The holidays may be over but the season for educational rankings never ends. Last week, Education Week released “Quality Counts,” its annual rankings of state educational systems.
In contrast to NAEP rankings based on student outcomes or tomorrow’s StudentsFirst rankings based on state policy—two valuable resources—the Quality Counts report incorporates a broad range of information on student achievement, administration, school finance, state policy and more. Through several articles and a survey of district administrators, the report also delves into education at the district level.
For the purpose of this post, we focused on two trends affecting district superintendents highlighted by the Quality Counts article: superintendents are feeling increasing pressure from academic and economic changes affecting districts and superintendents are prioritizing the increase of school-level autonomy.
Pressure
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and I can’t recall a time in my career when there were more changes happening at the same time. It’s a busy time, and it’s hard work,” said one Maryland superintendent.
Indeed, the Quality Counts analysis shows that the combined winds of the recession and a bevy of reform initiatives have pushed districts and their superintendents to make significant changes to how they have traditionally done business. A survey conducted by Education Week showed how widely these views are held. (See the chart below.)
School autonomy
A dedicated effort to grant schools additional autonomy also emerged from the superintendents’ remarks. Increasing autonomy at the school level has long been a priority, with groups like CRPE and AIR attesting to the importance of high levels of autonomy and superintendents are increasingly implementing this reform.
In Baltimore, “we took a leap to give schools enormous autonomy in decision-making and created fair student funding,” said another Maryland leader quoted in the article. “There was an enormous shift in mind-set about holding on to kids [in the face of a growing charter sector], and we saw an early turnaround of the decline in enrollment.” Increasing autonomy in Baltimore mirrors similar changes elsewhere in the country.
Project LIFT, an initiative of the Charlotte-Mecklenberg schools in North Carolina, is a great example of the move towards autonomy that district superintendents pointed out. In this innovative program, schools receive support through a public-private partnership that enables greater principal autonomy in hiring and designing the school day.
We highly recommend you take a look at the report for more information on these themes and others. Quality Counts can be found here.
Mac LeBuhn is a policy analyst at Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). Before joining DFER, Mac was a fourth grade teacher at Rocketship Si Se Puede, a charter school in San Jose, CA. He became interested in education policy through internships at the offices of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, and Colorado State Senator Mike Johnston.