ST. LOUIS • For the past four years, everyone from legislators to the city’s mayor have publicly complimented St. Louis schools Superintendent Kelvin Adams for the slow and steady improvements being made in his struggling district.
Test scores had been rising. The budget showed a surplus. Strong principals were being groomed, and ineffective teachers shown the door. Last year, the state recognized these improvements and upgraded the district’s status to provisional accreditation.
But a new reality set in on Friday when state performance reports showed St. Louis Public Schools ranked as the second-worst performing district in Missouri last year, receiving just 24.6 percent of the points available.
The results — which Adams called “bleak” — partly reflect how students did on state standardized tests, including a decline in math and language arts.
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But the sudden decline in the district’s standing isn’t about plummeting performance. By many measures, the system is doing about as well now as a year ago.
The difference is that a state education department that once used a magnifying glass to evaluate districts is now using a microscope. It’s a new rating system that digs deeper into every success and failure.
And while Adams said he isn’t making excuses, the picture isn’t as bad as the score indicates, he said.
“It’s not like everything fell off the wagon,” Adams said. “The rules changed and we were not nimble enough to make the changes we needed to.”
Even so, the city district’s weak showing calls into question the recovery that many believe the school system had been making. And in some ways, the more probing assessment has exposed weaknesses that had been beneath the surface.
“We were disappointed in its overall performance,” Education Commissioner Chris Nicastro said of the city school system. “There’s no question St. Louis Public Schools continues to have a ways to go and we’re certainly anxious to work with them in getting improvements.”
Robbyn Wahby, education liaison for St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, said she hopes the low score will trigger more cooperation between the school district and the mayor’s office in improving education options across the city. “We want to come together and look for bold solutions,” she said. “And we need to act quickly.”
Without improvement, the school district could be in a position to lose accreditation in two years. Under a state statute upheld by the Missouri Supreme Court in June, that means all city children — including 25,000 in the district’s schools, 10,000 in charter schools and thousands more in private schools — would be eligible to transfer to St. Louis County schools at the district’s expense.
A NEW STANDARD
The new state rating system — like the one it replaced — looks at a range of factors such as standardized test scores, graduation rates, attendance and college readiness.
But in several key ways, the new system raises the bar. For example, the old system rewarded districts for enrolling students in Advanced Placement courses. Now, those districts must also must show students are passing AP exams.
Across the board, St. Louis Public Schools is falling short by the new 140-point standard. The district earned none of the 56 available points tied to state standardized exams. And while it earned most of the points related to graduation rates, it failed in categories of college readiness and attendance.
Turning around a school district like St. Louis’ is no easy task. More than 89 percent of its students qualify for a free or reduced-price lunch, a federal marker of poverty. Children often change schools multiple times a year, moving in and out of the city public school system, charter schools, and into other districts.
Last year, the district had the added challenge of enrolling students from Imagine charter schools, which closed after years of academic failure. Adams said taking on the 3,000 or so students did affect test scores, though his staff is not yet sure to what extent.
Even before Friday’s scores became public, district staff had communicated with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education new steps being taken to improve city schools.
Some say recent success in Kansas City schools suggest that improvement is possible even amid urban challenges. That district scored 60 percent of the points possible, after losing accreditation in 2012. Its score puts Kansas City schools in the range of provisional accreditation.
“So it’s not impossible,” said Don Senti, executive director of Cooperating School Districts of Greater St. Louis, an umbrella organization that provides services to area school systems.
Parents such as Danielle Jackson, with a son and daughter in different city magnet schools, are impatient for a better day.
“At the end of the day, these are children,” she said. “They will become adults one day. If they can’t get what’s needed, they’ll fail.”
STEADY IMPROVEMENT
In 2007, the state Board of Education revoked the district’s accreditation because of the system’s unstable leadership and failures in academics and finances.
The state Board of Education replaced the district’s elected board with a state-imposed one. The three-member Special Administrative Board hired Adams in 2008. And in the years since, the school system made gains in its graduation rate, attendance, finances and student achievement, according to state and district data.
In 2007, just 20 percent of students had tested at grade level in reading or math. The passing rates for those subjects in 2011 had jumped to 33.1 percent and 30.9 percent, respectively.
Amid those gains, Adams and Rick Sullivan, president of the Special Administrative Board, traveled to Jefferson City to tell legislators of the success.
And then things began to sputter.
Allegations of test fraud were made by teachers at several elementary schools, claiming they were ordered by superiors to change answers on state exams. In wake of those allegations, Adams stepped up policing of the exams, placing a member of the district accountability staff at the schools each day during testing.
In 2012, scores at several schools dropped. Adams said the cheating problems were isolated, and not indicative of the entire district.
And in fact, thanks to improvement in select categories, the district last year finally had enough points on the state’s old 14-point scale to dig out of unaccredited status. Last fall, the State Board of Education members vote to upgrade the district’s status to provisional, with letters from Slay and others in support.
FOCUSING EFFORTS
For St. Louis Public Schools to lose accreditation again, the state Board of Education would need to take action. Nicastro said on Thursday that she doesn’t expect the board to review the district’s accreditation status until 2015, after three years of the new scoring system. That safeguards the district from an immediate and expensive outflow of students to other districts.
Earlier this month, David Jackson, president of the district’s disempowered elected board, asked for support from the Special Administrative Board for a plan that could further shelter the district from student transfers.
The elected board wants the state to rate schools — and not school districts — so that only students attending failing schools would be able to transfer out under the state’s school transfer statute.
“This is one way we could prevent the catastrophe that’s happening now,” Jackson said, referring to the transfer situation in the unaccredited Normandy and Riverview Gardens districts.
Jackson points out that St. Louis Public Schools has “some of the highest-rated schools in the state.”
Indeed, the new state rating system shows that several of the district’s 72 schools are succeeding even as others in the district are failing.
Twenty schools earned at least 70 percent of the points available under the state’s new rating system. And three magnet schools — Kennard Junior Classical Academy, McKinley Classical Learning Academy, and Metro Academic and Classical High School — earned perfect scores.
At the same time, 34 schools performed at a level so low that they would be unaccredited if the state designated such ratings to individual schools.
Turning things around, Adams said, is about focusing on those struggling schools.
Adams said he has now assumed direct leadership for the 18 schools with the lowest achievement levels. The schools are treated as a “subschool district” that he calls the Superintendent’s Zone — with extra support from central office and an extra $3 million for tutoring and services.
Adams said the poor score on the state’s new report card has caused him to lose sleep. But he expressed certainty that the district isn’t where it was in 2008, when he first arrived.
“Frankly, five years ago this was an unaccredited district totally and the (test) scores were lower than they are now,” he said. “No excuses. Please understand. I have no doubt in my mind that next year we’ll have a much different conversation.”
