Mayor Luke Bronin this week quickly shifted from suddenly-withdrawn nominee Harold Sparrow to name his director of families, children, youth, and recreation, Kim Oliver, to the Hartford Board of Education.  Good move.

Ms. Oliver has great credentials, following directly on those of José Colón-Rivas, her predecessor both at City Hall and now, soon, on the Board.  Her City Council approval hearing will be this month.

What is important here is having the mayor’s office represented on the Board.  After all, District results belong to Mayor Bronin in our governance structure, where the mayor appoints the five-member majority of the nine-member Board and is at the top of the leadership pyramid.  Second best to appointing himself, the mayor appointed his right hand.

Also, with Ms. Oliver’s prior focus, on youth and workforce, Hartford now has a unique opportunity to embrace at the Board level a vision for education centering on college and career readiness outcomes – looking to employers and colleges as the direct consumers of K-12 education success stories.

The Bottom Line.

It is now, as it has always been, fair to expect the mayor’s appointments to the nine-member Hartford Board of Education – as a majority block of five – to know his vision and act on it.  We will be looking for Ms. Oliver, in particular, to bring to the table the mayor’s voice about this vision.

Why was last month’s Hartford Board of Education meeting not our finest moment as a city?  It is because the confusion folks had in the audience about the community school strategy signaled that, despite having funded the community schools strategy for almost a decade, Hartford still does not have an overall vision for how we are going to win the war on poverty, or how all HPS strategies (community schools, student centered learning, etc.) are meant to come together. 

Confusion was on display when HBOE members January 17^th were doing due diligence, trying to figure out not only whether community schools were a good strategy, but where they fit into a larger strategy to turn around neighborhood schools, for which the Board is responsible.

As an example, at Milner school, with so much student turnover year to year, such a high concentration of student need relative to resources provided, expecting turnaround over a period of a few years is unrealistic. That’s the case for too many neighborhood schools – whether they operate with the community school strategy or not.

So what’s Hartford’s current path to realistically give all neighborhood school students what they need to be successful? We don’t know – do you?

With an ever-more challenging set of conditions in place for our neighborhood schools, and the ever-decreasing provision of supports, it’s no wonder so many leave at the first chance they get.

The Bottom Line

We believe that, despite all the PhD’s and graduate degrees we have at central office and throughout our city, we still do not have the in-depth conversations needed to address the needs of Hartford children (especially those most vulnerable), and we hope that the past Board of Ed meeting’s discussion on the “return on investment” of community schools was the start of a much larger, overdue discussion.

In its most basic form, the larger conversation we hear the Board of Ed wanting to have is one that creates a “Maslow’s hierarchy” of needs for neighborhood schools, as the following graphic suggests:

While the above diagram is simple to prove a point, we look forward to getting into more detail on this in a forthcoming publication.

This past week senior leadership and staff of the Hartford Public Schools – and key community partners – accepted the Superintendent’s invitation to discuss how to more efficiently and effectively implement Hartford’s Strategic Operating Plan, set forth in the fall of 2015.  We learned a lot at this meeting.

The session looked back to document and celebrate progress, but also identify priority work and create a roadmap for the next three years.

The recurring theme we heard?  Strong (and Lean) Management Needed Now.

That’s human capital management, financial management, project management and consistent implementation.  And it means providing support where needed, but also getting out of the way and allowing school leaders to do what they do best.

We sensed a notion among education leaders in the room – both those in central office and those leading schools – that, even despite drastic improvements over the past three years, the operational side of the school district is in desperate need of attention.  There is still no comprehensive answer to the question: What is the District plan  for reaching organizational and operational excellence for all students?

The truth is that almost all school district strategic operating plans around the nation stop far short of actually changing the way the district operates.  They more so set goals and define strategies to achieve them.  See the past one, two, and three strategic plans for HPS.  Note all the unmet goals.  How can focus less on setting goals, and more on making the changes necessary to reach them.

Having desired results set down on paper means nothing if they cannot be implemented with fidelity, with consistency, with an ability to discern what works from what does not, and with the right resources and talent in place.  That’s been Hartford’s problem.  As the session pointed out, we don’t yet know “how to operationalize equity.”

The Bottom Line

Last week’s dialogue on the HPS strategic operating plan was a refreshing reminder that those who work in central office and on the ground in schools share the same view as those in the community.  They don’t want to pretend they have the resources to accomplish everything they need to.   And they want change – transformative change. Both residents and educators in Hartford are tired of pretending that just because we proclaim things like, “every single student in Hartford will get what they need,” that it’s actually going to happen.  The fact is: Our system continues to be designed to get the results it gets.

Year in and year out, despite innovations and some powerful new strategies, we are still essentially driving the same car we drove five years ago.

Sure we can add a slightly better set of drivers, slightly better tires, and be working with a much better GPS (in the form of the strategic plan), but we are essentially driving the same car – one that could not get us to our destination before, yet we expect it to somehow get us there now.

With the cascading State, City, and District financial constraints becoming a permanent reality, a restructured school district and central office must be like a new car that can take half as much fuel and go ten times as far towards closing the achievement gap.