How do Pinellas County schools really measure up against schools in Duval, Orange, Hillsborough, Palm Beach, Broward and Dade counties? Click here for the numbers.
[Times photo: Scott Keeler]
"We don't do as well for some kids as we do for others, and our objective is to do for all kids," said Clayton Wilcox, the new superintendent for Pinellas County schools.
[Times photo: Cherie Diez]
Pat Archibald, here with Antwan Flournoy at Perkins Elementary, has been a student, teacher and administrator in Pinellas County. "I don't see the district getting the automatic respect that it used to," she said.
Jan Rouse said the transition to the choice plan is a large part of the county's problems. "I think we were utterly consumed by the logistics of making choice a reality."
Jade Moore of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association also cited choice as a problem. "When there's an unstable system, the system cannot be improved."
LARGO - The Pinellas County school system has long promoted itself as one of the nation's best. Yet by many key measures, it ranks as one of the least successful large districts in Florida.
The Pinellas dropout rate in 2003 was the second-highest among the seven Florida school districts with more than 100,000 students.
Its black and Hispanic students rank behind almost all of their large-county peers on the reading and math portions of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.
Even those who typically perform best - the district's white and Asian students - are more likely to fail the FCAT than their peers in the other large counties.
When shown these rankings - and others just as discouraging - Pinellas school officials said the district needs to do better.
"We don't do as well for some kids as we do for others, and our objective is to do for all kids," said Clayton Wilcox, the district's new superintendent.
The numbers are "a wake-up call," said Linda Lerner, Pinellas' longest serving School Board member.
The St. Petersburg Times developed the rankings after half of Pinellas County's high schools received "D" grades this year from the state. The rankings were culled from a growing body of information that dissects school performance in unprecedented detail.
The numbers reveal a striking contradiction: a large underclass of students in a district with relatively few poor children.
Pinellas is good at educating kids who are headed for college, the numbers show. But it lags behind other districts in raising the performance of average students and those on a path to academic failure.
Of the 110,000-plus students in the system today, about 40,000 won't graduate or will struggle to graduate if current trends hold true.
"I don't think we're doing a bang-up job with the everyday kids," said School Board member Jane Gallucci.
Yet Pinellas considers itself one of the finest school systems in America, a claim that finds its way into school brochures, speeches by district officials and pep talks to teachers. It echoes well beyond the schoolhouse, affecting home sales and corporate relocations.
Much of that reputation is based on past successes and on numbers that measure the entire student population. In a new environment that measures the success of smaller groups of students, the district is losing its luster.
"I don't think any of us can pretend this district has the reputation it did 15 years ago," said Sheila Keller, a 20-year Pinellas Schools administrator who recently retired. "It may be the reputation we had prior to that time wasn't really deserved."
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In the world of American public education, a sprawling landscape of nearly 15,000 school districts, reputations are difficult to quantify. They begin with a good crop of test scores, a big award, some flattering chatter at a national convention.
Pinellas became known in the 1980s and 1990s as a district that encouraged classroom innovation. It helped pioneer the idea that school systems could be managed like the nation's best businesses.
For years, overall test scores inched upward. So did the district's reputation.
Today, Pinellas leads large Florida counties in the percentage of students it sends to college. Its students perform better on college entrance exams and rank higher in college readiness.
It has no F schools, unlike most other larger Florida counties. It has significant pockets of excellence, notably its popular magnet and fundamental programs.
But the Times analysis indicates the district has been slower than its peers to adjust to the federal No Child Left Behind Act and to some of the newer, more stringent requirements in the Florida A plus plan.
The data these programs generate paint a sobering picture of Pinellas schools when compared to Florida's other large districts - Hillsborough, Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Duval and Orange:
* In most student categories measured by the federal government, Pinellas ranked last this year in combined reading and math performance. Those categories are African-American, American Indian, Asian, Hispanic, white and students with limited English proficiency.
* Last year, Pinellas had the lowest graduation rate among black, Hispanic and poor students in the seven large districts. White and Asian students ranked second from the bottom.
* Pinellas has a higher percentage of high schools labeled lower than a C - 50 percent - than any other large county. Statewide, only 27 percent of high schools have grades lower than C.
* Pinellas in 2004 had the second-worst gap in achievement between black and white students, ahead of only Palm Beach County. The gap was significantly wider than the statewide gap.
* From 2003 to 2004, Pinellas was the only one of the seven large districts to show no increase in the percentage of its students passing the reading and math FCAT.
* The district's less-than-stellar showing comes despite distinct advantages. Pinellas has the lowest percentage of poor students among the large districts and the smallest total enrollment.
* Hillsborough ranks above Pinellas in many categories despite significant disadvantages.
It has a much larger enrollment than Pinellas, more students in poverty and spends less per student. With more drags on its system, it would be expected to rank lower academically.
Yet Hillsborough's overall graduation rate is 10 points higher than Pinellas' and its graduation rate for black and Hispanic students is 20 points higher. It ranks higher than Pinellas on federal reading, writing and math measures. It also has a leaner bureaucracy.
"They have pretty good numbers," Lerner, the Pinellas School Board member, said of Hillsborough. "I think we really need to look at what they're doing, especially in high school."
To broaden the analysis, the Times also ranked Pinellas against the six Florida districts closest to it in size: Brevard, Duval, Orange, Polk, Volusia and Seminole counties. Pinellas still ranked last or near-last in most categories.
In a state that consistently ranks in the nation's bottom-third academically, the district does not stand out like it says it does.
Luanne Eagle Ferguson, a lawyer and mother of two St. Petersburg High graduates, frets about the size of some Pinellas schools. As School Advisory Council president in 2003, she worried that too many students were lost in the crowd and falling behind.
"I was very pleased with the quality of education my kids received, but they took advantage of (college) dual enrollment and (advanced) classes," she said. "For those who are successful, it's a great school district. I don't know what it does for the others."
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Pat Archibald will retire in the next few years with a unique view of Pinellas schools. She began as a student in the 1940s, graduating from Clearwater High in 1957. She grew up hearing her father, a Pinellas principal, rave about the district.
She became a teacher, then an administrator. She has seen the district go from small to large, segregated to desegregated, simple to complex.
"I grew up with tremendous pride in Pinellas County," said Archibald, 65, who coordinates the arts magnet at Perkins Elementary in St. Petersburg.
Now she senses that the district where her life's work took place has lost a step.
"The districts around us that always looked up to us began creating some really innovative programs while we continued to do the same things we have always done," she said. "I don't see the district getting the automatic respect that it used to."
Why?
"I think we've rested on our laurels a bit," said Jan Rouse, associate superintendent for curriculum and instruction.
One of several Pinellas officials who were shown copies of the Times analysis, Rouse said one reason the numbers aren't better may be the district's court-ordered transition from busing to the choice plan after 2000.
It was, she said, "the most significant and profound change in this district's history."
Schools developed "attractors" to lure students. Thousands of families had to apply, fundamentally changing the enrollment process. The district launched a massive publicity drive to educate parents. It beefed up the bus system because thousands more students would need a ride to school.
"I think we were utterly consumed by the logistics of making choice a reality," Rouse said. For awhile, she said, choice diverted the district from "the normal focus we usually have on student achievement."
Rouse said it probably slowed the groundwork for what became the district's primary response to new federal demands for ever increasing test scores.
Those demands became clear when Congress passed No Child in late 2001. Pinellas answered with a major initiative to focus teachers more on the FCAT and quicken the pace of instruction, but it didn't start until this year.
Rouse's assessment of choice as a culprit is "absolutely right," said Jade Moore, executive director of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association.
"When there's an unstable system, the system cannot be improved," he said.
Gallucci, the School Board member, disagreed.
"I can blame choice for a lot. I'm not sure I can blame it for this," she said. "We should be able to multitask."
Moore, who has directed the teachers union for more than 30 years, remembers the days when Pinellas was a hub of innovation.
It was one of the first Florida districts to go to all-day kindergarten and among the first to put guidance counselors in elementary schools, he said. It managed one of the nation's more rigorous desegregation plans without major problems, kept class sizes low and invested heavily in new buildings and special programs.
"No one has the programs we have," Moore said, citing two high schools with International Baccalaureate programs and a slew of magnet and fundamental schools.
In recent years, however, Moore sees a less dynamic district that has moved "in lock step" with Gov. Jeb Bush's plan to standardize education.
He sees problems, including middle schools that are so large many kids don't get the attention they need to prepare for high school.
Many see the same problem with Pinellas high schools, which average about 2,100 students each. The district is in the early stages of trying to address the problem by segmenting 11 high schools into "small learning communities" so they won't feel so big and impersonal.
The concept, promoted through federal grants, divides schools into smaller entities such as houses or academies. The goal is to improve by 10 percent the number of high school students performing at their grade level and by 15 percent the number of students prepared for college or careers.
"Our graduation rate is abysmal," said Moore, who asserts that Pinellas was hit hard by twin storms: Jeb Bush's 1998 election, which ushered in the high-stakes FCAT, followed by the choice plan.
"The testing system, I believe, has thrown this system for a loop," he said.
Another factor working against the district could be money.
Pinellas has the second-highest per person income among the seven large counties, yet it invests the least per person in its schools.
The reason is the state's funding formula, which gives bigger annual increases to rural and high-growth districts. With the highest median age of all the larger districts, Pinellas has little growth in its school-age population. It is a "donor district," with part of the money it sends to Tallahassee redistributed to educate students in poorer, less populated inland counties.
While many parents aren't versed in the politics and inner workings of the district, they are among the first to see a slip in quality.
Janet Dews, who moved to Clearwater from Maryland a year ago, thinks her three children are less challenged here than up north.
Her oldest, who attends Pinellas Park High School, rarely has homework or brings books home. "She says she does her homework in the classroom," Dews said. "If she's got that much class time that she can do her homework, what's wrong with this picture?"
The state gave Pinellas Park High a D this year.
Jeanine Wallace thought more would be expected of her daughter when she started this year at Northeast High, another D school. Three weeks into the term, her daughter had not yet brought a book home to study for her psychology class.
"She kept saying there weren't enough books," Wallace said. "I called the curriculum director to try to find a solution. She checked and verified there is just the one set of books for two classes. They don't have any plan to get any more."
Luanne Eagle Ferguson, the former advisory council president at St. Petersburg High, would like to see the district do more for potential dropouts and encourage average students to take more challenging classes.
"We have a lot to brag about," Ferguson said, "but we also have a lot to work on."
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Clayton Wilcox flattered the School Board last spring while interviewing to replace Howard Hinesley as superintendent. Then the superintendent in Baton Rouge, La., Wilcox told his future employers that Pinellas had always been a "lighthouse district."
In a later interview, Wilcox explained that he meant Pinellas was known for "outstanding" facilities. He meant class sizes were low and that the district had been a leader in developing teaching techniques.
Most of all, he meant Pinellas had spent time looking inward for management flaws. Wilcox called that "powerful."
He had seized on the cornerstone of Pinellas' claim as a nationally known school system - its long association with the "quality management" movement, a business philosophy popularized in the 1980s by noted consultant W. Edwards Deming.
A "quality" company is organized around an unshakable system, clear goals and employees who push in the same direction, always trying to improve.
If something goes wrong, it's a problem with the system, not the employees. Managers and workers talk frequently. Decisions are based on hard evidence. Problems once tolerated are no longer accepted.
Congress endorsed the philosophy in 1987, establishing the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. A few years later, at the urging of local business executive John Mitcham of AT&T Paradyne, Pinellas Schools embraced the movement.
Under Hinesley, Pinellas became the first school district to translate the Baldrige criteria for businesses into something educators could use. Districts across the country turned to Pinellas for advice.
Today, the district is awash in quality management and its jargon. "Cross-functional" groups of employees meet to solve problems. Administrators use Deming's "Plan-Do-Study-Act" process to make improvements. School Board members huddle after every meeting to analyze how well - or how poorly - they communicated while in session.
Still, the philosophy has yet to set Pinellas apart when it comes to its chief indicator - student performance.
In 2001, the district entered the competition to win a Baldrige award for education, but lost to two smaller districts from Alaska and New York. A team of Baldrige judges complimented Pinellas on many fronts, but also came back with stiff criticism:
Pinellas had not done a good job measuring itself against competitors, such as other districts or private schools.
Private school enrollment was up in Pinellas - higher than the state average, higher than comparable districts in Florida and more than twice as high as comparable districts nationally.
Pinellas collected data on the achievement gap between black and white students, but didn't do enough with it.
The district's workforce seemed demoralized. Forty percent of teachers and support staff did not have pride in their jobs, surveys showed. Among administrators, satisfaction with public education in Pinellas dropped from 70 percent in 1998 to 56 percent in 2001.
Three years after the Baldrige experience, top administrators say they have adjusted. They say they are more attuned to performance trends, better focused on struggling schools and are taking the best ideas from districts around the country.
"We were doing lots and lots of things, but we needed to narrow the focus," said Ken Rigsby, an assistant superintendent in charge of infusing the district with quality management practices. The district has since streamlined its mission to focus on what Rigsby calls "Wildly Important Goals," or WIGs.
He said Pinellas had developed good teaching approaches in recent years. Other districts were even paying the district to copy them.
The irony was that Pinellas was having trouble putting them into practice in its own schools. Student performance was flat.
Said Rigsby: "It's no secret to us that we need to improve, and that we have our work cut out for us."
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When half of a county's high schools receive Ds from the state, it's not something the chamber of commerce wants to spread around. High schools are the end of the educational assembly line, the place where a student's trek through the system comes together after 13 years.
When things go wrong in high school, people notice.
"My eyes dropped out of my head," Gallucci, the School Board member, said when describing her reaction to the D grades.
"That's a rather disconcerting statistic," said Mike Mayo, director of strategic relations for the 7,000-member Pinellas Realtor Organization. "I would think if you were a parent and were contemplating moving to Pinellas County, or even if you were a business . . . that kind of a number certainly couldn't be helpful."
Gallucci and others worry about the students who must advance from the district's better performing middle and elementary schools into a D high school. Sixty percent of Pinellas elementaries received A grades from the state this year, as did 45 percent of middle schools.
"But in high school, that's where we're breaking down," Gallucci said. "There's some kind of disconnect going on."
This year's high school grades illustrate how the state's accountability system emphasizes struggling students. If fewer than half of the lowest 25 percent of the students taking the FCAT do not make gains in reading, the whole school drops by one letter grade.
Six of the D high schools in Pinellas scored enough points to earn a C this year but dropped a grade because too many of their lowest performing students did not improve.
"It turned out not to be what we hoped for," said Hinesley, the former superintendent, who led the district for 14 years. "I was very disappointed."
At Clearwater's Countryside High, for example, 23 struggling students brought down the grade for a school with an enrollment of nearly 2,300.
That's why some say the state's grading system doesn't reflect reality. "It's all math," Moore said. "Countryside High School is too good a school to be rated a D."
In response to the D grades, Pinellas has begun turning up the heat.
The district has placed reading coaches in 14 high schools and 21 middle schools who are working with struggling students. The coaches also are working with teachers to infuse the entire curriculum with reading instruction, be it in math, geography or science class.
The goal will be to improve students' vocabularies and "fluency," the ease with which they get through passages.
Students also will be given more practice tests earlier in the year. Cathy Fleeger, an assistant superintendent in charge of high schools, said there will be "an unrelenting focus on ninth grade," where educators across Florida are seeing an unexplained dip in FCAT reading performance.
Meanwhile, a school district slowed by transition is trying to regain its stride. As the new superintendent, Wilcox's primary goal will be to step up the district's performance.
"We are hoping to come at this problem from every angle," Darian Walker, a language arts and reading supervisor, told the School Board recently. "I think we're going to be able to report some progress." She added: "I hope we are going to be able to report some progress."
