Lots of Moving Parts to Metro Schools Reform Process

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School Board Chair Gracie Porter listens as Schools Director Jesse Register speaks at a school board meeting.

Nashville’s school system is a pressure cooker of change these days.

The district’s 30 million dollar cut of Race to the Top money is paying for a massive brainstorming effort. The goal is to improve test scores in a city that has consistently lagged behind average–even for a state that itself is near the bottom of the nation.

There is some concern Metro Schools may be taking on too much at once. But others say it’s the only course of action that makes sense.

If you look at even a small slice of the district, you can see how the ideas quickly snowball into a potentially dizzying number of programs.

Take the example of English Language Learners. There’s a move to put students who don’t yet speak English into regular classes for part of the day. That’s one program, and at first glance, it’s pretty straightforward. But to make that work, the district also has to make a concerted effort to make sure their parents understand what’s going on, which takes another program.

There’s also training for the teachers dealing with these students for the first time, as well as for the ones who have to teach them English in smaller chunks of the day, with one course for this in elementary and middle school, another for ELL teachers in high schools, plus ongoing training for everyone needed as time goes on.

If you’re starting to lose track, well, just wait. Because, as ELL Director Nicole Chaput-Guiznani explained at a recent school board meeting, this is all happening in the context of other, overlapping programs. “Another important piece to us is to make sure we’re aligned with the new teacher evaluation rubric… to the twenty three themes of an artisan teacher…we’re also in the process of aligning our work with Understanding by Design Framework…”

That’s just what’s connected to a relatively small group of students. District-wide, there were more than forty programs in some level of development during just the last school year.

Dr. Hargreaves has studied and published about 30 books on school reform.

Dr. Andy Hargreaves says that’s natural. “In the initial stages of a reform effort there is a lot that is new, and it can feel overwhelming.”

Hargreaves is an expert in school reform. He chairs an advisory panel that’s watching over the shoulder of Metro School’s leaders. “One of the key things as you get into the middle phase is making decisions about what to stop, what to give up and what to give lower priority to.”

For two years running, an outside evaluation has said Metro may be taking on too much. It has encouraged the district to streamline its efforts. But for the most part, Schools Director Jesse Register says the weeding out has already been done. “I believe that you have to deal with the entire organization at one time, so if you have different pieces that have weaknesses, then you have to try to correct them all at one time.”

To be clear, Register is a fan of Hargreaves, and all of the outside feedback Metro is getting. He asked for their advice, after all. He admits his approach flies in the face of conventional wisdom.
“A more traditional way of thinking is that you can only undertake one or two major reform initiatives at the time.” He says there’s good reason to try something different. “Most reform initiatives in this country in public education have failed.”

Keeping it simple hasn’t worked, so Register feels driven to go the other direction, layering one piece on top of another, on top of another. And if there’s a time to try it all, that time is now—the Race to the Top grant paying for so much of at least the initial costs for these programs goes away in two years.

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