The Last School Board - A Review
Because our primary goal in this forum is to move the district forward, utilizing all the resources at our community’s disposal, we don’t want to spend too much time discussing the past, but we think it’s important to understand where we are now and how we got here to have a meaningful conversation regarding the path forward. This article is mostly speculation, but we hope it informs some of the decisions we’ll make in the future – from how we want to teach our students to how DPS management should operate.
Beth Nolan, the past School Board President, has been a lightning rod, and here at The DPS Chalkboard we think it’s important to try and understand the direction (we believe) she was trying to take the district. With all her posturing and attempts to control the narrative, which usually just made things worse, we’re not sure if she was given a fair shake on (again – what we believe to be) the main thing she was trying to accomplish as school board president.
In 2017 Beth Nolan, Kendal Briscoe, and Beth Creighton ran as a block and were all elected to the Decatur School Board. After joining the board, they set their sights on a major accomplishment: to make the Decatur Public Schools (DPS) a Destination School District, reversing the tide of families leaving the district and bring new families in from the surrounding communities.
Amongst themselves (again, we’re speculating here and throughout this article – and this is the last time we’ll mention that) they had conversations about how charter schools were having success in cities like New York and New Orleans and concluded that these success stories were measured primarily by their ability to raise standardized test scores. So, it was easy for these three school board members to conclude that if their time on the board was to be measured a “success”, their goal must be to raise the test scores in Decatur Public Schools - District 61. With the idea that raising these scores would stem the flow of families leaving, and if impactful enough, could possibly bring kids back into the district!
But, of course this wasn’t going to be easy. They hopefully knew that much of the success of high performing charter schools comes from the school’s ability to choose the parents that genuinely cared about their child’s education, and if the parents of these new charter school students eventually turned out not-to-care, those students could be kicked out. But DPS clearly can’t kick kids out of their district. They also understood that the Teachers Union makes it difficult for the Board to give any new or additional directives directly to the teachers – directives like longer workdays and required home contact are two additional bullets in the charter school arsenal used to great effect. (In fact, it may have been the strong teacher’s union along with Decatur’s reputation as a “union town” that prevented DPS from attracting the KIPP Charter School company a decade ago despite receiving over a half million-dollar grant to fund a KIPP start-up from the Staley Foundation.) So, since the School Board’s ability to implement drastic change was limited, they devised a plan where they would effect change through the school principals whom they could directly control, requiring them to force teachers to use the teaching method commonly known as “teaching to the test”. This was going to be the pathway to success for the new Board. Teaching to the test, the theory goes, works in charter schools, so why not in District 61?
(A little side note here… At the DPS Chalkboard we are not against “teaching to the test” per se. We plan to have a future article on this technique, but for now suffice it to say – there’s nothing inherently wrong with this method of teaching. If “teaching to the test” doesn’t force everyone into a narrow band where gifted students aren’t allowed to excel, and slower students aren’t left behind, and as long as teachers are still given autonomy, purpose, and an opportunity to thrive, “teaching to the test” can work.)
But the Board was faced with the difficult problem of how they would go about implementing this huge Change Management process – and do it quickly. Five years ago it was unheard of to have every class in the district follow the same general teaching plan, keeping students on-task for the entire year and holding teachers accountable for straying from the directed curriculum. Ms. Nolan needed the right person who believed in this new philosophy, and had the backbone to implement the necessary changes. An opportunity arose with the departure of an Assistant Superintendent for the District – an opportunity to hire someone new who would be strong enough to remove building principals that could not, or would not, go along. After all, teachers had never been required explicitly to teach to specific and exact standards, or even stay on track with other teachers in their individual school grade level, not just in their building but across the entire district.
After a short search the board found their man in Jeff Dase; a man who believes (in his own words) “eggs must be cracked, frequently, to make an omelet”. And so, working closely with Ms. Nolan, Mr. Dase set to work holding school principals accountable for micro-level details of exactly what was taught, on what day, and in what method in every classroom; admonishing the principals when evidence of a teacher’s adherence to the new policy was not forthcoming, and removing principals who struggled (or frankly didn’t see the benefit) to provide the difficult paperwork required.
Now, nearly four years after Ms. Nolan plan was hatched and “teaching to the test” is an integrated part of the school districts teaching methodology, it’s time to take a step back and ask: has this plan to raise test scores, and bring students back from outside the district worked? But unfortunately for everyone involved, due to Covid we may not be unable to completely judge the test score question for several years. However elementary school children recently finished the fall Fastbridge assessment tests, so we will be able to take a glimpse into those results in a coming article. We do know however that the scores will not be good - nationwide scores in math are down 8% and reading scores are stagnant - but we may be able to make a few inferences from our relative movement from the state scores.
As for becoming a Destination District, the numbers don’t yet look good here either. Demographics are tricky to judge, but the number of students in the district has dropped by 4% since 2017 while the county schools combined enrollment has stayed relatively flat, even in a time when the overall general county population continues to decline. It appears DPS continues to lose out to the county schools.
Now in hindsight, are we able to fairly judge the last Decatur Public Schools School Board? Our answer at this point is a qualified – yes, we can. In this post-No Child Left Behind world teachers, schools, and districts are unfortunately measured by their test scores, and Ms. Nolan certainly had a goal of raising those scores. So, we must give her credit for following through on her myopic plan to raise standardized test scores. But unfortunately, that goal has not been achieved, nor do we here at DPS Chalkboard believe it could have been achieved even without the interruption in learning over the last two years. Furthermore, we are going to try to analyze the data when it’s available (and this is very important) but even if we were to achieve a marginal increase in test scores, which is unlikely, that increase will certainly not make DPS a Destination District. Given the current implementation of the “teaching to the test” strategy (and a future article will discuss this further), an increase in scores will most likely come from an increase in the middle quadrant of students, or the average, at the expense of the upper and lower quadrants of students. And it’s our opinion (and feel free to let us know in the comments if you agree or disagree!) the parents most likely to move into the district for better schooling are the parents of the upper and lower quadrant students. In other words, the most likely path to becoming a destination district is to attract parents of gifted students at one end and very low students at the other. The current philosophy, even if it were to work to slightly raise scores in the middle, simply isn’t a path to success. The concept was noble and not entirely without merit, even if the expected results were nearly impossible to achieve.
Finally, and putting speculation aside over what Ms. Nolan’s plan was, you can talk to nearly any teacher in the district and they will agree that her legacy as the School Board President is a major shift toward “Teaching to the Test”. Did it, or will it, work?
We welcome comments. They are the fuel for future articles. (However, we reserve the right to delete comments that aren’t productive.)