Canadian system is model for school reform here
| • | Cost of reforms difficult to pin down |
By Derrick DePledge
Advertiser Education Writer
Mike Strembitsky remembers it as a tipping point, the moment when the impossible became inevitable at Edmonton Public.
Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser
The former schools superintendent, a burly, one-time hog farmer fond of colorful detail, has told his story countless times to Hawai'i educators during the past few months, and each time it sounds almost too easy. It wasn't.
"Only do this if you think it will work for Hawai'i," said Mike Strembitsky, former schools superintendent in Edmonton, Alberta.
In three decades, schools in Edmonton, Alberta, have undergone a remarkable transformation despite often bitter early opposition. Parents now choose where to send their children to school. Schools offer programs from ballet and aboriginal studies to hockey and aggressively compete with private schools for students. Principals control most of their school's finances and pick and choose their staff and the services they want from the central office. Student test scores, the most important measure, have steadily gone up.
School districts on the Mainland have tried to emulate Edmonton's success, with some encouraging early results, but it may take several more years to tell for sure whether it can be replicated. Gov. Linda Lingle, lawmakers and Hawai'i educators are on the brink of following Edmonton's path, and, to Strembitsky's credit, he is always careful to give a disclaimer.
"Don't do this because it worked for us in Edmonton," he says. "Only do this if you think it will work for Hawai'i."
Citizens Achieving Reform in Education, Lingle's advisory group, is expected tomorrow to recommend a new student spending formula based on Edmonton's model. The committee will also recommend dividing the state Department of Education into seven local school districts with locally elected school boards.
There is no definitive research yet on whether changes to financial or governance structures at public schools directly translate into student achievement, but with widespread disappointment with student performance in Hawai'i, many educators and policy-makers believe the tipping point for reform may be near.
"I know what we have now isn't working," Lingle says.
Wide praise for system
Strembitsky, who has volunteered his time in Hawai'i but soon may be hired as a paid consultant, has advised numerous U.S. school districts since he left his job as Edmonton superintendent nine years ago.
Edmonton has won wide praise for innovation, but so far only about a dozen U.S. school districts have tried to follow its model. School districts in Seattle, Houston and Cincinnati, among others, have experimented with variations of a student spending formula, usually within the context of larger reform aimed at repairing chronically troubled schools.
If Edmonton were such a sure-fire bet, why aren't more school districts copying it? Strembitsky believes more educators are interested but unwilling to battle the status quo. "An existing structure has a tremendous resistance to change," he said. "This is not fun. This is work."
Drawing conclusions based on a handful of examples can be imprecise, since the school districts vary in size, student characteristics and the amount of education spending and weights that go into student spending formulas. But school administrators and researchers have isolated some promising trends.
By basing school spending on student need, rather than the number of students at a given school, some school districts have been able to create more equity in school financing and school principals have been able to get resources to at-risk students.
"It's amazing the gains they have made in equity," said Marguerite Roza, a research professor at the University of Washington who has studied student spending formulas in Seattle, Houston, Cincinnati and Milwaukee.
School districts, Roza said, have usually tried to leave school spending patterns mostly in place during the first year of the transition and then fine-tuned the formula after educators and the public see the inequality and agree to change. Weights, or extra money, are usually given for low-income, English as a Second Language, special-education and gifted and talented students, but some districts have also given preferences to students with low test scores or those in the crucial behavioral years of middle school.
In Hawai'i, a sample formula created by the DOE found that most schools would stay within 5 percent to 15 percent of existing per-student spending, but that some schools would gain or lose as much as 30 percent and would need adjustments. Other school districts that have adopted the formula have also found disparities between schools that had to be adjusted — or accepted — over time.
Teacher salaries in general are a major contributing factor in disparities between schools, since veteran teachers who earn more money tend to gravitate to the best schools or to schools in middle or upper-class neighborhoods. Other disparities may be because some schools offer special programs designed to attract students away from private schools. Some schools are simply more successful than others at getting money and attention from school districts or the state, either because of well-connected administrators or vocal and organized parents.
"It's very politically difficult to take money away," Roza said.
Steven Adamowski, a former schools superintendent in Cincinnati and an education professor at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, said a student spending formula can level the playing field between schools so principals and teachers can concentrate on meeting performance standards.
"This is one element," said Adamowski, who also developed smaller, schools-within-schools at several high schools and a performance-driven accountability program in Cincinnati, where test scores have improved. "Other things also have to happen."
In Seattle, which adopted the formula in 1997, and in Houston, which followed in 2001 after a decade of related groundwork, school administrators have said there is now more equity in school spending and that student test scores have improved.
But the transition has not always been smooth. Joseph Olchefske, who spoke about the benefits of reform to Hawai'i educators in October, resigned as schools superintendent in Seattle after the district overspent its budget by $35 million over two years and teachers gave him a no-confidence vote. The financial problems were the result of several accounting and management errors and not a direct consequence of adopting a student spending formula.
Houston schools have been under an intense microscope since President Bush, former Texas governor, hailed Houston's success and made former Houston schools superintendent Rod Paige the U.S. Department of Education secretary.
Last summer, state auditors found that Houston schools had seriously underreported dropout rates during the same time the district was being singled out as a success story, but district administrators have stood behind student test-score gains under national media scrutiny.
Roza said it is difficult to make a direct link between the student spending formula and student achievement, since school districts have also taken other steps aside from financing to boost test scores. "I don't know whether it will ever be that concrete," she said.
Researchers at the University of Washington have received a $5.2 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for a four-year study on how education spending influences student achievement. They will look at schools in Washington state, Ohio, Texas and North Carolina.
But Hawai'i will likely not wait for perfect answers.
Rustic personality
Until now, it has been left largely to Strembitsky, an outsider, to shade in the outline of reform in Hawai'i with his own experiences.
With his northern accent and rustic personality, he has charmed educators with tales of bumbling principals and bureaucratic inertia. Aloha shirts aside, he is clearly not from here, but he is one of them, someone who has spent time in a classroom and understands the underbelly of school politics.
It has also helped that despite working out of a desk in Lingle's policy shop, he has not said that local school boards are absolutely necessary for reform to work, so he has no stake in the fight between Lingle and the Democrats over the need for school boards.
"People have to be willing to leave behind the existing way of doing things," Strembitsky says. "But you don't get to close down and reopen in three years when you're done. This is like redesigning a car while it's already on the road.
"Hawai'i definitely can make it."
Reach Derrick DePledge at ddepledge@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8084.
