LA Progressive Bottom-Up Rather Than Top-Down
“I was shocked that the state would consider a failed reform model that would take control of a Durham school out of our community’s hands,” Durham school board member Natalie Beyer recalls about her reaction to the threat to take over Lakewood.
The “failed” track record for state takeovers Beyer referred to is well documented in the example of an experiment in Tennessee with a similar approach called an Achievement School District. As the Tennessean reported in 2019, “Six years since it began taking over low-performing schools, new research shows Tennessee’s Achievement School District is failing.”
“We’re willing to innovate locally,” Beyer says.
To act on its willingness to innovate, the Durham school board partnered with teachers and local organizations to examine school improvement models being used in communities with similar demographics.
“We studied Cincinnati a lot,” Beyer recalls. Cincinnati’s record of improving student academic measures had been reported by Greg Anrig, an author and vice president of Washington, D.C., think tank the Century Foundation, in 2013. A 2014 article in the Cincinnati Enquirer reported that the district’s model of turning schools into “community learning centers” was being hailed as a potential “national model” for urban districts.
Cincinnati schools that had taken up the community learning center model operated as “neighborhood-based ‘hub[s],’” according to a 2017 joint report by the Learning Policy Institute and the National Education Policy Center, with schools that had a special coordinator who created partnerships with local agencies and nonprofits to provide a range of academic, health, and social services to students and families.
Cincinnati schools offering these services “had better attendance and showed significant improvements on state graduation tests,” according to the joint report, based on the school district’s internal analysis…
Borrowing from Cincinnati’s community learning centers and what the teachers’ union called “community schools,” Durham gradually put together a school improvement approach that grew from the bottom up rather than being imposed from the top down.
‘What Excites Parents and Teachers’
“The term community schools means literally a million different things depending on where you are,” Proffitt, who is now the vice president of the state association of educators, told me in a phone call.
“Community schools is not a program,” says Grant. “[It’s] about an approach.”