Nikolai Vitti’s voice trembles a bit when he talks about his maternal grandfather, Richard J. Past.
The man toiled tirelessly at Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Plant and passed away three years ago at age 84.
“After he retired,” Vitti recalls. “He had a lot of time with me. He was instrumental in taking me to my sports practices. I wouldn’t be the person that I am without him.”
Vitti, superintendent of the Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Florida, was appointed to lead Michigan’s largest school district in April. He began work as a consultant earlier this month and takes the reigns officially on July 1. His starting salary is $295,000; his contract is five years.
Dr. Nikolai Vitti and family
The Dearborn Heights native comes to a school district that had 300,000 enrolled students in 1967 but now has fewer than 50,000 children. What’s more, Detroit Public Schools Community District has struggled with financial challenges and has been under state control for 15 of the 18 years.
But Vitti maintains that he’s up the job. At 40, he is among the youngest Detroit district superintendents ever. Only Arthur Jefferson, the district’s first black schools chief, was younger. Jefferson was 37 when he was appointed to the post in 1975.
GROWING UP IN DEARBORN HEIGHTS
Vitti grew up during the 1980’s and early ‘90s. His father left the home when he was young so high school athletics, basketball and football at Dearborn Divine Child, provided roles models as coaches. Sports gave him the opportunity to fire up jump shots in Calihan Hall and go after the pigskin in the 80,000-seat Pontiac Silverdome. Equally important, he learned discipline as a team captain and it helped to prepare him for college and a public schools administration career.
“I think that I’m a strong leader because of those experiences,” he declares.
Although he struggled with dyslexia, Vitti studied at Wake Forest University in North Carolina and later earned the prestigious Presidential Scholarship graduate degrees in education at Harvard University.
Metro Detroit is one of the nation’s most racially segregated areas in the nation and Dearborn Heights, a white and tony working-class and middle class town, is 90 percent white. Racial segregation and hostile policies toward black and browns come to mind when one thinks about western Wayne County communities like his hometown. However, Vitti, a son of immigrants who grew up a stone’s throw from ethnically diverse Inkster, points out that his experiences in his uncle’s pizzeria and in sports was enlightening.
“My view of the world was very different than the average Anglo-Saxon American growing in metro Detroit,” he points out. “I was exposed to (ethic and racial) diversity at a young age.”
Moreover, Vitti is candid and philosophical when discussing race. He doesn’t mind questions about his marriage to Rachel, who happens to be black and hails from the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area.
“We should be proud of our identity,” Vitti states. “Far too often, whites try to erase race, which is linked to an identity. Idealistically, I look forward to a world where we recognize each other based on race because that’s linked to a history and a culture, experiences and values.”
The Vittis have been married for 16 years and have four children.
“I’M ABOUT THE WORK”
After college, Vitti worked in New York City, North Carolina, Miami and Jacksonville but not in metro Detroit. So what’s on his list of immediate to dos?
“When you talk about entry,” he says. “It’s about engaging internal and external stakeholders.”
Further, Vitti wants to “have an authentic dialogue” with area elected officials, which includes school board members, city, county and Detroit legislative leaders; as well as the foundation and clergy communities and school union leadership.
“At the heart and core of this is engaging teachers,” he states. “If you ask me, ‘Who do you really want to get to?’ it is teachers, principals, district staff, parents and students.”
What’s intriguing about Vitti’s approach to K-12 education?
“I’m adamant about focusing on what I call The Whole Child,” he states. “At the core, schools should be about reading, math, science, writing and social studies but we just can’t do academic work in our schools. It has to be broader than that.”
Vitti suggests a greater need for arts, music, foreign language and athletics. Several years ago, for example, he freed up about $20 million so that all Duval County elementary schools had music and art teachers.
In his public interview with the Detroit Board of Education several weeks ago, Vitti declared that wanted to put charters schools out of business. He believes that when traditional schools are doing their job well, there are better equipped than charter schools, which are also public schools.
“I believe that when traditional public schools and traditional education gets it right, they get it right better than any other form of education,” he says.
“I believe that when you look at traditional public schools, we have a better pool of teachers and principals,” he states further. “And we have a better bench than charters do. I also believe that, at its truest form, traditional public schools are closer to the community because there is a higher level of accountability. You have an elected local board.”
Vitti started work as a consultant this month and is prepared to enter contract talks with DPSCD unions, if necessary. “It’s part of the job,” he points out. The Detroit Federation of Teachers executive board earlier this month rejected a tentative agreement with school district administrators.
He believes that through partnerships, internships and playing an active role in helping to move favorable public policy in Lansing and Washington, D.C. small business play a greater role in urban public school education in general and DPSCD in particular.
“Without a strong traditional public school education system and I mean traditional public education system,” Vitti states. “we’re not going to develop students who are employable with the right skills for the future and the now.”
So what’s the best thing about coming home to metro Detroit?
Vitti states:
“The peace and opportunity that comes with serving the city I love and people who share many of my life experiences at one of the most important and defining moments in the city’s history.”
If you live anywhere near the Durfee Elementary School building and Central High School on the city’s west side, then you already see it happening. Because you really can’t miss it. It’s kinda big.
Beginning on July 31, 12,000 volunteers descended upon Durfee and the surrounding neighborhood for a six-day whirlwind transformation/overhaul/cleanup designed to remove blight on 300 city blocks, board up 300 vacant houses, and perform essential home repairs for 50 homeowners in the area.
Just one example of what Life Remodeled has done for Detroit neighborhoods
“We invite students from school, we invite community residents, churches, mosques, synagogues, businesses, people from every walk of life that you can imagine,” said Chris Lambert, CEO of Life Remodeled which is spearheading the project.
Lambert said he and his team typically spend at least a year working with the community figuring out what the community wants. Then they work together with that community to plan the blight removal project.
And that’s just for starters.
The initial whirlwind is really the kickoff of what will be at least a two-year effort spearheaded by Life Remodeled to transform the Durfee building into what will be known as a Community Innovation Center, and thereby transform an entire neighborhood in the process. And in case you’re wondering, this isn’t the first time Lambert has managed to pull this off. Life Remodeled, founded in 2011, is already developing a respectable track record of transforming neighborhood schools in troubled areas as a means of upgrading the entire neighborhood.
The organization’s first school-based project, costing roughly $5.5 million, was in 2014 at Cody High School. In 2015, Life Remodeled stepped it up a bit and took on Osborne High School. That project cost approximately $5.7 million. Both of these projects were a long way from the initial project in 2011, which involved pulling together 500 volunteers to build a home for a single mother and her four children in Westland. In six days.
“The process evolved from a vision that was big at the time but miniscule compared to what we’re doing right now. …It’s evolved from focusing on building a house that benefited one family at a time, to now benefiting a community asset that benefits the entire community,” said Lambert.
“This one is very different from what we’ve done in the past. In the past we’ve worked in existing schools that are still operating today. …This one’s very different because we’re working in a vacant school now. The former Durfee Elementary Middle School.”
In addition to other benefits, Lambert said that there has been a noticeable positive impact on crime in the neighborhoods surrounding their earlier school-based projects.
According to Lambert, the Detroit Police Department measured crime stats on the blocks where they worked, both before and after the project, “And it actually dropped in 10 out of 11 categories, “including 47 percent reduction in homicides.”
From the website:
“The Community Innovation Center will operate in collaboration with Central High School and the Detroit Public Schools Community District to provide hands-on education to students. Entrepreneurs will guest lecture in classrooms and students will have the opportunity to learn subjects, like math and finance, with real examples from case studies of business ventures taking place within the center. Community members of all ages will have access to resources and space in order to learn about entrepreneurship and how to start or grow their own businesses. The center will also serve as valuable community and recreational space for families and their kids.”
“As 2017 marks the 50th year anniversary of the 1967 Detroit uprising, Life Remodeled and our partners will invest in the neighborhood surrounding Central High School, the city’s first public high school, in the community where Detroit’s civil unrest began. This year’s project will serve not only as a powerful commemoration of the progress that has been made, but also the progress we continue to strive toward.
We are proud to announce Life Remodeled’s first two-year commitment to Central High School and the surrounding neighborhood as we take on our largest project to date.”
So why did Lambert and crew decide on Durfee for this year’s project?
“We really chose Durfee the same way we chose every other neighborhood. There’s really two things that we look for; significant need, and radical hope. And when we say ‘significant need, what we’re looking for is neighborhoods that have high levels of crime and high levels of blight. And we’re looking for schools that have academic challenges that can be addressed with a construction/renovation project. When it comes to radical hope, we’re looking for a neighborhood that already has a foundation of sustainability in place or in process,” said Lambert.
What the community surrounding Central High does have “is a very rich history of resilience. And it is geographically located in close proximity to downtown and Midtown. And a tremendous amount of development is coming this way. And so what we want to do is help create more equity and inclusivity in the community so the community will have more power to shape the development that’s coming.”
Hopefully, if all goes according to plan, this is the kind of impact that will result in all future developments as well. Using schools as anchors to rescue communities.
“We haven’t decided what neighborhood we’re going to next, but what we’d like to do is to prove that this model of repurposing vacant schools can be of great benefit to the city and continue to do it in other Detroit neighborhoods.”
It’s an idea that definitely beats shutting them all down.
Want to know how high U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos and her team will set the bar in approving Every Student Succeeds Act plans? How DeVos handles her home state may provide the answer.
That last move angered Brian Whiston, Michigan’s state chief, who said the feds were sending mixed messages when it comes to ESSA. DeVos, he said, stressed local control, and told state chiefs in a closed door meeting to hand in their plans even if they weren’t totally complete. But Botel, the acting assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, seemed to be working from a different playbook, Whiston said last month…
A key section of Michigan’s plan to implement the Every Student Succeeds Act is so sparse that the U.S. Department of Education isn’t sure it’s ready for formal review, according to a letter the agency published Tuesday.
The department told the state chief, Brian Whiston, the information it provided “was insufficient” to “adequately review” the section of the plan dealing with the state’s accountability system, arguably the heart of ESSA. That could be partly because the state’s application, filed this spring, Michigan offers three possible approaches on accountability. (Michigan has since settled on one of them, a “dashboard”, Whiston said.)
Otherwise the letter, which followed a phone call between state officials and the education department on the plan, is fairly light when it comes to the list of things the state needs to fix. (More on that below).
It is 50 years since the Detroit riot, which followed a police raid on an unlicensed bar in 1967. The intensity of that event was surpassed previously only by the 1863 New York City draft riots during the Civil War, and subsequently by the 1992 Los Angeles riots. By the time it ended, 43 people were dead and over 1,000 injured. The 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions and the National Guard were deployed. At least 2,000 buildings were destroyed in a neighborhood that, half a century later, remains largely a wasteland.
The chaos, violence and brutality erupted in a city of multiple ills, with discrimination in policing, housing and employment rife; the quality of public education incredibly poor; and limited access to medical services. The riot erupted in one of the most neglected neighborhoods, in one of the nation’s most segregated cities—and little changed as Detroit continued its decline in the 50 years that followed. The city’s traditional public school system—which could and should have been a great equalizer, helping erase other injustices—has been dubbed the worst in the nation.
Today, as in many other cities where the public education system all but collapsed, public charter schools, which operate independently of the traditional school system, educate a large share of students enrolled in public schools. Taxpayer-funded and tuition-free—like traditional public schools—public charter schools may determine their own school curriculum and culture, while being held accountable for improved student performance by their authorizer, which can demand changes and even close campuses.
[/media-credit] Dr. Ramona Edelin is executive director of the D.C. Association of Chartered Public Schools.
Proficiency as measured by standardized test scores is better than at its nadir, but still far from satisfactory. There are some bright points, however. Charters have helped raise student proficiency. Of those public school students who took standardized tests in school year 2015-2016, 50 percent were enrolled in charters—but 61 percent of those who scored as “proficient” were charter students, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. And nearly half of charter students significantly outperform their Detroit Public Schools counterparts, Stanford University’s Center for Research and Education found.
With 53 percent of public school students enrolled in charters, Detroit has followed a similar path to the nation’s capital, which has a 46 percent charter school share. Only Katrina-hit New Orleans at 92 percent is higher among large cities. Washington, D.C. had similar problems with its public school system, as well as many of the same economic and social issues. Washington also began to innovate in its public schools with charters in the mid-1990s, amid a traditional system that, like Detroit, was seriously in decline academically, organizationally dysfunctional and dangerous to student safety.
If anything, the charter and other education reforms introduced in the District of Columbia have produced even more significant gains for the public education offering in the city as a whole.
Before the charter reform, half the public school students dropped out before graduating. Last year, the on-time—within four years—high-school graduation rate was 73 percent for charters, and 69 percent for DCPS, lower than the national rate, but fast catching up.
Standardized test scores also significantly improved at both charters and DCPS, with the strongest gains in the most underserved neighborhoods—not at the expense of a varied and diverse curriculum, but alongside one.
As public schools of choice, charters have brought options to families who pre-reform would have lacked the means to access alternatives to substandard schooling—especially important in a city where three in four public school children are economically-disadvantaged and half are defined as “at risk.”
The demand for these unique public schools is such that nearly 10,000 students are on waiting lists to attend one or more charter campuses in the school year about to begin. Demand for traditional public schools in the out-of-boundary program also has increased. And parental choice has been simplified by DCPS and D.C. charter participation in the common lottery, which allocates places when schools’ popularity causes them to be over-subscribed.
Charters’ success also has catalyzed improvements in the traditional public school system, following the introduction of mayoral-control of DCPS and the appointment of three reforming School Chancellors.
From Detroit, Washington, D.C. and New Orleans to the 13 other urban school districts where the charter share is above 30 percent, education reform has been a beneficial agent of change. This reform transforms the lives and life prospects of children growing up in our nation’s most troubled and vulnerable urban communities—for both traditional and chartered public school students.
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which is the primary legislation related to federal K-12 education programs. ESSA replaces many provisions contained in the previous reauthorization—the No Child Left Behind Act—to give states more authority in the design of their school accountability systems and to encourage them to use measures beyond test scores to measure school performance. States, districts, and schools also have greater autonomy to design and implement school improvement strategies for struggling schools.
The law, however, continues to require states and districts to track and respond to low performance of schools and subgroups of students within schools. They must also be able to disaggregate the data they use to determine interventions by race and ethnicity, disability status, English language learners, and income. These critical protections ensure that all students—including the most disadvantaged—cannot be ignored.
Sixteen states and Washington, D.C., submitted their ESSA plans—which cover multiple provisions of the law—to the U.S. Department of Education for review during the first submission window. The Center for American Progress reviewed these submissions for their school classification systems and school improvement plans. The summary provides critical context and methodology. The 17 individual state fact sheets break down each state’s school classification system in addition to school improvement timeline, grant structure, types of schools identified, and key improvement strategies.
Laura Jimenez is the director of standards and accountability at the Center for American Progress. Samantha Batel is a policy analyst with the K-12 Education team at the Center.
Will parents be able to understand their child’s school’s performance under the Every Student Succeeds Act? And will schools with students from difficult socioeconomic backgrounds get a fair shake?
Those are two key questions that folks at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute set out to find answers for in a new report. In an analysis of the 17 plans turned in so far, Fordham President Michael Petrilli and Editorial Director Brandon Wright based their answers on three main questions:
How clear are school ratings are to parents, educators, and the general public?
Do the plans push schools to focus on all students, not just those furthest behind? and
Are schools are treated fairly, particularly those with a large share of students in poverty, and judged in part by academic growth, not just achievement?
Fordham is often identified with right-leaning education policy positions, such as support for school choice. On ESSA, the think tank has also…
Yesterday, a twelve-member task force, convened by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), released a report on “Quality Education.” The task force was formed in December 2016 after the NAACP’s October 2016 call for a national moratorium on expanding charter schools until a set of conditions were met.
The charge of the task force was to bring forward “practical recommendations that respond to the urgency of this resolution and the inequities undermining public education.” In order to fulfill their charge, from December 2016 to April 2017, the task force held public hearings in seven cities—New Haven, Memphis, Orlando, Los Angeles, Detroit, New Orleans, and New York.
The report acknowledged that, from testimonials at the public hearings, they found some positive aspects of charter schools. However, the report ultimately concluded that “even the best charters are not a substitute for more stable, adequate and equitable investments in public education in communities that serve all children.”
Criticism of Public Hearings
According to NAACP task report report, the “hearing format [for the public meetings] ensured testimony” from all of the following stakeholders: educators, administrators, school policy experts, charter school leaders, parents, advocates, students, and community leaders. However, some have questioned the authenticity and fairness of these meetings, claiming that they did not include groups and individuals who were charter supporters.
For example, in Tennessee, members of Memphis Lift, a parent-activist organization, voiced disapproval when they were only allowed 12 minutes at the end of a four-hour meeting. Additionally, in Orlando, Minnesota education activist Rashad Anthony Turner was ushered out of the meeting by police after he interrupted a speech by Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers President, because opponents of the moratorium were kept waiting.
Task Force Provides Five Recommendations Based on Public Hearings
According to the report, the testimonials illuminated the “perceived” benefits and problems with charter schools. Using those testimonials, the task force created five recommendations, summarized below, that would improve the quality of charter schools.
Recommendation #1: Provide more equitable and adequate funding for schools serving students of color. The task force argued that education funding has been “inadequate and unequal for students of color for hundreds of years.” In order to remedy the problem, the task force recommended that states should implement weighted student formula systems and model them after the systems that Massachusetts and California have pursued. They also recommended that the federal government should “fully enforce” the funding equity provisions within the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).
Recommendation #2: Invest productively in low-performing schools and schools with significant opportunity and achievement gaps. In order to ensure that all students receive a high-quality education, the task force recommends that federal, state, and local policies need to “sufficiently” invest in three things: creating incentives to attract and retain teachers, evolving instruction to be more challenging and inclusive, and providing more wraparound services for students such as health and mental services.
Recommendation #3: Develop and enforce robust charter school accountability measures. There were five parts within this recommendation. They are as follows:
Create and enforce a rigorous chartering authorizing and renewal process. The task force recommends that states should only allow districts to serve as authorizers. This is significant since, of the 44 states that allow charter schools, only four—Wyoming, Virginia, Iowa, and Kansas—have district-only charter authorization.
Create and enforce a common accountability system.
Monitor and require charter schools to admit and retain all students. This recommendation calls for open enrollment procedures, and asserts that charter schools should not be allowed to counsel out, push out, or expel students that they “perceive as academically or behaviorally struggling, or whose parents cannot maintain participation requirements or monetary fees.”
Create and monitor transparent disciplinary guidelines that meet students’ ongoing learning needs and prevent push out. The report recommends that charter schools should be required to follow the “same state regulations regarding discipline as public schools,” and use restorative justice practices.
Require charter schools to hire certified teachers. Many states allow charter schools to hire uncertified teachers at higher rates than traditional public schools, however Minnesota is not one of them.
Recommendation #4: Require fiscal transparency and equity. The task force recommends that all charter schools be held to the “same level of fiscal transparency and scrutiny as other public schools.”
Recommendation #5: Eliminate for-profit charter schools. This recommendation not only states that all for-profit charter schools should be eliminated, but that all for-profit management companies that run nonprofit charter schools should be eliminated as well. Approximately 13 percent of U.S. charter schools are run by for-profit companies. Additionally, at least 15 states allow virtual schools, with many of them operated by for-profit organizations.
Report Elicits Scrutiny from Education Advocates
In response to the NAACP report, Nina Rees, CEO and President of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (NAPCS), issued a statement where she indicated that NAPCS was glad to see the NAACP recognize the value of charter schools and agreed with them that “whoever oversees a public school should take that responsibility seriously, have the highest expectations, and hold educators in the school accountable” for educating students.
However, Rees also asserted that the NAACP’s policy resolution and report failed to “acknowledge that Black parents are demanding more and better public-school options,” citing a nationally representative survey which found that found 82 percent of Black parents favored allowing parents to choose their child’s public school.
She also cited a 2015 CREDO Urban Charter Schools Report, which found that Black public charter school students gained 36 days of learning in math and 26 in reading over their non-charter school peers.
Chris Stewart, based in Minnesota and former director of outreach and external affairs for Education Post, asserted that “the NAACP has lost its way,” claiming that they have become an “unwitting tool of teacher unions” due to the union’s significant contributions to the NAACP over the years. He also claimed that the unions are “threatened by the growth and success of non-unionized charter schools.”
District-Charter Collaboration: Hope in a Time of Political Tension
The growing and contentious disagreements between education organizations and advocates regarding the merits of charter versus traditional district schools are not new and will likely continue to dominate the news cycle.
However, in recent years, a growing number of districts and charter schools have put aside their political differences and worked together in order to do what’s best for students. Our next two blog posts will examine the cities where some of those collaborative relationships are taking place, as well as provide history on district-charter collaboration in Minnesota.
U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ home state education chief thinks her department is sending some conflicting signals when it comes to the Every Student Succeeds Act.
Brian J. Whiston, the state superintendent, said the message he’s heard from DeVos has been all about state leadership and leeway.
But he got a very different sound bite from Jason Botel, the acting assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education. Botel called the state earlier this month to talk about what the department sees as missing from its ESSA plan, in advance of an official feedback letter…
By Ken Coleman, Special to the Michigan Chronicle
By Ramona Edelin Special to the AFRO
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