Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Betheny Gross is a senior research analyst and research director at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Before working at CRPE, she was a research analyst at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

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STRIFE AND PROGRESS

BROOKINGS INSTITUTION PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................vii1 Introduction......................................................12 The Portfolio Strategy in Practice................................103 How the Portfolio Strategy Gets Adopted...........................424 Conflict in Portfolio Districts...................................655 Judging the Results of the Portfolio Strategy.....................906 Does the Portfolio Strategy Have Legs?............................1027 A Ratchet Effect?.................................................121Notes...............................................................125Index...............................................................133

Chapter One

The new school is run by a combination of New Orleans business people, college administrators, former New Orleans teachers, and teachers recruited from outside the state. It serves students like Yolanda, many of whom have experienced interrupted education, family separation, and loss of their old home. Moreover, most had been performing well below grade level in the schools they attended before the hurricane.

Throughout this book, we return to Yolanda's story and those of children, parents, and teachers in other cities. In the meantime, a debate rages about whether it is fair for Americans to demand more of their public schools. One side argues that high dropout rates and low achievement, especially among poor and minority students, are rooted in poverty and social conditions that schooling cannot overcome. The other side argues that schools do far less for poor and minority children than they could if they made better use of the time, money, and talent available to them. The debate has become nasty, with the first side claiming that schools and educators are being blamed for society's failings, and the second claiming that teachers unions and other defenders of the status quo put their own interests before those of children.

As is usual in polarized debates, both sides ignore inconvenient facts. Some schools are making innovative uses of time, money, and teaching methods and are having dramatic success with children who are otherwise likely to fail. However, even the most effective schools for disadvantaged children still don't work for all at-risk students. In particular, no one has found a way to reach the small minority of students who do not attend school faithfully and do not do the assigned work. Thus neither side's claims fit all the facts. In their candid moments, debaters on both sides concede both that poverty impedes many students and that many schools serving the poor are poorly staffed and inefficient. But neither side is about to abandon the debate, fearing that the other side would, if left unopposed, either totally dismantle public education or block reasonable efforts to improve it.

We are writing this book because we believe that both sides are partly right and that the current stalemate is harmful to everyone. It is possible both to maintain the core values of public education—including public oversight, a commitment to equity, and fair treatment of educators—and to organize public education so that it is always open to new ideas and new sources of talent. Stalemate leaves Americans in the worst possible position: millions of children leaving school unprepared to be effective participants in a competitive global economy and an increasingly complex political system.

Our goal is to explain a strategy that is emerging in many big cities. The strategy would preserve public education by transforming it from a stagnant entity that cannot adapt to the needs of its students into a dynamic public enterprise engaged in a constant search for the set of schools and instructional experiences that best meet the needs of a diverse urban student population.

The Portfolio Strategy: What It Is and What It Isn't

The portfolio strategy, often introduced by mayors and others concerned with a city's future viability, is so named because it is founded on an idea similar to a financial portfolio (table 1-1). A financial manager aims for a diverse portfolio that performs well. She avoids betting everything on one investment, knowing that some holdings will perform much better than expected and some much worse. This manager is agnostic as to which companies are represented but knows that diversity is key and regularly reviews performance as well as industry and company news. When some stocks make impressive gains, more of those are added, and when some are trending poorly, those are sold.

A school district portfolio manager thinks the same way. No school model is right for every child, so the district needs a diverse array of schools. By constantly reviewing school and student outcomes, as well as school climate and neighborhood need, the portfolio manager knows which schools are both performing and trending well, which schools have the possibility of improving, and which schools must be replaced with options that are right for the affected students. Portfolio district managers also track performance closely and make sure everyone in the system has access to good data. The portfolio strategy is a way to seek a solution to a problem that has never been solved before, akin to the methods used to discover remedies to previously incurable illnesses or to develop computers that can do things previously thought impossible. In K–12 education the problem to be solved is how to effectively educate all the children in a large city, including those from the most disadvantaged homes. The portfolio strategy does not assume that the best methods known today will always be the best available. Instead, it incorporates a spirit of continuous improvement, always asking, "Is this the very best we can do for our community's children?"

Not every effort to create a new school or improve an existing one can work as planned the first time. With a portfolio, leaders add more of what's working, eliminate what is not working, assess, and repeat. They also track performance...