Progress and problems: Checking in on the Cleveland Plan

During the summer of 2012, Governor Kasich signed House Bill 525 into law. The bill, dubbed the Cleveland Plan, implemented aggressive reforms aimed at substantially improving academic performance in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District (CMSD). The plan focused on four strategies: growing the number of high-performing schools while closing and replacing failing schools; investing and phasing in educational reforms from pre-K to college and career; shifting authority and resources to individual schools; and creating the Cleveland Transformation Alliance (CTA), a nonprofit responsible for supporting implementation and holding schools accountable. Soon after the bill was passed, Cleveland voters approved a four-year, $15 million levy to support the plan.

Soon, the district will need to go back to the voters to renew the levy that passed in 2012. District leaders have been working hard to demonstrate enough progress on their goals to maintain community support, and they’re right that several promising signs of progress exist. But Cleveland has long been one of the worst-performing districts in the country, and incremental glimmers of progress may not cut it for families and taxpayers. One only needs to glance at the comments section of a Plain Dealer article about the district to observe the public’s already faltering faith. In order to answer the question of whether the district has made enough progress to deserve continued community support, it’s wise to investigate both sides of the coin: the progress and the problems. Let’s take a look.

Signs of progress

This June, the CTA released a report on the implementation and impact of the Cleveland Plan that contained some signs of progress. The report uses state letter grades to place Cleveland schools in one of four categories: high-performing, mid-performing, low-performing, or failing. According to these categories, the percentage of students in failing schools has declined from 43 percent in 2010–11 to 35 percent in 2013–14. CMSD’s high school graduation rate also rose to 54 percent in 2012–13, an 8 percent gain since 2010–11. Fewer graduates tested into remedial college courses, and the percentage of CMSD students who met the college-ready benchmark ACT score of 21 increased from 12 percent in 2011–12 to 14 percent in 2013–14. Finally, of the nine CMSD schools labeled high-performing, six were fully enrolled by the start of the 2014–15 school year.

In his annual update, district CEO Eric Gordon asserted that the Cleveland Plan “is working.” While this year’s objective measures are delayed due to state testing transitions, Gordon shared several positive indicators, including better facilities, more parental engagement, stabilizing district enrollment, 750 new high-quality preschool seats, and financial stability. Gordon isn’t the only one who thinks the plan is proceeding successfully. Megan O’Bryan, the founding executive director of the CTA pointed in a recent op-ed to many of the same measures that Gordon and the CTA report highlighted. She also emphasized the “unprecedented collaboration” between the district and high-performing charters. For instance, CMSD received a $100,000 planning grant through the Gates Foundation’s District-Charter compact. The compact has charter and district officials meeting to discuss how they can work together to increase the availability of high-quality seats. Perhaps most surprising, at least to those outside of Cleveland, is that the district actually shares levy funds with high-performing charters that have decided to work with the district.

In a recent edition of The Sound of Ideas, both Gordon and O’Bryan were careful to note that lasting and transformational change takes time. O’Bryan mentioned that although many of the changes to CMSD were sweeping and significant, they were also behind the scenes, and more definitive results are still to come. In particular, she referred to the increasing autonomy of schools. The CTA’s June report echoes her point: As of 2014–15, 48 percent of the district’s operating budget is controlled at the school level—a remarkable rise from the 5 percent in 2011–12. Gordon, meanwhile, noted that the district’s value-added scores have increased from an F to the equivalent of a C.[1] Value-added measures determine how much a student learns over the course of one year, and a C grade—the state’s expectation—implies that students are learning a full year’s worth of content. While meeting the expectation of a year’s worth of learning is a significant milestone for a district that has struggled for a long time, CMSD needs—sooner rather than later—to help its students gain more than a year’s worth of learning in order to catch up.

Although the temporary absence of state report cards could lead some cities to ease off the gas, Cleveland leaders have taken the opposite approach. Earlier this summer, the CTA released its own school quality ratings. In its School Quality Guide, the CTA provides profiles of schools that include performance index, value added, and graduation rates from the previous year’s state report cards, as well as the alliance’s rating of the schools’ current and historical academic performance. The profiles also include reviews of schools from community members, student demographics, student and teacher attendance percentages, and information provided by each school[2] in regards to its mission and philosophy, academic offerings, extracurricular activities, and safety.

Persistent problems

One persistent problem that CTA and district officials face on the road to raising achievement is attendance. During the 2013–14 school year, Cleveland’s 89.1 percent attendance rate was the lowest of all Big 8 urban school districts. That rate has been flat for quite a few years: In 2012–13 attendance was 89 percent, and in 2011–12 it was 90.9 percent. In fact, over the course of the past nine school years, the highest attendance rate has been 92.1 percent—and that was all the way back in 2006–07. When considering attendance percentages, it’s important to remember that they’re not like grade percentages; while 89 percent on a test indicates a B grade, 89 percent attendance means that thousands of kids across the district are missing school each day. Gordon recently told the Plain Dealer that over the past three years, the district has averaged 57 percent of kids missing ten days or more in a year—a worrisome number, considering the Ohio Revised Code defines a habitually truant student as one who misses twelve or more school days and a chronically truant student as one who misses fifteen or more school days in a single school year.   

In an effort to combat the problem, CMSD has created a new campaign complete with radio ads, lawn signs, and billboards. Gordon also penned an op-ed to emphasize the importance of regular attendance. The increased emphasis seems to have had an initially positive effect: Attendance on the first day of school was 91 percent, up from 84 percent last year. These numbers will hopefully stay high throughout the year, particularly since Gordon is willing to go the extra mile—including breaking out dances like the Q-Tip—in an effort to remind kids that regular attendance is important. If numbers don’t stay high, though, district leaders need to take a serious look at reshaping their attendance policies.

Attendance and truancy aren’t the only concerns plaguing the district; despite meaningful progress, there is still much to be done academically if the district hopes to meet its goals. For instance, although the number of students in failing schools has fallen, the number of failing schools has actually risen. In addition, the number of students in high-performing schools declined 2 percent between 2010–11 and 2013–14. Unfortunately, this decrease made the district’s recent changes to its high-quality seats goal seem like a lowering of the bar for the sake of claiming progress. While the change actually raised the bar for deeming schools high-performing (they now must have an A or B on value added instead of an A, B, or C), it also led to an adjustment of how many schools were initially labeled high-performing—thus making the goal for tripling the number of kids in high-performing schools lower than the number announced back in 2012. Adding to the tension is the wait for state test results and report cards. CMSD’s report card from last year didn’t show much progress. The district had F grades in K–3 literacy, gap closing, and overall value added, as well as a D in achievement. The prepared-for-success component was particularly bleak: Within the 2013 graduating class, only 1.8 percent of students earned an honors diploma, .3 percent earned an industry-recognized credential, and .6 percent earned a score of 3 or better on the AP exam. In each of these measures, CMSD was one of the three worst-performing Big 8 urban districts.    

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Persisting problems shouldn’t put a damper on celebrating progress, but they should serve as a reality check for just how much work CMSD and the CTA have left to do. While district officials have presented clear data points that indicate progress, that progress may not be happening quickly enough. Nowhere is this clearer than in the consideration of value added: even though the district’s value-added grades improved to Cs over the past two years, a C isn’t enough to help students gain more than a year’s worth of learning—which is the only way the huge number of students in CMSD who are below grade level will ever catch up (a point that Gordon himself is careful to acknowledge). While district officials have every right to preach that reform takes time, they must also remember that the students they serve don’t have the luxury of time. With each passing year, they get closer to graduation, college, or career; it’s hardly too much to ask that their schools prepare them for their futures.