JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — The state of Missouri has contracted Citied for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust), a division of the Indiana based company — The Mind Trust — to draft and present to the State Board of Education a long-term plan for addressing chronically underperforming schools.
The Mind Trust was tasked during 2010 with analyzing why decades of reform efforts had failed in Indianapolis Public School, and CEE-Trust is a national initiative begun by The Mind Trust and several peer organizations to create city-based solutions for public education.
CEE-Trust Executive Director, Ethan Gray, says the plan was to focus primarily on Kansas City Public Schools, currently teetering on the brink of losing accreditation and a complex legal battle.
“We conduct research in the highest performing schools across the country serving urban communities,” Gray says. “And we’ll use that to inform our decisions about what a condition is for success, and then we’ll communicate to the state board how they can re-create those conditions for success.”
Kansas City Public Schools, for DESE, represent something of a coming storm. State law and last summer’s state Supreme Court decision plainly says students in unaccredited districts must be given the option of transferring to a neighboring district with accreditation on the failing district’s dime. In St. Louis, Normandy School District has already requested emergency funding from the state, saying the transfers will bankrupt the district by mid-March if they don’t get it.
Should Kansas City Public Schools be fully classified as unaccredited, potentially tens of thousands of students could opt to transfer out, a massive financial and logistical burden on the community.
CEE-Trust sees the transfers as a “short term” fix to a long-term problem, and were largely contracted for this plan to help stem the bleeding.
“We are fully aware of the transfer and accreditation issues,” Gray says. “We’re coming up with a long-term solution to this problem, and we see [transfers] as a Band-Aid. Obviously if our plan is accepted, the intention would be to create good and successful urban schools that wouldn’t be subject to those transfers.”
Gray says their plan would be applicable to struggling schools around the state, but would focus primarily on Kansas City Public Schools, which became unaccredited last January following a decade of provisional accreditation status. KCPS is currently embroiled in a legal battle, which has prevented the city from being compelled to transfer students to surrounding schools, as they have in St. Louis, but DESE officials expect the ruling to ultimately come out the same way it did for Normandy and Riverview Gardens School Districts: transferring students.
CEE-Trust’s plan will encompass many educational factors and, according to Gray, focus as much on “structure” as “changing leadership.”
DESE’s Invitation for Bid (IFB) lays out the requirements:
“To act effectively, the state needs (a) an intensive, comprehensive analysis of the school system’s challenges, focusing on contributing factors such as governance, educator quality, and operational practices and policies; and (b) a clear set of recommendations for state action to transform district governance (where deemed necessary), policies, and systems in ways that carry the potential to lead to dramatically improved student outcomes that are sustained over time.”
CEE-Trust will present preliminary findings to DESE during October and submit a full report for approval by the state Board of Education during January.
Collin Reischman was the Managing Editor for The Missouri Times, and a graduate of Webster University with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism.
