Columbus Schools is too broken to fix, now it must be broken up.
With its recently announced budget cuts, Columbus City Schools (CCS) is again in the news for its failures. Students can’t read at acceptable levels, and the district’s repeated mishandling of a $1.8 billion budget suggests its leadership has bigger math problems than the children sitting in its classrooms.
It’s long past time to acknowledge that Ohio’s largest school district — from which I graduated almost 50 years ago — can’t be fixed. It’s too broken and too adrift from its primary academic purpose. Fundamental change is necessary.
CCS should follow the lead of Cincinnati Public Schools and its Community Learning Center model, but district leaders and elected officials should take it one significant step further. Cincinnati established each high school as a community focus. That included delegating substantial authority away from central office administrators to each school’s principal who should have greater awareness of — and can focus limited resources on — local community challenges.
Rather than mere delegation, CCS should instead be dissolved as a single district and reconstituted into four or five separate districts. These smaller districts would be more geographically compact, more accountable to local parents and taxpayers, and more manageable overall.
Most importantly, they’ll be better able to focus on the educational needs of their students rather than the distractions of big city partisan politics and an entrenched bureaucracy. And while there’s no guarantee all of these new districts will be successful, the failure of any one of them will harm fewer children than the colossal failures of CCS.
Small, rural districts can benefit from the type of consolidation that eliminates redundant administrative expenses. But CCS’s overstuffed officialdom shows that large bureaucracies can too easily become self-replicating parasites that feed off of and slowly kill the organization that sustains them.
This isn’t a knock on school administrators generally. I’ve worked with truly exceptional ones who were worth every penny — if not more — of taxpayer money paid to them. I’m sure CCS has numerous such stars. I know because I approved hiring some of them for my district when I was on our school board.
In any well-run organization, good leadership and management adds value by clarifying goals and keeping the mission on track. Schools are no different. Effective administrators set measurable objectives, support the people closest to the work, and hold them accountable for results — not intentions.
But even the best administrators are no match for a bloated bureaucracy and muddled mission. CCS is hopelessly compromised by both. And, despite recent headlines, neither the political nor executive management has been able or willing to fix either.
To great fanfare while expressing sympathy for those losing their jobs, CCS leaders announced the reductions of 62 people from their administrative posts. Except that more than half of the positions cut weren’t filled by any actual humans to begin with. The move was like a magician’s misdirection to trick the audience — taxpayers — into ignoring what’s really happening outside their view.
While CCS student enrollment has been spiraling downward, its administrative ranks have only grown. District magicians tricked taxpayers into voting for a nearly $100 million levy barely two years ago, only to increase expenses at multiple times the rate of inflation. The announced cuts reduce the rate of growth, they don’t reverse overall spending.
A review of the latest contract with the district’s teacher’s union is reminiscent of those in place as the great auto and steel industries in Ohio and across the Midwest turned into the “Rust Belt.” They’re focused on maximum job, wage, and benefits protection for existing employees, even as customers — parents — flee to better choices.
And, just as with those failing industries, the fault lies not with employees or unions but with leadership, because systemic failure always rests with those at the top.
That leadership failure is on public display in CCS’s mission, vision, and values statements. They’re undefined, falsely aspirational, edu-speak nonsense. They provide no clear guidance for students or staff and no bright-line boundaries that direct the focus to be on academic outcomes for students.
The new districts must be created not from the detritus of the old CCS, but from the ground up. Existing buildings can be used as long as they currently or can be brought up to modern standards. Staffing and spending levels must be determined from what’s known as zero-based budgeting.
Every teacher, counselor, cook, coach, bus driver, janitor, and administrator must have absolute clarity that their job only exists for the purpose of helping children acquire foundational knowledge as defined by established curriculum while building healthy bodies. Music and the arts are integral components of foundational knowledge.
Every dollar spent must be necessary for those purposes and objective academic outcomes must be the primary measurement by which success is determined. Contracts with the unions representing teachers and staff must mirror those outcomes.
Ohio has emerged from its Rust Belt woes and reduced reliance on dominant industries. We learned that their failure to adapt led to their collapse, which destroyed entire communities.
We need to apply those lessons to Columbus City Schools and all of Ohio’s large urban districts. They’ve failed too many children, burned too much taxpayer cash, and tricked us with excuses too often. It’s time to stop falling for their act.