Was the LeBron James school a false promise?

In August, basketball superstar LeBron James made headlines in the education policy circles. It had nothing to do with his performance on the basketball court or his chase for a fifth world championship title this upcoming season. Instead, drama surrounded the acclaimed I Promise school that his foundation has supported since its opening in 2018 in James’ hometown of Akron, Ohio.

Recent Ohio state test results revealed a troubling truth. None of the now 8th graders who have spent the last three years in James’ school have met Ohio proficiency standards — not a single student. The LeBron James Family Foundation has invested millions of dollars in the school, while securing additional support from the likes of Walmart, Dick’s Sporting Goods, and superstar musician Drake. But is it all for nothing? Is the I Promise School a failure?

In 2018, I wrote a piece in Education Week applauding James’ effort. My main argument was that the governing arrangement — not just the star-powered philanthropy — is a reason for excitement about the school as a model. Unlike other notable philanthropy-driven schooling models like the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy in Detroit or Deion Sanders’s Prime Prep Academies in Texas, the I Promise School positioned itself to operate largely as a traditional public school managed and held accountable by the local school board. Are the low test scores an indictment of the model? No. If anything, the scores are a result of the school’s design. I Promise enrolls students through a lottery reserved for students who test in the bottom 30% on reading assessments. They want the kids who are being left behind.

To have strong educational systems, we need schools committed to the students with the greatest challenges. We need those schools to be connected to systems that provide avenues for public accountability as well as access to the larger pool of quality administrators, teachers, and support staff who work within the existing system.

So even as recent headlines have caused many to doubt, I’m doubling down on my original argument.

Systemic problems require systemic solutions

It’s easy to be skeptical of school boards right now. As I recounted in my previous column (Collins, 2023), the racial and economic gaps in achievement have grown under the watch of many school boards. The three-year superintendent turnover carousels, particularly in urban districts, have become a regular part of the show. Board meetings often are long, stiff, and overly procedural. When the meetings break from the norm, they’ve become intense grounds of protest — some useful, some not; some peaceful, some not. We’ve seen literal fisticuffs at some meetings.

These problems distract us from the important truth. School boards and the districts they govern allow for school improvement at a structural level. We call them school systems for a reason. School boards solve problems that impact the entire system. Have administrators been adequately trained? Do students have consistent transportation to and from school? Systemic solutions could be matters of life or death.

Even when the end goal isn’t saving lives, the stakes are still high for systemic leadership. We need institutions committed to removing barriers to learning for students across schools. We need the ability to offer teacher training and professional development, improve the conditions of facilities, and provide student programming as a systemic process. Do school boards have the best track record of solving systemic problems? Probably not, but to be fair, we don’t have a rigorous tracking system that spits out easy-to-understand data. Policy reformers point to test score performance — an indirect measure of district effectiveness — to judge school boards and districts, while glossing over their impact on the things they more directly shape.

Nothing shows the superficiality with which we toss school board governance to the side than the reaction to the I Promise School. As media outlets reported the news of the low test scores, supporters of school choice have taken uncouth victory laps (some in my email inbox). Yet the vast majority of those joining the failure parade fail to consider the context that surrounds the I Promise School. The thing we must remember about school systems is that they are interdependent.

Look at Ohio. In 2017, when I Promise was still a promise not yet fulfilled, only 12% of Black students met the math proficiency standards. In 2019, when the doors of the I Promise school were opening for just its second year of operation, Black students in Ohio were still struggling. Only 13% of the 8th-grade Black student population across Ohio earned proficient scores on the National Assessment for Education Progress (NAEP) in math. How did Ohio Black students do in 2022? Only 9% of them reached proficiency in math.

The trend extends beyond Ohio. Nationally, Black students experienced more than twice the level of pandemic learning loss in math than their white counterparts (Mervosh, 2022). I Promise is not an isolated incident of failure; this is a school caught in a dangerous storm.

Asking the right questions

Would I Promise fare better if it were a more autonomous charter school or a private school? If you’re asking this, you’re asking the wrong question. For that to be the right question, we would need clear and consistent evidence that choice models work for underserved students. However, the evidence is a mixed bag (Betts & Tang, 2016; Cohodes & Parham, 2021).

Instead, we should ask: What is truly possible through democratic accountability? What should it look like for public accountability to create the conditions for supporting the kids we leave behind and write off? How can we, with the goal of creating a strong and equitable education system, make democracy better?

We don’t improve school district democracy by doing more of the same. The route to democratic deepening will not be through having a small portion of the population cast ballots in school board elections once every four years and waiting for test scores to rise. It won’t happen through obstreperous groups with narrow political agendas causing havoc at board meetings. It won’t happen by finding the messianic public official or school administrator who can throw around bright ideas and single-
handedly save schools. We need stronger systems, not weaker ones.

That is the issue facing I Promise. The concern is not just that students seem to be struggling academically; it’s that Akron Public Schools is on its fourth superintendent since the I Promise School opened. The concern is that the tenure of one of those superintendents ended in less than two years. The concern is that Akron’s school board of members elected at-large by voters throughout the district have suddenly been pressured to replace one superintendent after another far too swiftly for anyone to make the systemic change that is needed (Cary, 2023).

Taking democracy deeper

We need deeper democracy. School board elections alone are insufficient accountability tools. Elections are infrequent opportunities for exercising voice, occurring only once every two or four years. The voting process is hyper-individualized in that voters make selections through secret ballots that encourage coordination but not collaboration. It is a limited form of public oversight, and that is before we start to factor in the alarmingly low levels of voter participation.

Akron is the perfect example. How many Akron community members participate in the school board elections? I collected the total number of votes cast in the past five Akron school board elections, according to the Ohio Summit County Board of Elections. I put together an estimate of voter turnout by dividing the total votes by the adult population (~158,000 people), which I then divided by three, given that in the general election voters can choose up to three candidates. Based on my estimation, 11.5% of the entire adult population of Akron votes in the elections determining who sits on their school board.

We need to judge democratic systems of school governance by how far they stretch beyond voting. That dexterity should take us to routine events in accessible sites that spur substantive and routine dialogue around how to improve individual schools as parts of a larger system. The NAEP scores and state test results give us an indication that students are struggling, but only the teachers, parents, and kids themselves can tell us why.

Dialogue is not about fielding individual complaints. Democratic school governance is about identifying all the issues and mapping them onto systemwide problems. It is about engaging in the kind of reform that places the interdependency of the schools at the center. That type of reform only works if a central authority maintains a serious commitment to the lowest performing students.

I Promise is serving kids who are playing the hardest version of the game of life. And they have arguably the greatest athlete ever leading their team. But championship teams do not succeed on the backs of an individual star talent. Success perches atop the shoulders of well-designed systems. These strong democratic education systems weave through the experiences of every child and bind their destinies together. It’s a decree to never let go of the children who need it most.

Or, better yet, it’s a promise.

References

Betts, J.R., & Tang, Y.E. (2016). A meta-analysis of the literature on the effect of charter schools on student achievement. Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness.

Cary, T. (2023, June 30). Akron Public Schools board votes to hire Dr. C. Michael Robinson Jr. as next superintendent. WKYC.

Cohodes, S.R., & Parham, K.S. (2021). Charter schools’ effectiveness, mechanisms, and competitive influence. National Bureau of Economic Research

Collins, J.E. (2023). Should we abolish school boards? Phi Delta Kappan, 105 (1), 58-59.

Collins, J.E. (2018, August 2). LeBron James opens a school and speaks democracy to power. Education Week.

Mervosh, S. (2022, September 1). The pandemic erased two decades of progress in math and reading. The New York Times.

This article appears in the October 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 105, No. 2, p. 62-63.