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The turnaround strategy inside St. Louis Public Schools that may be working—and may get discontinued

As the Consortium Partnership Network tries to carve out autonomy within district control, it is revealing why innovation is so difficult inside SLPS

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The brick façade of Meramec Elementary in Dutchtown is 111 years old, speckled, dignified, and offers no hint that the public school behind it is listed by the state as one of Missouri’s worst performing. Or that more than 90 percent of the students there have fallen behind grade level in math and reading. Or that Meramec is now in the third year of a pilot turnaround effort that appears to be helping some students catch up—and that may soon be discontinued.

Pablo Ramos greets me there just inside the front doors. A compact 33-year-old with an unruly beard, Ramos is both a Meramec teacher and an alum: He attended second grade upstairs. “Product of the district,” he says, meaning Saint Louis Public Schools. Ramos leads us down a hallway, into that classic potpourri of radiator heat, industrial cleaner, cafeteria cooking, and warm bodies. We enter his classroom. Over the door is a stained-glass window depicting a German castle—presumably a nod to the immigrants who once filled this neighborhood. Today, by contrast, more than 90 percent of Meramec’s student body is African American, as are 11 of the 12 fourth-graders who begin filing into this room that everybody calls “the STEM lab” (STEM being the acronym for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The pupils rush into seats and grab tablets.

“Class, class!” Ramos calls out.

“Yes, yes!” they respond.

“Get on Kahoot.” They use their tablets to log onto that learning platform. This launches a game-show-like review exercise in which Ramos poses multiple-choice questions drawn from previous lessons—what’s the meaning of “algorithm,” “debugging,” “sequence,” or “finite loop”?—and the kids tap in their answers, hoping to light up the scoreboard on a monitor facing the room. (For the record, Dennis crushes it with 12 of 12 correct; Cyneise and Fahid aren’t far behind.)

Meanwhile, four girls at a table chatter and fidget nonstop, despite Ramos’ warnings. But even they quiet down and watch when he places a piece of paper on the carpet in the middle of the room. The challenge: Write code to make Dash, a small remote-controlled robot on wheels, travel around the paper three times. The kids break into groups. Organized chaos ensues.

The remarkable thing about the STEM lab is not any empirical record of success. The lab is a “specials” class, like music or gym, that the kids attend twice a week or so. It’s designed to complement (and whet young appetites for) math and science classes rather than substitute for them. What’s remarkable is how the lab came to exist at all.

Meramec is one of two SLPS schools in a pilot program called the Consortium Partnership Network, or “CPN” for short. (The other is Ashland Elementary in Penrose.) The idea is to keep the two schools under district supervision but shift key decisions to staff inside the school buildings, all while letting them partner with an ad hoc nonprofit that provides technical support and funnels in philanthropic dollars. In short, it grants the schools partial autonomy in the hope that they’ll use it to improve.

The STEM lab is an illustrative outcome. It emerged when teachers and staff met with a parents’ focus group who made clear what they wanted: more hands-on learning that would position their kids for jobs of the future. So the team cobbled together public and private funds and rejiggered the schedule so that all grades could participate. “It wasn’t just waiting around for a directive,” says Jay Hartman, executive director of the CPN’s nonprofit arm. “It was, ‘We’re just gonna do this.’” Principal Jonathan Strong recalls voicing incredulity at first: “‘So you’re saying I can just order these robots? So can I order them right now?’ ‘Yes, order the robots!’”

Because this governance model seeks to fuse the strengths of school autonomy (staff buy-in, hyperlocal knowledge) with those of district control (economies of scale, democratic oversight), it’s sometimes called the “third way” by proponents, including the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. Variations have been tested in Indiana, Colorado, and elsewhere; SLPS’s version is unique to St. Louis, with elements borrowed from Massachusetts. Whether it has proved its viability is an open question. But it has revealed a truth about innovating inside SLPS: It’s hard to get started, and even if you do, it’s hard to know if you’re succeeding.

“I still think it’s a promising model,” says Dr. Saras Chung, executive director of SKIP Designed, an education consultancy at Cortex that’s providing pro bono technical support to the consortium. Chung hopes that SLPS does not make a mistake common in other districts: flitting from pilot to pilot too fast to figure out what works. “The thing with turnaround efforts like the CPN is that you cannot judge it based on one or two years of implementation,” she says. “What all the research says is you have to give it a long runway.” But she also recognizes that its three-year trial period is about to expire, and the district’s board may decide to pull the plug. Says Chung: “That is what I worry about the most.”

The numbers were bad before the pandemic. Now they’re worse. In the 2020–2021 academic year, three-quarters of SLPS third-graders tested at “below basic” mastery in math—the lowest level in state standards. Only 13.7 percent of third-graders scored proficient or above in reading; the eighth-graders didn’t do much better.

To be clear, not every SLPS institution has these issues. The district runs some of Missouri’s rockstar public schools, including Metro Academic and Classical High School and the Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience. Such schools enjoy ethnic diversity and high rates of proficiency in reading and math. But they’re few in number, and crucially, have admissions requirements. Most SLPS schools are neighborhood and choice schools that welcome everyone—and their proficiency numbers are unacceptably low.

It’s true that proficiency reflects out-of-school factors, such as household income, and that about 89 percent of SLPS students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch—a rough measure of poverty. Yet even when compared to districts across the country with similar socioeconomic profiles, SLPS still scores a grade level lower on average, according to the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University.

The path to the present has been rocky. Like other U.S. cities, St. Louis emerged from World War II and watched as Black Americans won their civil rights, judges ordered desegregation, industrial jobs shifted overseas, and crime began to flare up. In response, many white families fled to the suburbs, and many Black families followed suit. Enrollment in SLPS sank. So did test scores and graduation rates, such that by 2007, the district’s academics and finances were in such dismal shape, and the central office and elected school board so dysfunctional, that state regulators yanked SLPS’s accreditation. They handed control to a special administrative board, which hired a new superintendent, Dr. Kelvin Adams. After years of steady leadership and several tweaks to state oversight, SLPS won back accreditation in 2017.

Even so, about a quarter of its 60 schools remain in the bottom 5 percent of Missouri public schools that receive federal Title I funds. And here’s the most alarming datapoint of all: The city’s child population has shrunk by 40 percent since 2000, according to the U.S. census. That’s 40 percent fewer giggles, skinned knees, fresh eyes, incisive questions; 40 percent fewer humans primed to feel a lifelong attachment to our metro’s historic core. Parents of school-age kids, evidently, are voting with their feet—and choosing to live elsewhere.

Some think the solution is to right-size the supply. SLPS once accommodated 115,000 students; today, it teaches 20,000—and not very efficiently. Saint Louis University’s PRiME Center, a group of education policy analysts, recently found that the district had fewer students per building than almost every comparable district in the nation. To improve economies of scale, Adams and the board decided last year, after some emotional hearings, to consolidate by closing seven schools with low enrollment. For district-or-die partisans, SLPS is a victim of the child exodus, not its cause, and must slim down because it is losing kids (and the funding that follows them) to a surfeit of charter schools.

Charters are publicly funded but enjoy total freedom from the district’s central office and school board in exchange for stricter accountability from the state. Charters only receive public funds if kids show up for class; right now, 12,000 city kids attend 33 charters. More charters are in the works. In response, the district board and the board of aldermen have called for a temporary moratorium on new schools. (These gestures were symbolic; only state legislators could enact such a measure.) For their part, charter advocates argue that the city’s real problem is not some oversupply of schools but a chronic undersupply of good ones. In this view, a moratorium would not only be cruel—equivalent to forcing kids into failing district schools by blocking charter competition—but also futile, in that parents would pack up and move rather than wait for those district schools to get their act together.

For now, at least, this competition will grind on—especially because, after two decades, the performance data doesn’t point to an obvious victor, according to independent observers. “We just don’t have evidence either way,” says Evan Rhinesmith, the director of research and evaluation at SLU PRiME. Rhinesmith and his colleagues argue that the best available metric of school quality is not student proficiency—which, again, correlates with family wealth—but rather student growth, which measures how far along a school has brought a student’s learning in a given time period compared to what was statistically expected. And by that metric, Rhinesmith says, the difference between the charters and the district wasn’t dramatic in the 2019 data.

As David R. Garcia wrote in his book School Choice by MIT Press, “Policymakers and advocates on both sides of the debate who are looking for a clear winner…are often disappointed with the results.”

So the charter-vs.-district contest will continue. Meanwhile, the folks inside the CPN are trying to create a hybrid.

Kelvin Adams has a numerical mind and a no-bullshit mien swept of sentimentality—until you ask why he’s still superintendent after 13 years. “Honestly, I like the kids,” he tells me in his sandpaper voice. Yes, some bring weapons to school or get into fights. He’s gone toe-to-toe with a few. But once they deescalate and start talking for real, Adams doesn’t hear a “bad kid.” He hears one who wants support. “I’ve not met a kid that I think is not worth saving,” he says.

A native of New Orleans, Adams took the helm of SLPS in 2008. He’s widely credited with turning a district deficit of $66 million into a $114 million surplus. Still, he’s not without critics. Some charge that he’s too cautious; others, that he’s too charter-friendly and willing to close schools. (He has presided over about 20 closures.) Either way, Adams has already tried a couple initiatives that resembled the consortium—and they didn’t pan out.

In 2009, he designated five “pilot” schools that would enjoy autonomy while focusing on literacy; the plan dissolved, he says, after certain principals retired. In 2014, he proposed a “superintendent’s zone” of underperforming schools. The idea was that they would receive extra resources and, if they still failed to improve, would be handed over to nonprofit contractors who had the freedom (though not the obligation) to make moves that Adams couldn’t, such as dismissing the entire faculty and hiring new, non-union teachers outside of the American Federation of Teachers Local 420. The union howled in protest, and this plan, too, fizzled.

So in 2018, Adams eyed the “third way” approach. At the time, studies of Tennessee’s and Colorado’s attempts at the model were suggesting it held promise. Both the Progressive Policy Institute and the consultancy Bridgespan Group wrote favorably of a different version in Massachusetts called the Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership. Adams and other key players flew out to Springfield to observe. “We came back and thought it would be something that we would try to incubate,” he recalls.

One of the trip’s key players was Eric Scroggins. He’s a lightning rod in the local education scene, so his role in the CPN’s origin, though minor, is worth clarifying. Raised near Alton, Illinois, Scroggins spent years helping to grow Teach for America before moving back to the region. He says he launched his nonprofit, The Opportunity Trust, in the hope that it could be for local education what Forest Park Forever is for Forest Park—an entity that steers philanthropy into the stewardship of a regional asset that no single local government could handle on its own. He’s been accused by progressive and labor activists of a secret agenda to privatize education, a notion he insists is baseless. What’s undeniable is his knack for persuading major donors such as the William T. Kemper Foundation and The City Fund, which supports the charter movement, to contribute millions to the group. Scroggins asked Adams if he could tag along to Massachusetts; Adams said OK. “The hope,” Scroggins recalls, “was to work together with them [on the CPN].”

That cooperation never came to pass. Scroggins believed that the CPN needed several ingredients to succeed, including an appointed board of governors and wide autonomy. Such a board did indeed make it into the design, and Scroggins’ employee, Marcus Robinson, became its mayoral appointee. (Robinson, now the embattled superintendent of the Normandy Schools Collaborative, has left the board.) But as for autonomy, the CPN schools had, in practice, no more freedom to hire or fire than other SLPS schools. (Adams says they’ll get priority in transfer requests.) They also had to use the district’s custodial, security, transportation, and food services; some district services  were optional, but the CPN ended up using them anyway, partly to keep things simple during the pandemic.

So Adams moved forward without Scroggins and The Opportunity Trust’s deep-pocketed donors. The CPN did, however, need startup capital. It was around this time that Adams met up with Chung from SKIP Designed. As they chatted over coffee, they discovered a shared interest in the “third way” model. Chung found a local family foundation open to funding a pilot. Several discussions later, that foundation agreed to donate $400,000 to the Saint Louis Public Schools Foundation, which directed the funds to the CPN’s nonprofit arm so that they could hire staff, such as Hartman as executive director. (Adams, Chung, and Hartman decline to name the local family foundation behind the grant.)

The grant was critical, but for the consortium to work best, it needed the blessing of the teachers’ union as well. Its president at the time, Sally Topping, had been another key player joining Adams on the Massachusetts trip. Topping says she flew back underwhelmed by Springfield’s model but was willing to try a homegrown version because it promised to give teachers more decision-making power. Such power, however, could entail extra hours worked by her members, and the union and district disagreed on compensation for it. “They tried to sell us a shiny new car,” says Topping, “then said, ‘Oh, you want wheels, too?’”

Then Ray Cummings took over as union president. He frowned on both the compensation offer and CPN’s governance by an appointed board. The district tried to sell him on that board, Cummings recalls, by arguing that philanthropists eager to donate would feel more comfortable with that structure. “I don’t buy that,” Cummings says. “There’s no reason our elected school board should not be trusted.”

Ultimately, no agreement was signed. Yet the CPN found ways to proceed—for example, by securing a stipend from the district for staff who serve on the leadership teams. “We’ve had to just be more thoughtful,” says Hartman. “[The teachers] are such a critical partner that we want to incorporate their goals into this work.” Hartman’s hope is that negotiations reopen and the union gives its official endorsement.

Cummings, though, sounds against it: “Dr. Adams and I, we’re pretty much in accord on a lot of things, but I let him know we could get in a fistfight over this.”

To say that the CPN teachers adopted new reading textbooks implies that they already had some. They didn’t. Teachers were cobbling together lessons from several sources. Once the pilot began, though, team members explored the website of EdReports, an independent nonprofit that rigorously vets curricula. Noticing that the Core Knowledge Language Arts series had green scores (indicating “meets expectations”) on material at all grade levels, the team persuaded the district to buy it for Ashland and Meramec. Hartman says some teachers found that CKLA required more prep time or that it lacked cultural responsiveness. But overall, it was a hit. “That was a huge catalyst in changing the culture,” he says. (The district has since adopted its own district-wide reading textbooks.)

Not every CPN innovation has been teaching-focused. Meramec brought on an embedded therapist, thanks to a grant from the SLPS Foundation. (That grant has run out.) The school also stocked a clothing boutique with help from the Little Bit Foundation, and for a time, doled out backpacks of food from Operation Food Search.

But the teams’ main effort has been to up their teaching game, and that has required political savvy. Early on, they sought the expertise of the Transformational Leadership Initiative at Washington University’s Institute for School Partnership. Through the TLI, they got training in “place-based learning”—whereby, for example, students explore the concept of erosion by stepping outdoors to hunt for examples. Yet according to an Institute-commissioned independent review of TLI programming, the CPN schools have so far tried place-based learning only in science and social studies, not in math and reading, “where testing incentives and central office turf wars can create fraught political dynamics.”

The TLI has also pushed CPN teachers to shoot for “deeper learning.” So if you’re teaching a lesson about cookies, then yes: Your students should learn the ingredients (level 1) and follow a recipe to bake them (level 2). But they should also stretch a bit by figuring out how to bake a double batch (level 3) or by baking something entirely different, like brownies (level 4). In sum, regurgitating info isn’t good enough; kids need to apply knowledge and then transfer it. The Meramec teachers did a workshop on this in December, led by TLI’s Linda Henke, the former Maplewood Richmond Heights School District superintendent who is credited with turning that district around. “Students’ performance can only be as good as the assignments they receive,” she says.

Henke believes that on the all-important Missouri Assessment Program standardized tests, you don’t get higher scores by aiming for them directly. You bolster teaching and learning first, and higher scores will follow. But she observes that her proposed teaching methods feel risky to some CPN teachers. “One teacher said to me, ‘Linda, I understand what you’re saying, but in the end, the district pays me.’ So there’s pressure [to teach to the MAP tests]. You have to build a semipermeable membrane around the school so teachers will be vulnerable and take risks.”

Adams agrees with Henke on strategy but says that while his central office does hold teachers accountable for certain standards, it doesn’t instruct them to teach to the MAP tests. “No teacher has ever been fired for bad MAP scores,” he says.

That may be true, yet districts can lose accreditation for as much. Therein lies the tension at the CPN’s heart: The consortium may have the autonomy to teach, spend, and decide differently, but it doesn’t have autonomy from the results. The CPN schools remain in the district. They answer to the district. They contribute to the district’s overall MAP scores. So how much patience will the district show if the CPN’s scores don’t trend up?

“I think what you’re pointing out is the million-dollar question: How long a leash are they going to get?” says Rhinesmith of SLU PRiME. “It’s unfortunate that in education, we give things maybe three years to really try to plant some roots and make a difference. I’m hopeful that the district will give this a chance.”

Recent data may prod the district board to do just that—perhaps as early as its scheduled March 8 meeting. Internal standardized testing in the first half of the 2021–2022 school year indicated that at Meramec, grades 1–4 achieved above-average growth in either reading or math, and at Ashland, grades 1–6 achieved above-average growth in math (with the exception of fourth grade; they were under quarantine during testing). Such growth suggests that kids are starting to catch up to grade level. Still, it’s wise to interpret those results cautiously. The sample sizes are small, and any progress may take time to be reflected in the state-administered MAP tests.

“It is enormously difficult to attribute anything of long-term implication to the results of initiatives that have been pursued over the last few years,” says SLU PRiME’s Cameron Anglum, the lead investigator of a team contracted to evaluate the CPN. Even if the data shows promise, Anglum says, the pandemic has made causal claims tricky.

Unfortunately, “third way” projects in other states don’t offer much guidance: Their results are mixed, too. In Massachusetts, the Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership claims that 4 of 10 schools recently saw “strong” gains in proficiency rates or state percentile rankings. In Indiana, schools in the “innovation zone” of Indianapolis showed higher growth scores on average than traditional public schools from 2016–2019, according to data supplied by the Mindtrust (an entity analogous to The Opportunity Trust). But in Colorado, a plurality of innovation schools in Denver County had a worse state rating in 2021 than when they launched.

Dr. Joyce Roberts, who chairs the district board and also sits on the CPN’s board, has visited both Meramec and Ashland. They hummed with energy, she says. Putting decisions in the hands of teachers might be scalable, in her view. But will she and her colleagues decide to renew? “I couldn’t speak for the board,” Roberts tells me. “We don’t have the data to say it’s hit a home run. But there are some promising practices that I believe could make a difference at other locations.”

Meramec’s STEM lab is a raucous boil of fourth-graders, tablets, and robots when Principal Strong shuffles into the classroom. With long braids and an avuncular presence, Strong doesn’t carry or see himself as an old-school autocrat. The Soldan High School graduate prefers a football analogy: He’s the fullback, throwing blocks and creating holes for his CPN teachers, the running backs, to run through. He observes the activity that the STEM lab teacher, Mr. Ramos, has unleashed.

In one corner, a trio of boys has assembled a code in Blockly, Google’s visual programming language. They watch as Dash the robot zooms forward and stops. Dash swivels right, zips forward, stops. Two more times, and he’s back to the starting place.

“Yes!” cries one of the boys. “Mr. Ramos, we done it!”

Strong sidles up to me. “We’re only a few months in,” he says of the robots. When these fourth-graders write code for Dash, he says, they’re applying mathematical logic to make a physical object move, which is better than, say, memorizing a formula. Once they’ve given it a try, he adds, you can ask them: Why did your Dash move around the paper? Why didn’t your Dash make it?

“Knowledge changes every day,” Strong says. “The best thing you can teach them overall is how to be problem-solvers and then to transfer that skill into everything.” He shepherds the kids out of the room.

Ramos settles onto a stool and sighs. “I didn’t really like how they were acting,” he says. The boys got it, he says, “but my group of girls over here—they get it, they were just being social butterflies.” Months of social distancing altered their behavior, Ramos says. But underneath those temporary challenges are deeper ones—ones that will make evaluating the CPN difficult.

Meramec students live in the city’s densest cluster of violent crime, according to the 2021 police crime map. This environment puts students at risk of toxic stress—a heightened, prolonged bodily response to threats that, in the absence of supportive adults, harms kids’ ability to learn. A related problem is housing instability: In the 2019–2020 school year, the state identified 3,599 students in SLPS as “homeless.” Many observers add an uncountable number of kids who bounce from home to home among friends and family.

Ramos knows what it’s like. His mom struggled with addiction. He attended several elementary schools, lived in shelters, spent time in foster care. “I went through stuff these students have been through,” he says. But now he’s in a doctoral program. “I’ll do whatever I can to show them: If I can do this, you can do this.”

The CPN’s future, though, hinges on being effective not just for an exceptional student but for many students. Even if it does so, discerning that will be tough because of the mobility problem. A school’s mobility rate refers to the portion of the student body that has changed at year’s end because of student departures and arrivals. The CPN’s mobility rate, Hartman says, is 40 to 50 percent, meaning they regularly lose kids who have learned within the pilot and gain kids who haven’t. This affects the data “immensely,” Hartman says. But one of the CPN’s strengths is a full-time data analyst who “tries to find the signal in the noise.”

Chung argues that innovating inside SLPS isn’t impossible. “It’s just hard,” she says, “because doing so requires time and thinking space.” And those are in short supply when you’re expending so much energy just to bring kids up to grade level.

But by all accounts, the folks in the CPN will keep trying as long as they’re allowed. For Mr. Ramos, it’s personal. “When I look at these kids,” he says, “I see myself.”