Detroit’s Nonprofits Hope School Overhaul Will Become National Model

As part of their effort to revitalize Detroit, foundations and nonprofits have made a major push to improve the city’s schools—a daunting task in a troubled school system that is run by multiple entities.

But they are trying new approaches that could serve as models for other cities. For example, Excellent Schools Detroit, started by a coalition of philanthropic and civic leaders in 2010, has developed a scorecard that provides side-by-side comparisons of the city’s schools, along with letter grades, to help parents decide where to send their children.

In addition to measuring how students performed on standardized tests, it evaluates the school climate—for example whether it has effective leaders, collaborative teachers, and involved families, according to reviews by teachers, students, educators, parents, and community members.

The goal, says Dan Varner, the group’s chief executive: to get parents to select the best schools, thus putting pressure on the weakest schools either to improve or to close.

Excellent Schools Detroit was created to promote a new philanthropic approach to upgrading the city’s schools since the traditional methods were not working. Tonya Allen, chief executive of the Skillman Foundation, a local grant maker that led the coalition effort, says her organization and others would typically help finance pilot programs and hope that if they were successful the Detroit Public Schools would expand them.

But it never worked, she says, partly because of a constant leadership turnover, including the appointment of three state-controlled emergency finance managers since the late 1990s.

Skillman and others decided it would be more effective to promote changes that would affect the entire network of schools, including the growing number of charter schools—a controversial shift since, as in many cities, charters were a lightning rod for teacher’s unions and the traditional-school establishment.

“We were trying to open up the debate, that it does not matter who is governing the school,” says Ms. Allen. “What matters is the product and the quality of the school.”

High Failure Rate

Excellent Schools Detroit rates public, charter, and private schools—in addition to those that are under the control of the Education Achievement Authority, a private entity that Gov. Rick Snyder created in 2011 to take over the state’s worst-performing schools.

As with so many other efforts to help the Motor City, foundations have chipped in to help cover the costs of that new body, which is now running 15 Detroit schools (an effort that has drawn some controversy for removing schools from local control). They include Skillman; two Michigan-based grant makers, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Kresge Foundation; Bloomberg Philanthropies; and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, whose founders both attended Detroit Public Schools.

“We were heartbroken and outraged when we learned that the worst 5 percent of Michigan’s schools were failing 90 percent of their students,” the Broads wrote in the Detroit Free Press last spring. “How can Michigan recover from its crippling economic setbacks if it doesn’t have a homegrown educated work force?”

Parent Involvement

Changing Detroit’s schools will not be easy. When Excellent Schools Detroit issued its first letter grades last summer, only a quarter of the 149 schools that it reviewed received a C+ or above, the minimum that the group considers acceptable.

But the nonprofit is thinking longer term. In addition to its scorecard, it works to keep parents involved in pushing for change, for example through a magazine and video channel, and promotes projects like an academy for aspiring school leaders. It aims by 2020 to make Detroit the first major U.S. city where 90 percent of students graduate from high school, 90 percent of those attend post-secondary programs, and 90 percent of the enrollees succeed without needing remedial work.

In addition to foundations, the United Way for Southeastern Michigan has become a major player in the school-overhaul movement in Detroit, thanks to a five-year, $27-million grant in 2010 from the General Motors Foundation for education projects—the largest grant in the foundation’s history.

The money is paying for a project to help increase graduation rates at seven high schools as well as early-childhood programs. An example is the Little Steps program, which provides books to new mothers in hospitals, asking them to sign a contract that they will read to their new baby for 15 minutes every day. The United Way uses that relationship to bring parents into its other programs designed to prepare young children for school, says Michael Tenbusch, a vice president at the United Way.

That program is one of many designed to help the United Way achieve a lofty goal that it has set for itself: to make greater Detroit one of the top five places to live and work in the country by 2030.