What Do You Do When You Can No Longer Be the Dynamo of Dixie?


October, 2004
By Dr. Dan Challener, President - Public Education Foundation of Chattanooga
As printed in Profiles in Leadership: Innovative Approaches to Transforming the American High School

As recently as 1975, almost half of the men and women employed in Chattanooga, Tennessee, paid their bills by working in factories and foundries. This reliance on industry earned Chattanooga the nickname “Dynamo of Dixie.” Around the clock, the plants hummed and the smokestacks billowed. In fact, the smokestacks billowed so much that it wasn’t uncommon for drivers to use their headlights at midday and for the few men who wore suits to work to put on a clean shirt after lunch.

But all of that has changed now. Since 1975, there’s been a mass exodus of manufacturing jobs from Chattanooga. Today, fewer than 20 percent of our community’s jobs are in manufacturing. And in 2001, the city’s largest factory—Wheland Foundry—closed its doors, laying off more than thirteen hundred employees. As the newly unemployed, many of whom had never graduated from high school, began their search for work, they learned that their days of $40,000 incomes and good family health benefits were over. Slowly, these displaced workers realized that they’d be lucky to make half their Wheland salary, and even luckier to get any kind of health care at all.

But Hamilton County’s luck changed the month after Wheland Foundry closed, when Carnegie Corporation of New York announced that Hamilton County’s Public Education Foundation (PEF) and the Hamilton County Schools would receive an $8 million, five-year grant to transform all seventeen of our high schools.

Carnegie’s grant did not fall from the sky. Over the last decade, PEF and the Hamilton County Department of Education have established a powerful partnership that has yielded demonstrable improvement in the eighty-one schools that serve our county’s forty thousand young people. In 1998, through an Annenberg Foundation Challenge Grant and local support, PEF and the district created a leadership development program that has become the engine of all reform efforts. In 2000, the local Benwood Foundation challenged PEF and the district to transform the community’s nine lowest-performing elementary schools; the results have been dramatic and earned national recognition from TheWashington Post, The Education Trust, and longtime IBM CEO Lou Gerstner’s Teaching Commission. Most recently, with support from the Lyndhurst Foundation, the Public Education Foundation has conducted pathbreaking work with William Sanders’s value-added assessment scores to understand what makes one hundred high-gaining teachers so effective.

We are now halfway through our five-year effort, and we are seeing uncommon success. Those outside the schools who clamor for quantifiable proof can look to significant increases in the number of ninth graders who are promoted to tenth grade in one year, the number of students passing our state’s gateway exams, and the number of students moving on to college. Those inside the schools can see more students engaged in challenging course work and more teachers engaged in effective instruction.

Systemic reform of high schools is not for the faint of heart. But at this juncture, we are ready to share four lessons that we have learned. We believe that any community that wants to improve its high schools should consider each lesson carefully.

LESSON ONE: You can and should make your “college track” the track for all your students.

Easily the most controversial strategy we’ve employed has been changing the graduation requirements for all students. Beginning in 2005, all ninth graders who enter a Hamilton County high school will be on what was once known as the “college track.” They can only graduate from high school when they have completed a course of study that includes four years of math, science, and English and qualifies them for admission to a four-year college.

In 2002, Superintendent Jesse Register built significant community support for this change by reaching out to parents and leaders in the business and higher education communities. Over a period of three months, he repeatedly described the importance of raising the standards. Because only 18 percent of adults in our county have a college degree, the proposal required our community to fundamentally rethink the purpose of high school. Nevertheless, parents and the business and higher education communities well understood the importance of these changes given the realities of the new “knowledge economy” and Chattanooga’s ever-diminishing manufacturing sector.

Predictably, there was opposition from a large suburban high school. Some faculty, parents, and students worried that the changes would water down the curriculum. Others worried that this would change the school they believed did not need to change at all. And they wondered aloud, “How can students from all parts of the county do what only our best students do?” The president of that school’s student council told the press that all students should not be expected to pass algebra and that if a more academically diverse group of students were in her chemistry class, it would be less challenging for her.

Fortunately, the Hamilton County School Board did not listen to this small group. We had shown them data from the Education Trust that showed that in places like New York, Texas, and San José higher graduation requirements led to higher achievement, higher graduation rates, and more students going to college. The board passed the resolution seven to one.

There is no question that these new requirements will make us change what we teach and how we teach it. We will have to provide greater guidance and more support to the students who have previously struggled to graduate. But the Carnegie Corporation’s grant has given us the time and resources to address these new challenges. And given that we believe the changes will increase the number of students who are better prepared for challenging jobs and college, we have no doubt that we did the right thing.

LESSON TWO: Locally built plans trump centrally mandated models.

Hamilton County’s seventeen public high schools are very different from one another. We have urban, suburban, and rural high schools. We have K–12, 6–12, and 9–12 schools. We have large and midsize schools, and small schools of fewer than two hundred students. In some of our schools, almost all the children are African American, in others almost all are white. In only a few do we have a truly diverse population.

Given this landscape, the leaders of the Foundation and the district decided that it would be useless to mandate a reform model. We expressly did not, as so many districts have, begin our efforts by requiring all high schools to break up into themed academies with a mandated literacy program for all students. Why would we want to break up a rural high school with forty students in ninth grade? Why would we want to mandate a literacy program for a high school where most students are reading above grade level?

Instead of mandating the process, the Foundation and district established clear and quantifiable goals. We made it clear to all schools that to receive any of the Carnegie grant money, they needed to construct their own plan that would ultimately yield:

95 percent of students moving from ninth to tenth grade in one year;
95 percent passing state gateway exams;
95 percent graduating from high school; and
a reduction by 75 percent of students needing remedial courses in college.
We recommended that they focus their efforts on four core strategies: increasing teaching quality; personalizing instruction for individual students; making academic courses rigorous; and creating flexible daily, weekly, and annual schedules to maximize student opportunity and support.

While we did not mandate a model, we did require all schools to gather and review an immense amount of data, including survey data from all ten thousand of our high school students. Schools were given a full year to review their data, learn about best practices, talk among themselves, and travel to high-performing high schools in different parts of the nation. Most importantly, each school’s staff was given time to construct its plan: monthly meeting time, four full professional development days, four half days, and a weekend retreat.

Because each school constructed its own plan, the blueprint for change has become part of each school’s daily work. When you walk into most schools, you’ll meet passionate advocates for the changes. It’s their plan, and they own it. Indeed, most of our high schools have developed themed academies, and almost all have implemented a literacy program. But they did this based on what their students said, what their data said, and what their teachers said—not because the superintendent mandated it. By trusting each school and allowing for dialogue and critical inquiry, we created momentum and commitment usually absent from most high school reform efforts.

This is not to say that community leaders sit and watch while schools do all the work. Our leadership role—the role of the superintendent, his senior staff for secondary education, and the members of the Public Education Foundation’s project staff—is to provide support and expertise and to ask hard questions. And when the data show the progress is not there, the questions get harder. Unless there are very good answers, schools have to revise their plans or lose support. This year, the leadership team from PEF and the district only approved portions of the plans from two of the slowest-moving schools. We do this with the hope that they’ll earn all their funds by the quality of their redrafted plan.

LESSON THREE: High school reform must be about improving instruction.

Across the country, too much of high school reform focuses solely on changing the structure of the school—such as creating academies or small schools—without changing instruction within the school. Some communities have difficulty realizing that if we take a huge box full of terrible teaching, toxic relationships, and low expectations and divide it into quarters, we won’t come out with better schools. Hamilton County holds a different belief, and we came to it because we listened to students.

In the beginning months of our work, we surveyed all ten thousand high school students about the quality of teaching in their school. Using a simple protocol, students interviewed each other. They then answered a survey that reported their opinions on a range of issues ranging from the rigor of instruction to how often they were asked to sit and take notes. This trove of information was then compiled by teacher leaders at each school who shared it with all their colleagues. The data subsequently served as the catalyst for a weekend retreat for the leadership teams from each school.

I won’t belabor the obvious: if you listen to students you will understand that the core problem in high schools is an instructional problem. Unless we improve instruction, all the academies and all the test prep courses in the world won’t change the outcomes. Thus, we have invested most of our grant funds and lots of time to help each school improve instruction by building a culture where teachers learn together and focus on improving their teaching. The grant funds support experts and materials, but the district has provided an even more important resource: time. Because of strong leadership from the superintendent and a modicum of flexibility

from state officials (they allowed us to access time from our banked snow days!), we have been able to annually provide teachers at all schools four full days and four half days of professional development. Teachers have had extraordinary opportunities to learn about best practices and to work together to improve their teaching. We see the success in our annual survey of students—what they say about instruction—and in increases in student attendance and in success in our state-mandated subject tests in English, algebra, and biology.

LESSON FOUR: Knowing students well trumps everything.

Nothing matters more than knowing students well. Every survey, focus group, and interview with high school students reveals that most high school students feel disrespected and unknown. At the core of our work has been a series of investments that ensure that our students are known well by adults. The work begins before the first day of ninth grade.

What have we done to know our students?

Every high school has created a summer program for all rising ninth graders. At some schools, these programs are two-day retreats in nearby state campgrounds. At other schools, all ninth graders attend a full week of enrichment classes at their new school. At all schools, the ninth graders get to know their peers, their future teachers, and the expectations set for them.

Every high school has developed an advisory program—a program where each student meets regularly with an adult to review progress. In some schools, advisories happen twice a week; at others, they happen once a month. But in all schools, adults are trying to connect with young people, and, according to our student surveys and focus groups, students are starting to feel like they are better known than before.

Almost all of our high schools have created at least one small academy, and many have created separate ninth-grade academies. We’ve tried to ensure that these academies do not simply retrack students. The academic results speak for themselves; the students in these academies consistently show greater achievement than they did before going into an academy.

Developing New Dynamos

Even with all this progress, we know we still have a long way to go. Improving instruction takes a lot of time and effort, and transforming seventeen diverse high schools will require years. Most recently, the district has suffered dramatic budget cuts because our county commissioners fear the wrath of anti-tax voters more than they fear the costs of an undereducated generation. Nevertheless, we have made clear progress across the district. The percentage of ninth graders who make a good start and are promoted to tenth grade inside of twelve months is up significantly in almost all schools, and we’ve seen a considerable decrease in the number of dropouts. Students in our academies are getting much better grades than before their academy experience. And in most schools, there are modest but clear improvements in ACT scores, college applications, and acceptances into college.

At the end of the day, we hope that what we’ve learned can help other community leaders make changes. But most importantly, we hope that our students will become the new dynamos of our community—and our nation.



Dr. Dan Challener is president of the Public Education Foundation in Chattanooga, Tennessee. As president, Challener oversees the Foundation’s efforts to strengthen student achievement in Hamilton County’s public schools. Among these programs is the High Schools for a New Society Initiative, which brings about innovative improvements in Hamilton County’s seventeen public high schools. Before coming to Chattanooga, Challener served for seven years as CEO of the Providence Blueprint for Education (PROBE), a community-based advocacy and research project that involved communities in the improvement of schools in Providence, Rhode Island.

Challener holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, and a master’s and PhD in English from Brown University. He is the author of Narratives of Resilience (Garland Press, 1997), a study of what builds strength in young people. He has taught high school in New Jersey and served on the faculty of both Brown University and Johnson and Wales University.