Head of the Class

The students at LEAD Academy, a Metro charter school anchored in a bleak North Nashville neighborhood, have been in class for nearly four hours on this particular Saturday, but they’re not all surly and staring at the ticking clock. Instead, everyone is focused on the computers. The boys are playing a football game that awards touchdowns each time they answer a math problem correctly, and some of them noiselessly pump their fist with each score. The girls, meanwhile, are a slightly more serious bunch as they avidly assemble electronic puzzles that come to shape as they figure out fractions.

Things are no different in other classrooms. Fifth and sixth grade students, nearly all of who are African American and come from low-income households, talk about Martin Luther King Jr., detailing the highlights of his life and what led to his untimely death. Then when it’s time to practice their writing, they silently clutch their pencils and think before they begin. At the end of the class, the kids empty out slowly and quietly, lining up in single file on the edge of a long hall without a prompt from any teacher.

The quality of a school is difficult to measure, if easy to sense, and perhaps you can say the same thing about an entire district. Although there are plenty of troubling characteristics about Nashville’s public school system, not the least of which is that its lagging test scores have placed it under the partial control of the state, perhaps its greatest failing is that places like LEAD Academy are the anomalies. Now, in the wake of schools director Pedro Garcia’s resignation, there are scattered cries for imaginative reform, and new Mayor Karl Dean is open to just about any idea—no matter how bold, unusual or even practical.

“What I think is so exciting about Nashville right now is that everybody wants to be involved in improving our schools,” Dean tells the Scene. “There may be disagreements about educational philosophies, about what the right answer is to any particular issue, but at this point we need to be open. Every option should be on the table.”

All signs indicate he means it. Whether Dean delivers the kind of real reforms the school system needs is an open question for the untested politico, but for now he’s acting with more urgency than he showed during most of his laconic mayoral campaign. Over the last 10 days, Dean’s public calendar has included visiting eight schools, hosting a graduation summit, talking with Garcia’s old senior staff and having conversations with a half-dozen education junkies, from Vanderbilt professor Jim Guthrie to former school board member Kathleen Harkey. He’s also meeting, once again, with all nine current board members.

So far, Dean’s public statements are telling only because of his repeated promise to consider an array of ideas. But in many of his private talks so far, Dean’s made it clear that he will lean heavily on the board to select a different kind of school director. There’s almost no chance the mayor will allow the board to pluck a middle-aged No. 2 from a large school district—the kind of plodding, earnest candidate whose idea of reform is to add a charter school or two every five years. Instead, Dean has told a number of people inside and outside the mayor’s office that he wants the board to look seriously at a candidate who came of age outside the dysfunctional arena of public education. That could be a corporate executive, the head of a nonprofit or a political official. Just so long as the board doesn’t pick from the same bench used by every other lagging urban district.

Dean tells the Scene that the system does not face a “crisis” but “a time of great opportunity.” He must also think that John Edwards’ presidential campaign remains viable. Last summer, the state placed Metro schools under “corrective action,” a clinical designation for districts that continually fail to meet federal No Child Left Behind benchmarks. The district’s high schools are in particularly bad shape, meeting almost none of the law’s proficiency standards. To take one example, nearly 40 percent of the district’s African American students score below minimum benchmarks in math. And although the district’s 70 percent graduation rate marks a major improvement from when Garcia arrived in town, it’s still 20 points lower than the state goal.

Perhaps an even more fundamental problem facing the district is the flight of the middle class. Ten years ago, 42 percent of the district’s students qualified for the federal free and reduced lunch program, which is available only to economically disadvantaged kids. Now nearly 65 percent of Nashville public school students qualify. Under Garcia particularly, middle-class families spurned the district in part because of the director’s apathy toward advance placement classes, charter schools and the arts.