April 30, 2007 | Volume 4, Issue 1
Mark Roosevelt, Superintendent, Pittsburgh Public Schools
Mr. Mark Roosevelt, in his relatively short tenure as Superintendent of Pittsburgh Public Schools (PPS), has already made visible changes in the public education system here and made a name for himself in the educational community as a change leader. The HSR recently spoke with Mr. Roosevelt about the current state of education in Pittsburgh and his vision for the future.
Heinz School Review:
To start things off, what are your top three priorities for fixing the state of public education in the city of Pittsburgh?
Mark Roosevelt:
First, what really gets to the heart of the improvements that we want to see are the quality of teaching and of learning. We need to reform and upgrade the curriculum, coupling it with more extensive and rigorous professional development for our teachers. Also, it is very important to improve leadership in the school buildings. Great principals are essential components of a successful school and many need help to be good building managers and leaders.
To tackle this, we are implementing an extensive program to develop principals which will extend into next year. Further, we want to implement performance-based contracts as an additional incentive.
HSR:
Since arriving here in Pittsburgh, have you had any of your previously held “educational policy” beliefs challenged or reformed? If so, what where they and why did they change?
Roosevelt:
That’s an interesting question. No matter how complicated and large I thought the challenge was, I still underestimated it. There are two main challenges and two ways of looking at the work. First, you must get the managerial house in order to be a functional, innovative, well managed, and student focused district. That means that we need to hire first-rate teachers. We need to change the culture. The culture we have had has been moribund; we need something that is more invigorating.
We need to get our finances in order so we can spend money more effectively. Also, we need to choose the right curriculum and be sure to challenge kids that are already proficient, and not let them get left out. Ninety percent of our efforts fall into these areas.
The second piece has a broader societal focus. We need to be more conscious of the cultural challenges and recognize the many issues outside the schoolhouse that cause trouble for children. With all of these outside issues, just getting into classrooms is a serious task with dramatic implications. We also have to address behavioral challenges that create barriers that keep children from valuing learning and being open to it. So many kids lack adequate family and community support and we need to accept that in order to make it part of our delivery model. Then we can be more supportive in behavioral areas.
This idea is often referred to as “alternative scaffolding.” Scaffolding is a good way to think about it; we have to actively build and repair what is not established or damaged at home. Much of the middle class takes for granted having books at home, being read to, or being taught ways of thinking about the world. People often take for granted that all children receive some support to get an education in order to succeed later in life. Nonetheless, very often that entire concept is missed.
HSR:
We often hear people in your position or comparable positions speak about the mechanics of a good school. Teacher training, funding, and classroom size are components that receive a lot of attention. Even private sector education initiatives, seem to put all their focus in these areas. One aspect that is not often addressed is curriculum. In the past, schools have used the compartmentalized model of math taught as math, English as English, etc. This model seems to be failing. How do you address this problem?
Roosevelt:
That is an important question that we think of in terms of “rigor, relationships, and relevance.” Kids do need to understand how this information is relevant to their lives. There is a dramatic need for children to understand that there are benefits to a good education, even if they do not see the benefits in their neighborhoods.
To quickly address something you mentioned, Pittsburgh has good student teacher ratios and we are very lucky for that. We are a high spending urban district. Nonetheless, we are not managerially efficient enough to reap all the benefits from that. Private sector education initiatives began by thinking that a business model is a silver bullet. They have run through hundreds of millions of dollars but have seen modest results.
One thing the private sector has helped show is that there is no silver bullet answer. Effective management is good, and the private sector initiatives have this. But the problems are deep, locally specific, and rely on numerous different strategies tailored to meet specific needs.
Relevance is only one factor. For example, look at elementary school reading and literacy. We thought that we were making great improvements but we still had substantial underperformance on standardized tests. We had to change the reading program and we knew that it was very important to do it. But, at the same time, we had similar problems in many other subject areas.
So the larger question that we were posed with was, “What do we do and in what order do we do it?” We had to do something about elementary math performance also, but we could not do it at the same time as reading; it would have been too much of an overload. So we chose to do the literacy first, since it is so essential to work in other subjects.
In terms of relevance, we have to deal with longer term questions about, for example, what type of math to teach. High-level math, like calculus, is valuable, but it seems that statistics and probability are more relevant to peoples’ lives. This subject has received insufficient analysis. Colleges, however expect incoming students to have calculus. Districts do just what colleges expect and are hesitant to change what is already being done. The world has changed so much but our education system has changed so little.
HSR:
Going back to managerial issues at PPS from a policy and management perspective, how have you responded to the challenge of ensuring that all physical and human resources are being utilized to their full capacity?
Roosevelt:
Like so many other districts that have had similar problems, we had to start with “right-sizing” which is very painful. We did our research and discovered that we had 88 schools that we needed to close. From everything we had seen we knew that we did not want to do it slowly, say 5 at a time. That method saps energy from everything else; you have to battle the entire time. Instead, we wanted to look at the academic performance of schools and promise that we would only move kids to schools that were performing better.
But we found, pretty quickly, that in some areas of the city, there were no schools that were performing well enough to move kids there and call it improvement. So we had to first get a school in an area that we would be willing to send other kids.
We looked around the country for reform models looking for the best strategies to tackle our own problems. It is a difficult process, and everyone stumbles. Eventually we chose the “Americas Choice” model. It entailed increased pay to teachers, a longer school day, and a longer school year. Also, it dealt well with challenging urban environments.
The reform model was (as we expected) particularly brutal in its first year. The plan dealt primarily with K-8 schools; however, middle schools were performing particularly poorly. We were losing all of our gains in comprehensive middle schools.
HSR:
Where do you see the district in 5, 10, or more years?
Roosevelt:
In five years we hope to see a substantially different school system with extensive gains in student achievement and completely redesigned delivery models. Changing the culture of the district at every level is a prerequisite. We need to be intellectually alive, questioning, and innovative.
Also, many of our kids feel lost. We need a more welcoming environment with more personal attention; we need to be more nurturing of the children. That is part of a teacher’s job that is too often not described to them in school.
Being a results-based district is also essential. We must improve student achievement and narrow the education gap. It is also important not to forget about kids in Pittsburgh public schools that are performing at or above expected achievement levels that must be challenged. We are establishing an international baccalaureate middle school and K-5 and K-8 schools.
Overall, we call this strategy “pulling from the top, pushing from the bottom.”