Report Card on Brizard's Portfolio Plan

The Rochester City School District has a poverty rate of more than 80% as measured by the number of students eligible for free lunches. Superintendent Brizard has chosen a “portfolio school district” approach that is a new way of addressing the poor graduation rates and lack of college-readiness that usually accompanies high poverty. Although the portfolio approach is an idea whose success rate has been variable across the country, it would seem reasonable to try something new when old solutions are not working. Surprisingly, however, Brizard has veered away from the portfolio idea’s basic tenets around research-based decision-making, so we are not off to a good start.

What is a “portfolio school district” approach? The portfolio idea is similar to asset management in the investment world. The manager (in this case, the superintendent) has a collection of assets that are constantly changing because he/she can add favorable ones and dispose of unsuccessful ones. In education portfolio strategy, this translates to assuming that schools are contingent rather than permanent. That is, if schools are successful they will be retained and expanded. If they are not they will be closed or replaced.

Aside from the problem of how realistic it is to expand or merge successful schools, let’s examine the core premises of a portfolio approach that seeks improvement through “broad experimentation with many possibilities, careful tracking of results, and constant adaptation in light of what appears to work” (http://www.crpe.org/cs/crpe/view/csr_pubs/295). The literature describing district management of school portfolios emphasizes the importance of supporting existing schools that serve students well, helping schools that are struggling, and eliciting promising ideas from groups both inside and beyond the immediate school system.

Such an approach would rely upon excellent data tracking and positive environments for the sharing of ideas. The first element, a focus on data, requires both collection and analysis for school improvement. Data is only as useful as the humans who understand and design and implement a rational plan of action based upon it. The second element, known in education lingo as “professional learning communities”, is key for the dissemination of good teaching ideas. Many leaders of successful schools understand that the best way to improve teaching is to provide supportive in-house group structures in which teachers can discuss practice and problem-solve with one another. At its core, the professional learning community is a collegial approach to improvement. You can find this dynamic approach in many fields, including medicine, science and business. It is 180 degrees away from traditional top-down school improvement approaches such as assessment of teachers “performance” by supervisors (1:1 and unidirectional), or the common district-designed menu style of professional development offerings taught by experts whose need was dreamed up by central office bureaucrats.

Let’s step back and take a look at how we’re doing with Brizard’s implementation of the portfolio plan in the Rochester City School District. Such a plan calls for:

1) Broad experimentation with many possibilities

2) Careful tracking of results

3) Constant adaptation/adjustment in light of what appears to work

4) Supporting existing schools that serve students well

5) Helping schools that are struggling

6) Elicitation of promising ideas from groups inside & beyond the school system

1) Broad experimentation is something that Brizard is certainly on track with. Last year one new school opened and this year six more opened, each with an outside institutional partner*, some of which have no track record of mentoring new schools, some for which there is no data yet on their ability to raise graduation rates, and some of which have no reported measures for improving student learning (http://education.cgr.org/policy-reviews-of-rcsd/). Is this a reason to cheer or to tremble? That’s not yet clear. Experimentation is by nature… well… experimental, so we should accept that for what it is. It’s possible that the new schools will be more successful than those that haven’t worked in the past. It’s also true that good asset managers will choose experimental options whose failure would not threaten to destroy the rest of the portfolio. In a school system’s case, destroying the portfolio could happen either by extreme loss of money or extreme loss of public confidence. Brizard needs to pay special attention to both of these areas.

2) Careful tracking of results has been launched under Brizard’s School Performance Analytic (SPA) systems tool. He has hired the eVerge Group to integrate all of the district’s data and launch at full capacity sometime late in the 2010-2011 academic year. No doubt this is the data-management panacea for improving the nine major information systems (Chancery, Datacation, DataMate, Gradebook, SharePoint, Acuity, Datamentor, IEP Direct and Avatar) that already burden central office by not properly interfacing. Could streamlined data increase the efficiency and navigational capacity of the district? Yes. However, proof of its worth will not be found in the purchase and installation of yet another a system without the training and support of staff who can successfully connect analysis of data to all teaching and professional development in the district. Without investment in human capital, technological investment is literally useless. Taxpayers should be aware of this data initiative, monitor its implementation, and be alert for signs of coma.

3) Brizard’s constant adaptation in light of what appears to work, is not evident in light of his most recently announced initiative, Equitable Student Funding (ESF). Elsewhere this budgetary approach is called Weighted Student Funding (WSF) because it assigns a dollar amount of base weight per ‘type’ of student for special education, English language learners, and gifted and talented students to receive more money than do general education students. Proponents claim it is a way to achieve equitable services across school districts. They also believe that it increases the size of school budgets so that principals can have financial autonomy to choose extra services or programming in their buildings after they have paid for mandated services. Assessment of WSF around the country, however, shows that it doesn’t work during times of budgetary austerity. There are other concerns too. To date, the weighted formula assigned to students has been uneven and subjectively determined in different cities, with variable results. The literature raises concerns about school incentives to mislabel students in order to gain the extra funding attached to special populations. Those few positive responses to WSF may be due to the fact that its proponents have evaluated its implementation mainly during times when budgets were stable or growing (Baker, 2009 http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=EJ835083&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=EJ835083; Education Resource Strategies, 2010 http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED502615&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED502615; Ladd & Fiske, 2009 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=ladd+and+fiske%2C+weighted+student+funding&btnG=Search&as_sdt=0%2C33&as_ylo=&as_vis=0; Snell, 2009 http://reason.org/news/show/weighted-student-formula-yearb; Picus & Odden, 2009 http://www.schoolfundingmatters.org/files/default.aspx; Shambaugh, Chambers & DeLancey, 2008 http://eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/search/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED502615&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED502615). When the unit of funding is based upon the student rather than the program, professional educators lose leverage to adequately support quality programs that demonstrably work. Since principals across RCSD have decried the imposition of this opaque formula, argued their lack of autonomy due to inadequate funding, and expressed great uncertainty around declining monies across the state, Brizard should take the concept of constant adaptation in light of what appears to work to heart. It is surely foolhardy to press forward with WSF at this time.  Let’s save this particular initiative for review in better economic times.

4) Supporting existing schools that serve students well is the simplest yet most overlooked goal within Brizard’s portfolio strategies. It does not take 10 different database programs and a surfeit of central-office employees to figure this one out.  City parents already know about the existing schools that serve students well. They are easy schools to identify because they are the most sought out and oversubscribed in the district (primary: 12, 15, 23, 46, secondary: 58, Wilson Academy, School with Walls, School of the Arts, and public charter: Eugenio Maria de Hostos and Genesee Community). As Brizard’s strategic plan states, the district will support “homegrown innovation” by naming them “autonomous schools” and giving them some further measure of freedom from central office. They would be presumably expected to continually improve as they were held up as explicit models for the district to replicate. So where is that official acknowledgement of the successful schools that already exist, and why hasn’t Brizard turned to these schools for at least a few ideas in his portfolio of new schools? How about replicating the successful HOLA program in several other schools, or opening two more Arts and two more International Baccalaureate schools elsewhere in the district? How about copying the excellent professional development model that is used by teachers in the Genesee Community Charter School? Good ideas already exist locally. The best reasons for start-up partnering of new schools with successful homegrown ones are that this would be much less expensive than outside partners, the public buy-in for these choices would be immediate, and the increased scrutiny would undoubtedly mature their work further.

5 & 6) The last two, helping struggling schools and eliciting promising ideas from groups both inside and outside the district are only partially evident. Brizard shut down rather than helped several schools, and he has sought out promising ideas primarily from those outside of the school district, often through expensive consultants whose fees have raised many eyebrows.

Remember that many great ideas can come from teachers - which was the original intention of charter schools before so many of them were corporatized by for-profit funding. One excellent internal way to achieve school improvement is to cultivate professional learning communities in every building. Move away from top-down administrative approaches and embrace dynamic collegial structures by encouraging regular groups of teachers to share their work with one another. That is much more cost effective than hiring outside consultants or adding yet more administrators to do ‘deep dives’ into data interpretation for his zone chiefs (See http://www.ustream.tv/channel/rochester-city-school-district-broadcast-channel, “Superintendent Brizard addresses Central Office staff”, 3/25/11).

Since this post is so lengthy, I’ve designed a simple report card that summarizes my evaluation of Brizard’s progress with the Rochester City School District portfolio approach to date.

	Little to No Evidence	Evident with Reservations	On Course	Early Signs of Excellence	Excellent
Experimentation			X
Data tracking		X
Adaptation/Adjustmt	X
Support of Good	X
Helping Struggling	X
Elicitation		X

In a nutshell, Brizard scores high on experimentation, low on actions based upon data analysis, fiscal accountability, and community dialogue.

Since this is a formative assessment rather than a summative one, let’s hope that Brizard will pay attention to these benchmarks by moving toward more evidence-based research and collaborative input on improving schools. The future of our children and the Rochester region’s long-term economic prospects depend on it.

Liz Hallmark