenge there is that's pretty unlikely that your crowded buildings are next door to your non-crowded buildings. In fact, they may be on the opposite sides of town. So by doing this you will either disrupt hundreds of students by re-drawing attendance districts and forcing students into different schools OR you will be busing students across town for 20 or 30 minutes one way. In fact, nearly everything you do will have a transportation cost associated with it (which already takes up 30% of the district's budget). And none of this touches on the political issues that parents and school board members will likely raise when any program moves anywhere.

The point of this is to simply demonstrate that nearly all of the various desirable goals to which we hold schools accountable are constantly in conflict. While it seems pretty straightforward to say that our decisions should be focused on doing whatever we need to do to improve academic achievement, doing so in nearly every case is going to have an adverse affect on some other metric that we value--segregation, cost, parental choice, neighborhood schools, efficient use of resources, etc. These aren't impossible decisions. They aren't insurmountable problems. But they do require courage and leadership that can be in very short supply.