A Great Miracle Happened There
No other way to describe it
Nina Turner needs no introduction, I’m sure. The 2010s version of John Kasich was a hard core conversative. State Senator Peggy Lehrner has never been beloved. State Senator Sandra Williams was my choice in the 2021 Cleveland Mayoral primary. In 2024 political terms, none of these people would have anything to do with one another. But in 2012, in Columbus, Ohio, they came together to pass The Cleveland Plan. A moon shot in the world of public education. For twelve years their miracle compromise transformed Cleveland public schools.
Edit: When Eric Gordon first became CEO of CMSD, he took a one-year contract. During that first year he designed The Cleveland Plan, lobbied Columbus politicians for passage, engaged Cleveland’s philanthropic community to help pay for many of the programs, negotiated with the CTU to change their collective bargaining agreement, and asked Cleveland taxpayers to give him one year’s worth of operating funds to get the plan off of the ground. It was a remarkable bet. He accomplished so much in that first year, all of it while driving around town in what has been described to me as “his old jalopy” because he believed in the Cleveland Plan and he believed in Cleveland students. The Cleveland Plan happened because the school district had just had back to back failing report cards and was about to be taken over by the state. That almost never changes anything. Only a radical experiment could do it. Curiously, if you go to look for these kinds of story archives on the CMSD website, they have all been removed. The newspapers will tell you what the politicians take credit for, but only the people who slogged through it can really tell you about the Cleveland Plan.
The Cleveland Plan allowed school choice and recruited students from other school districts. It allowed for the creation of different styles of schools. It was radical and innovative. It was the reason I moved into Cleveland city limits. My daughter was born in 2012 and my twins in 2014. Once we entered the school choice lottery and won that seat at Campus International School, I thought we were set forever.
But it wasn’t just about the education. The Cleveland Plan created a feel good, root for them story about Cleveland schools and Cleveland school children. We had a communications/marketing department that told stories about the school children. My kids were at Campus but I was hooked on stories about the wins taking place in schools all over the city. I met fellow Campus parents who had multiple kids in different Cleveland schools that met the needs of their individual children.
The stories helped pass the levies. Until the Cleveland Plan, levies hasn’t been passing and it took a couple of years of progress under the plan before a levy passed. Then more levies passed. We are still paying for the 2020 levy, which was the teachers and tech levy. But if the November levy doesn’t pass, apparently we are going to lose 700 teachers, which is weird since, again, we are still paying for the levy that was supposed to save their jobs.
The Cleveland Plan is dead. Mayor Bibb wasn’t interested in it and he wasn’t interested in keeping Eric Gordon either. The Gund Foundation money started to dry up (it paid for a lot of things) and the new Academic Superintendent decided to impose a single curriculum across 100 schools, paying no heed to their previous independence. And how is that ELA curriculum going? It cannot be modified to meet the legal requirements of IEPs and at our 5 star early college high school, 40 out of 60 students failed an assessment. Also, it’s not a great curriculum for our district’s ELL students either. The new ELA curriculum is an abject failure in almost every possible way. Oh, and there is some question as to whether or not Tremont Montessori will be able to maintain their Montessori status.
I have been told that even if the levy passes, Dr. Morgan and Michelle Pomerantz intend to cut the instructional minutes in our extended day/year schools. Don’t know why, since our levies have been paying for them all this time. Many of the schools with the additional 150 minutes per school week are 4 and 5 start schools and they are on the eastside of town. The are schools with a majority Black student population. This is not about equity and do not let them continue to push that lie. Cutting the instructional minutes was the impetus for starting this blog. I wondered how a group of credentialed people from the Mayor to the school board to the Executive Leadership Team could be so wrong. Along the way, while investigating the decisions, I’ve come to find that their credentials don’t mean much at all.
The Indianapolis Plan
I’ve been saying that it’s possible that Dr. Morgan could have been successful at a smaller school district. I thought that because he and his team seemed determined to make this radical school plan into something smaller and easier to manage. I don’t think there is ill will toward The Cleveland Plan. But having so many schools with such a variety of learning designs, differences in length of school day and school year is just too much for the $2 million dollar Executive Leadership Team. It’s doesn’t allow them to have neat, digestible data. We have families that choose to get up early in the morning a traverse across the city to send their children to schools that suit their needs. It is school choice even if there are some families that didn’t find it to be a perfect system.
But Dr. Morgan and his ELT want to reduce that choice, just a little. They want you to feel like you have a choice, but not so wide ranging and all of the schools will mostly be the same because they aren’t just stopping with ELA. They are going to mandate math and science curricula, as well. When Dr. Morgan says that he wants quality schools in every neighborhood so that people don’t have to cross town for the school that offers what a student wants, what he means is that under the Indianapolis Plan (my name for it, probably not theirs) your household will be in a zone and you’ll be free to choose schools in your zone.
This is how they do it in Indianapolis Public Schools, where Dr. Morgan spent two years as the Academic Superintendent. It’s funny, I read one of the welcome interviews he did when he joined IPS and it was dated September 2020. He gave lots of welcome interviews here in 2023. He was interviewing for the Cleveland job most of 2023, which puts into perspective just how much time he spent in Indianapolis.
Families in the IPS are sealed off into zones with 12 to 15 schools in each zone. Families can choose seats in their zone schools. They don’t seem to be able to choose a school in a different zone. There are “innovation” schools, but those seem to be primarily for high school.
Here in Cleveland, if you read the Signal article about our state report card results, you would have also read that two-thirds of Cleveland families choose a school outside of their zip code. That’s higher than I would have guessed. I wonder how those families are going to feel about being locked into a zone. I wonder if those of us already using school choice will get to stay in the schools of our choosing or will be forced into the zones. What about the families that choose Cleveland schools even though they live in Willoughby, Euclid, Cleveland Heights, or Rocky River? What zones will they be in?
What might those zones look like in Cleveland? Take a look at this visual from the Signal article and tell me the families on the west side aren’t going to have better zones than those of us on the east side.
The dividing lines in Cleveland and the historical issues with the neighborhoods is not something I expect a team from made up of people from Chicago, Atlanta, Memphis, and Saginaw to fully understand. Nor can their well-paid consultants from Denver, Chicago, and Cincinnati.
Time
This past week I had a conversation with a Campus parent who says she finds it difficult to read this blog anymore. She thinks I should give Dr. Morgan more time before being so critical. I disagree and I told her so. In Dr. Morgan’s first year in the district, he made several foolish decisions. We are supposed to trust him and vote for this levy. But he wants to reduce instructional minutes and said, “those extra minutes just don’t get us much.” He was proven wrong with data. But he still plans to do it. If we, a parents and Cleveland taxpayers let Dr. Morgan and Michell Pomerantz take those extra 150 instructional minutes, we will never get them back. My sons are in the 5th grade and I don’t have the time to wait to criticize bad school district decisions. The creation of The Cleveland Plan isn’t something that can ever happen again. If you give up this inch, the students lose the miles.
If we let Dr. Morgan and the ELT take away the district wide school choice of The Cleveland Plan, we will be restricted into zones which will probably be fine for those on the west side but not for anyone else. If we continue to let Dr. Morgan, his ELT, and the unaccountable school board impose faulty curricula across all of the schools, the zones won’t even matter anyway. The school board and the schoolboard president seem to have contempt for the parents, teachers, and taxpayers in Cleveland. They want you to shut up, vote for the levy, and not to question them. We can’t afford to do that.
Speaking of questions
It’s getting more difficult to get responsive documents from CMSD public records. Back in April, I could ask for some guy named Bob in some department’s emails and they would send me emails. But now my requests are deemed too broad. Like this one about a company called Equity Matters. We’ve been contracting with them since at least 2021 but I can’t get copies of those contracts.
I cannot even get invoices for copies of books our school district has bought through Equity Matters. And yet, Equity Matters is so important to our school district that they are taking full credit for the rise in student performance at RG Jones School.
One would think that CMSD would proudly shower me in those invoices, regardless of how much money has been spent (By Gordon and Morgan, fyi) but no.
This week I also found out that Dr. Morgan has been given approval from the school board to make consulting contracts without board supervision, no matter how much the contract is for. Dr. Morgan isn’t being held accountable by a school board that has no accountability, and I just don’t see how that doesn’t end up leading to corruption.
If we have lost The Cleveland Plan, it’s time for the state legislature to give Cleveland citizens power over our schools again. Sure, it was terrible before 1997 and terrible before the Cleveland Plan, but at least we were responsible for it.