It was decision time. Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro took her seat beside the Missouri Board of Education, before a crowd of Normandy school administrators, state lawmakers, parents and reporters.
In preparation for this moment, she and her staff had spent long, caffeine-infused hours inside a conference room in the Jefferson State Office Building, debating various options for the Normandy School District.
They had to settle on one.
They could retain the district’s unaccredited status, which would keep it under the controversial school transfer law, bringing certain bankruptcy. Or they could choose an option that would give the new district a balanced budget, but force hundreds of Normandy transfer students out of their new schools.
It was the kind of dilemma policy leaders hate. No matter the decision, there would be public outcry. But the opportunity to act in a way that might transform the state’s worst-performing district was a task Nicastro relished. Never had any state or school district successfully transformed a failing urban school system. Nicastro wanted to try.
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The Education Commissioner leaned toward the microphone.
“Across the nation, hundreds of thousands of students — who are disproportionately minority and low-income — are trapped in persistently low-performing schools,” she said. To bring dramatic improvement, she added, the state and local systems, policies and structures must be fixed.
“Many of the recommendations today are difficult, if not painful for some,” she said. “None are made without careful consideration and thoughtful deliberation by the (education department) and district staff. In the final analysis, the essential question was, ‘What is best for the children of Normandy?’”
The question is a key one.
Competing views on how to address Normandy and other troubled districts in Missouri have collided in the state Capitol as lawmakers and education officials have debated the fundamentals of what should take shape.
Nicastro is in the eye of that storm. For her, it’s familiar territory.
FACING CRITICISM
In her fifth year as education commissioner, Nicastro has grown accustomed to driving change where it’s not welcomed.
She’s overseen a department that has been subject to deep budget cuts, forcing it into a more regulatory role, rather than the supportive one preferred by superintendents statewide.
Nicastro’s embrace of Common Core has led to backlash from the right, who refer to the new national learning standards as “Obamacore.” From the left, she has come under fire from those who oppose the move toward more testing and high-stakes accountability for teachers.
She’s faced scorn from Kansas City-area superintendents who felt she should have pushed for an upgraded accreditation status after the district showed improvement last year.
And her recommendation to classify the Normandy School District as unaccredited in 2012 prompted then-Superintendent Stanton Lawrence to accuse her and the state board of stacking the decks against high-poverty, high-minority school districts. Just two years before, Lawrence had agreed to take in children from Wellston, a neighboring failed district that the state board had dissolved.
When the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the school transfer law last summer, Nicastro and her staff set guidelines to make the transfers out of unaccredited school districts less chaotic.
The recommendations gave receiving districts the cover they needed to turn children away when classrooms were full. They also allowed unaccredited districts to select just one district to send buses to, rather than paying to transport all children who transferred under the law.
Neither Nicastro nor her department had anything to do with the creation of the law itself, passed by the Missouri Legislature in 1993. They were nonetheless blamed at several public forums for the financial devastation brought on the unaccredited Normandy and Riverview Gardens districts.
It all comes with the job, say most who are familiar with Nicastro’s role.
“Chris has an enormous job as education commissioner,” said Rep. Tommie Pierson, D-St. Louis County, who met Nicastro in 1996 when he was pastor of a church in the Riverview Gardens School District. He eventually served as the district’s School Board president. “You have all these factions. You have all these people who have ideas on how things should be. It doesn’t make a difference which way you go. You make some people happy; you make some people unhappy.”
The Missouri Constitution protects the position of education commissioner from the political upheaval that could result from making unpopular decisions.
Nicastro works for the Missouri Board of Education, whose eight members are appointed by the governor and serve staggered terms. Several outspoken lawmakers have called for her resignation. Yet neither the Legislature nor the governor can fire her.
“I joke and say good thing I don’t have to run for homecoming queen this year,” Nicastro said.
SHAKING THINGS UP
When the Missouri Board of Education interviewed Nicastro for the state’s top education job five years ago, president Peter Herschend was looking for someone who would bring change.
“Change is hard, but stagnation is fatal,” Herschend said last week. “We were not stagnant in the sense of dead, but we weren’t going anywhere.”
He had met Nicastro when she was Chris Wright, superintendent of the Riverview Gardens School District and then the Hazelwood School District. In her two decades in north St. Louis County, Nicastro had developed a reputation for shaking things up.
In Hazelwood, she told the School Board that the district was in academic trouble. She went about the controversial task of redrawing school boundaries, shifting the racial and socioeconomic makeup of schools. In the following years, the district improved security and adopted new learning programs and a school uniform policy for elementary schools. She was able to win voter approval for two bond issues that paid for four new middle schools.
She also earned her share of detractors.
When word got out that Nicastro was one of three finalists for the commissioner’s job, several people called or wrote the state to complain, said Mark Behlmann, who was then president of the Hazelwood School Board.
“She is a change agent,” he said two weeks ago. “My interview with the state board when they were thinking about her — I made it very clear that’s what they were going to get.”
Nicastro’s experience in education spans 40 years. She began as a social studies teacher and administrator in the Northwest School District in Jefferson County. She worked as an assistant superintendent in the Ritenour School District for 11 years. Then, in 1995, she arrived at Riverview Gardens, an unaccredited school system with poor student performance, a high dropout rate and other problems. The district’s poverty level and the percentage of minority students was on the rise. The previous superintendent had been there 29 years.
“When she walked into Riverview Gardens, she saw firsthand some very ill effects of complacency,” said David Clohessy, who served as district spokesman for several years under Nicastro. “She took a district that was in the dark ages and literally prodded and begged and worked to move it forward, over some pretty vigorous opposition.”
She began by using retirement incentives to replace the all-white central office staff. She built a team that included African-American administrators, and she recruited several new principals.
Nicastro pushed parental involvement and formed new community advisory committees. She met regularly with clergy, real estate agents and local politicians. She launched a school breakfast program and opened alternative schools. She was successful in getting voters to approve a $17 million bond issue to expand and renovate schools.
Test scores at some schools rose. Riverview Gardens went from unaccredited, to fully accredited, down to provisional, and then back up to accredited.
Marlene Terry, the first African-American elected to the Riverview Gardens board in 1999, said she was impressed with Nicastro at first.
“Then I came to believe she wasn’t fighting for the children. She was fighting for herself.”
Over the years, the perception of Nicastro has gone to two extremes.
Supporters say Nicastro will do whatever it takes to benefit kids, particularly minorities and the economically disadvantaged. They point to the plethora of forums she would hold to get feedback on any policy changes, and to get the community support needed to move forward.
Detractors say she’s willing to run over anyone who doesn’t share her vision. They accuse her of being autocratic, of not staying true to her word, of trying to come into African-American districts and control things.
“She certainly isn’t someone who relishes a fight,” Clohessy said. “Often the public sector attracts incredibly well-meaning people who err in the direction of avoiding healthy and necessary conflict. Chris is not one of them. If she’s convinced, and data supports a particular course of action, she’s not shy in pushing what’s best for kids.”
‘THE STATE HAS CANCER’
Nicastro arrived in Jefferson City as the first woman to serve in the state’s top education post. She also was the first to bring experience in urban and suburban districts to the commissioner’s job.
Immediately, she began working to increase accountability in schools, districts and in the teaching profession. The education department now focuses less on inputs, such as funding, and more on outputs, such graduation rates and test scores.
Nicastro has pushed an agenda that includes early childhood education and holding Missouri teachers colleges accountable for the first time for how well their graduates perform in the classroom. And lately, much of her focus has been on districts in urban and suburban areas, to the disappointment of rural superintendents.
From the start, Nicastro was vocal about the state’s failure in how it had been addressing high-poverty districts, ones that are filled predominantly with African-American students.
“We cannot afford to allow over 7 percent of our student population to be at risk because of where they live,” she said in 2009. “Our greatest challenge is to find a way to meet student needs in every school, in every district, throughout the state.”
Across Missouri, more than 62,000 students are enrolled in unaccredited or provisionally accredited school districts, state education officials say. The average graduation rate in those school systems is less than 70 percent. Less than 30 percent of students enrolled in those districts scored proficient on statewide tests for math, communication arts, science or social studies.
“That enrollment in the state has cancer,” Herschend said. “I can’t count myself as healthy if 10 percent of me has cancer. We cannot as a state move ourselves to where we want to be when we have 10 percent of our kids in failed or failing districts.”
Herschend, a 23-year veteran of the Missouri Board of Education, has consistently championed Nicastro’s initiatives, which require the approval of the board’s majority.
In February, the board adopted a new plan for addressing troubled schools across the state. It involves a layered, preventive approach that will send support and increased accountability to districts that begin to slip, rather than wait until they’re where Normandy is to intervene.
Nicastro was in Normandy’s central office on Tuesday, meeting with three members of the new appointed board. Her staff has been working with Normandy’s administrative team for weeks on such issues as staffing, professional development and restructuring the school day.
When the Normandy School District becomes the Normandy Schools Collaborative on Tuesday, it will operate under a new school board — one made up of appointed experts with experience in finance, education administration and nonprofit work in the Normandy area.
Replacing elected boards with appointed ones in urban districts is a move favored by U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. Nicastro said it should be done as a last resort.
“It is my sincere hope this is the first and last time we have to have this level of involvement directly in the operation of a school district,” she said. “School districts are best operated and best governed at the local level.”
For the first time, education department staff will oversee a district’s operations, though the work will belong to Superintendent Ty McNichols and his team. The new Normandy will have to get the community on board. Trust must be built. Bridges with parents must be strengthened.
“I’m realistic enough to know (those bridges) might not be established by Chris Nicastro,” Nicastro said.
At 63, she is at an age when most public school administrators have retired.
Normandy has been a troubled journey, Nicastro said, one that’s had her and her staff working long hours, trading email after midnight and wondering what the outcome might look like.
Nicastro said Normandy is a “rare opportunity to do something really significant that could have a huge impact in urban education, not just in Normandy, or in the St. Louis area, or in the state, but everywhere.”
