Board gets lesson in success

California superintendent wows Akron school officials with tips for urban districts

BY REGINALD FIELDS
Beacon Journal staff writer 

Students in uniforms. An alternative school for disruptive pupils. Incentive pay for the best teachers who agree to work in the lowest achieving buildings. A longer school year.

All these bold steps toward reforming education in Akron have been talked about and forgotten before the brainstorming starts.

But they're doing it in Long Beach, Calif., where rising test scores, record-high student attendance and a declining dropout rate at the urban school system have drawn hails by university and education researchers as one of the nation's best.

Long Beach Superintendent Carl Cohn was in Akron yesterday to talk about his success at turning around California's third-largest school system.

He first met with the school board in a meeting the board reluctantly opened to the public, even though state law requires them to do so. Cohn didn't seem to mind. He later was the guest speaker at an education forum at Central-Hower High School.

Education supporters hope Cohn's presence will encourage school officials to put action behind their ideas and to involve the community in solutions to better Akron's struggling system.

Cohn first met with the Akron School Board and emphatically said that his educational philosophy is to not worry about a student's socioeconomic status and focus more on teaching that child. Several Akron board members and educators believe family income is what ails Akron schools most.

"It's about holding students to high standards. I don't want to hear about their backgrounds. Just get after it," said Cohn, who recalled being taught to read in a 1950s classroom by a teacher without a college education or teaching certificate.

"If you only extend your year and do nothing with teacher quality," Cohn told the board, "you can be really exasperating your situation."

The board is currently in the middle of a national search for a new school superintendent. Current leader Brian Williams will retire in June. The board wanted to use Cohn as a practice candidate and ask him questions they might ask during an interview.

But because the meeting was open to the public, board President Linda Kersker changed the plans because she doesn't want the community or superintendent candidates to know what questions the board might ask.

But the 90-minute meeting proceeded anyway, with board members asking Cohn questions they likely will use in an interview.

Cohn left them spellbound with his answers on how to have courage in running a successful urban school system.

His district has 93,000 students and 88 school buildings. Akron has 31,000 students with 60 schools. 

But the two sides learned they share many of the same problems that face urban districts -- low student achievement, high teacher turnover and sparse community support. The difference is the approach Cohn has taken in his nine years in Long Beach.

"We're not scared to try something," he told them.

And he has. Despite early criticism, Cohn made Long Beach middle schools single-sex buildings. And if an eighth-grader gets more than one F, he or she is held back a year before being sent to high school. That move has helped lower the district's dropout rate.

Cohn said he applies the tightest supervision to his district's lowest-performing schools. And if changes are needed, such as reconstituting a school or reassigning an administrator or teacher, Cohn said he will do it.

The Akron schools' philosophy has been that whatever it does for one school it has to do for all schools -- no matter the difference in student achievement at a building.

Meanwhile, Akron's search consultant, Dick Viering, yesterday said he has whittled the list of 25 superintendent candidates down to 11. He has recommended the board interview the remaining hopefuls.

They are: Timothy Calfee, Akron's coordinator of testing, research and evaluation; Agnes Case, director of business and finance for Utica, N.Y., schools; William Capehart, Boyd County, Ky., superintendent; Perry Clark of Indiana, regional vice president of Edison Schools; and Robert Harvey, assistant executive director of North Central Association on Accreditation and School Improvement.

Gerald Kohn, Vineland, N.J., schools superintendent; Dennis Kowalski, Strongsville schools superintendent; Dennis Leone, Chillicothe schools superintendent; Donna Loomis, Akron's executive director of secondary education; Thomas Seigel, former superintendent in Boulder Valley, Colo.; and Sylvester Small, Akron's assistant superintendent, also are included.

The school board will have access to information on all 25 candidates, but Viering was hired to lead the search, draw applications and bring them a short list of semifinalists.

President Kersker said the candidates the board decides to interview will be determined at its March 12 meeting. The interviews will begin the next day. The board hopes to make a decision by April 9.

Cohn, incidentally, is not a candidate for the Akron job.

Reginald Fields can be reached at 330-996-3743 or rfields@thebeaconjournal.com