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Building Smart Education Systems: VUE Number 26, Winter 2010
NOTE: This article was originally published in Engaging Communities: VUE 13, Fall 2006.
After years of mistrust between the schools and community residents, the mayor of Nashville set out to rebuild confidence by opening schools to families and city residents, and the effort has paid off in increased support.
After a campaign in which he pledged to make education the top priority of the city, Mayor Bill Purcell of Nashville began, soon after taking office in 1999, to engage the entire community and rebuild public support for Nashville Public Schools. Through activities such as First Day, a civic celebration timed to commemorate the beginning of the school year, and a campaign to encourage parents to bring their children to school on the first day, Mayor Purcell has generated substantial support for the schools. And, in turn, the city has raised the school’s budget by more than 42 percent since he took office.
Mayor Purcell has a long history of involvement in education. As a state legislator, he sponsored the state’s education reform act. He was director of the Child and Family Policy Center at the Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies. And he is the parent of a child in the Nashville Public Schools.
Voices in Urban Education editor Robert Rothman spoke with Mayor Purcell about the challenges and rewards of strengthening the relationship between schools and a city community.
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What was the relationship between the community and the schools like when you took office?
I think, in retrospect, there was a significant amount of mistrust between the community and the schools. This went both ways. Schools wanted – genuinely wanted – the support of the larger community, but had an ambivalent attitude towards the active presence and involvement of parents. Parents felt that.
The school system had a great commitment to sharing the good news and good stories about the schools.
Parents knew that. But they also knew that the schools were very reluctant and, in fact, did not share the shortcomings that the parents and their students knew the schools suffered.
That, frankly, combined with the fact that the community’s efforts to support the schools overall were not coordinated by the district, was at the heart of what I would describe as mistrust.
There were plenty of people trying hard to reverse this. The Chamber of Commerce actually had begun, almost ten years before I took office, to work to change this dynamic. And there were lots of people of good will on all sides of the equation trying to reverse this. But at the core, “mistrust” would describe the overall relationship.
And you saw a concrete example of that mistrust in a letter from your daughter’s school.
Oh, yes. I can still see the letter. I can see it in my hands in the kitchen as I’m sitting at the table reading, “Congratulations. School starts in two weeks.” (Of course, that was a traditional school communication at that time; they let you know only two weeks in advance.) The only printing in bold face was the admonition that on the first day of school, no parent shall enter the building. There was nothing else in bold face.That was the one thing they wanted to be sure you took away: you weren’t to go into that place on that day.
There was no suggestion that there was another day they encourage you to come in. They wanted to be darned sure you didn’t come in on that day. And while that doesn’t describe every principal in every school, that was the overall feeling that probably encapsulates the culture of the district as well as any other.
Education: The Most Important Thing a City Does
How did you go about trying to change that relationship?
I started in earnest as a candidate. I started out almost two years before the election saying, from the beginning, that education was the most important thing that this city did. Period. And I never left that message, from the moment I announced that I wanted to be mayor to the moment I was elected.
Having been elected, I continued at every opportunity to reaffirm that message. If there’s one thing that I think we have established firmly, it’s that education is now the most important thing that we do; it always was the most important thing that we do; and it always will be the most important thing that we do. This will never change, in this city or any other city that wants to be successful.
Then, in affirmation of that message, I became personally and highly focused on the schools themselves. I started talking early on about the importance of being in the schools. I had committed to visiting every school in the city during my first year as mayor – at that time there were 127 schools in the city – and I made those visits. I walked through every kitchen and every classroom in every section of the building and sent reports back to the school system about what I was seeing. I tried to make sure that every teacher and principal knew that I was there.
Welcoming Parents into the Schools
I made those visits myself and, during that period of time, pushed the First Day initiative. There was some initial reluctance. When I first met with the then–school superintendent, he thought it was a good idea, but why don’t we do it on the first in-service training day in October? And I said, “Why would you choose that?” And he said, “Well, because there are no students in the building.”
And I remember sitting there thinking, “I must not be explaining myself.” Because that’s exactly not what I want to do. I think parents should be in the building when there are kid there and teachers there and learning isgoing on. I think it ought to happen as soon in the school year as possible. That’s the first day.
And, to the superintendent’s credit, he relented, or agreed, depending on your perspective, I suppose, and said it was something they would try.
Accountability, with Support
We then offered a full-blown performance audit on the entire system, and offered to raise the funding for this from outside the school system. Normally, performance audits are paid for by the entity that’s being audited, but in this case I felt that it was an innovation for the city, as a whole, and the school system, specifically, so I should raise the money outside. It was about $500,000, as I recall, and half of it came from general government and half from foundations here in Nashville. They agreed to this, and we began the performance-audit process, which, ruthfully, culminated in a very important report and an important level of understanding and attention to the school system.
That was the process in the first eighteen months that I was mayor.
First Day: Engaging the Community
How have these efforts developed? I understand First Day is now a major
event in the city.
In terms of First Day, we now have roughly 21,000 parents and students appearing at the festival, which we hold, presently, on the day before school starts. From the first year, we had a higher level of attendance on the first day than we’ve ever had. In fact, the first year, they found, I think, 400 students 
who, traditionally, would have missed the first day – parents were out of town, they didn’t get the message, some problem – 400 kids who statistically never would have appeared on the first day, and some of them not for several weeks, were in school. We immediately noticed, because of this attention, higher PTA and PTO membership and participation.
And the combination of all of these things really allowed us to do one of the most important things, which
was significantly increase overall investment in our schools. That investment is financial: the school budget in the city of Nashville went from $397 million annually in the year that I came into office in 1999 to a total of $563.2 million for the current year, 2006–2007.
We’ve had significant capital investments, which we began doing, on my watch, annually.We’ve done, basically, six annual installments totaling $361.6 million.
As a result, I think you’d find here a much higher level of personal investment: investment by individual
parents, investment by the business community overall. Our public alliance for education has raised $4 million, which is something that wouldn’t have happened before; it couldn’t have happened before.
The Ultimate Goal: Improved Student Achievement
Were there other goals you had for engaging the community in the schools?
Ultimately, we all want performance to improve across the board. We have, still, a distance to go on that. I think what we find is a much higher level of trust in the results the system itself is producing.
In Tennessee, I sponsored, as House majority leader, the Education Improvement Act, which passed in 1992, and which started regular testing here. It was one of the earliest efforts in the country to bring regular and honest reports to parents. And it does so down to the subject and grade level, so you can tell how the third grade in your child’s school is doing, and teachers and principals have information about the performance of individual teachers and classrooms.
The first year we had that in place was 1995. As a result of this process, I think we have a higher level of press interest and parental belief about what the school system itself is saying about how it’s doing, about its accomplishments and its shortcomings. And a general belief that we have to do better and we can do better and we will do better.
At different points in our history, we weren’t sure we could do better. At different points in our history, we were pretty satisfied we wouldn’t do better overall. But, at this point, I think there is a general expectation in the community as a whole that we should, can, and will – and that we will do this in every school, not simply in certain sections of the city or certain magnet schools, but that, in fact, we can accomplish it across the entire system.
Investment won’t continue without success, and I’m satisfied that success won’t continue without investment of all the kinds I listed: money, and people, and general good will.
Successful Schools, Successful City
Now that the community is at this stage, what are the next steps? I think the most important thing for me to imprint permanently is the notion that this is the way that schools – and the city in which they are located – succeed. You can’t ever go back. There never will be a time when these schools aren’t the most important thing that we have to attend to.
And that’s, frankly, what I’m busily doing this next year. I have one more year as mayor, and my strong commitment is to make sure that’s a permanent part of the culture of this city. Because I care a lot about the schools and because I don’t think the city can continue to succeed without it.
The good news for us is that, with this focus, there have been other visible signs of success for the city. The last two years in a row we’ve been the number-one city in America for the expansion and relocation of businesses. Last year, we were the number-one city in America for corporate headquarters relocation. Kiplinger’s magazine, two months ago, said we were the city in America that anyone should choose to live in – the number-one choice. These are indications, I think, along with lots and lots of individual decisions by corporate leaders to bring their headquarters here, that, in fact, this city is leading in a way we didn’t lead before in America. This has everything to do with what we’ve been doing, first and foremost, focusing on education.
That connection is clear now, and my goal is that it is never forgotten or lost.
