Fort Worth looks to a charter network to turn this failing middle school around.

Fort Worth school officials hope a new partnership with a charter school operator will turn a struggling middle school into one of the district’s strongest campuses.

Beginning this summer, the district will bring in Phalen Leadership Academies to operate J. Martin Jacquet Middle School, an F-rated campus in the Stop Six neighborhood. The partnership is for five years, at the end of which district officials say they expect the school to have an A rating in the Texas Education Agency’s annual school accountability rating.

Fort Worth school officials say the partnership will give the district more flexibility and more money to help turn the school around. The charter network’s founder, Earl Phalen, can point to cases elsewhere in which the network has helped low-performing schools improve. But in other cases, such partnerships have fallen well short of expectations.

Charter partnership brings more resources

Jacquet will remain in the Fort Worth school district, but its name will change to Phalen Leadership Academy at J. Martin Jacquet Middle School. The partnership is based on guidelines laid out in Senate Bill 1882, which went into effect in 2017. The bill offers school districts financial incentives to partner with charter schools, colleges, nonprofits or other government entities to operate schools.

District officials say many of the details of the partnership, including stipends to attract high-quality teachers to Jacquet, are still being worked out. But Rian Townsend, the district’s executive director of student and school support for Dunbar High School and the schools that feed into it, said during a town hall meeting with Jacquet parents Wednesday that all of the school’s current teachers and support staff members will be able to stay on with the district if they choose, though not necessarily at Jacquet.

This isn’t the first such arrangement the district has made. In 2019, the district partnered with Texas Wesleyan University to take over operations and management of five struggling schools under the newly-formed Leadership Academy Network. David Saenz, the district’s chief innovation officer, said the district selected Phalen to take over operations at Jacquet because the charter network’s programs fit well with many of the tenets of the Leadership Academy Network, including an extended school day, enhanced after-school activities and efforts to make parents a part of the school community. Phalen also has a long history of success working in predominantly Black communities like Stop Six, Saenz said.

The partnership gives Jacquet the benefit of support from the school district, Phalen and the Texas Education Agency, Saenz said. Although Phalen will operate the school, teachers will continue to be employees of the Fort Worth school district. And the school will continue to offer the same kinds of athletic and fine arts programs it has now.

The district hopes to see change come quickly at Jacquet. But that change must also be sustainable, Saenz said. There are examples across the country of schools that have improved quickly and lost all those gains just as quickly, he said. By bringing the school district, Phalen and TEA together to focus on improving the school, district officials hope they’ll be able to help the school find the long-term improvement it needs, he said.

District officials expect the Jacquet to receive about $300,000 extra from TEA because of the financial incentives laid out in Senate Bill 1882. The district is also a member of TEA’s System of Great Schools, making it eligible for certain startup grants that could give the district more money to devote to Jacquet, he said.

The partnership includes a provision allowing families to opt out of sending their students to Jacquet and instead have them sent to another middle school in the district. But Saenz said district officials hope the partnership will bring back students who left the district in favor of charter schools or private schools.

“We know we’ve succeeded when families come back to Jacquet and finish at Dunbar High School,” he said.

Phalen, which is based in Indianapolis, operates 22 schools nationwide, including two in the Beaumont school district. Phalen leaders didn’t respond to interview requests. But during Wednesday’s town hall meeting, Earl Phalen, the charter network’s founder, said the network has turned nine F- and D-rated schools into A- and B-rated campuses. The network’s schools are safe, nurturing and joyful places, he said, and teachers and other school leaders have high aspirations for their students’ futures.

The charter network’s leaders say their approach combines high expectations — Phalen calls their children scholars rather than students — with support and empathy. The network places a premium on school culture and works to build deeper relationships with parents.

Fort Worth Superintendent Kent Scribner said during the town hall meeting that the partnership will allow the district to strengthen the school pipeline that leads into Dunbar. That campus has seen strong progress recently, Scribner said. Dunbar improved from “improvement required” status in the 2017-18 school year — that year’s equivalent of an F rating — to a C rating the following year in TEA’s annual school accountability ratings. Dunbar also benefits from an early college partnership with Texas Wesleyan, Scribner said.

By strengthening Jacquet and continuing to work on the elementary schools that feed into it, the district can give students in the Dunbar area a higher quality education from beginning to end, Scribner said.

“We are trying to build a rigorous, supportive and engaged pipeline from cradle to career, from birth through college,” Scribner said.

School officials hope for growth at Jacquet

Jacquet served 742 students in grades 6-8 last year, according to TEA records. The agency gave Jacquet an F rating for the 2018-2019 school year. The prior year, the school received an “improvement required” rating, the equivalent of an F on that year’s rating scale. TEA didn’t issue A-F ratings for the 2019-2020 school year because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2019, 19% of students at Jacquet performed on grade level or better in reading, according to TEA records. In writing, just 9% of students performed at grade level, and 16% performed at grade level or better in math.

During a district Board of Trustees meeting in March, deputy superintendent Karen Molinar said the district had tried for years to find a solution for Jacquet. It tried strategic staffing initiatives and leadership changes, but the school continued to struggle, she said.

“We just feel like we have not been able to provide and stabilize Jacquet to really see the growth that it needs to receive,” Molinar said. “We want to do something different.”

Trustee Quinton “Q” Phillips, who represents Jacquet, said the school hasn’t had the consistent support it needs from the district to do well. Before voting to approve the partnership, Phillips said the proposal was a vote of trust that the students at Jacquet aren’t the problem. The adults who lead the district need to find a solution, he said, or else they’ll look back years later and realize the school is in the same place it’s been all along.

Angie Boyd’s son, Jacob, is in seventh grade at Jacquet. Jacob is autistic, and Boyd said he’s struggled with school in the past. But teachers at Jacquet have been able to help him stay motivated, she said. After the district announced plans to partner with Phalen, she looked at some of the school’s educational outcomes. What she found was worrisome, she said. She doesn’t understand why the district allowed Jacquet to languish for so long.

Based on what she’s heard from the district, Boyd thinks the partnership with Phalen could be a good idea. If teachers are more involved in students’ lives, it may help some struggling kids do better, she said. But she doubts the district, or Phalen, will be able to solve Jacquet’s problems on their own. She sees a need for a broad cultural change in the neighborhood — one that gets parents more involved in their children’s education.

“If they want to make that school into a leadership school, that’s great,” Boyd said. “But it’s more to it than pushing education.”

Phalen schools show progress in Indianapolis

The Phalen network was founded in 2013. Two years after the network began, the Indianapolis school district brought Phalen in to operate Francis Scott Key School 103, a low-performing elementary school in eastern Indianapolis. Since then, Indiana has changed its state standards and adopted a new state exam, making it difficult to compare academic outcomes in 2015 to those today, said Jamie VanDeWalle, the district’s chief portfolio officer. But the Indiana Department of Education gave the school an A rating for the 2018-2019 school year, up from several years of F ratings before the partnership began.

There have been positive cultural changes at the school since Phalen took over, VanDeWalle said. Before the partnership began, there were an average of 120 fights at the school per year, VanDeWalle said. But when administrators visited the school in 2019 as a part of a review of the partnership, they found a “completely different school culture,” VanDeWalle said. There were far fewer fights and students were warm and inquisitive, she said.

At first, it can be difficult to tell whether a school turnaround is working, VanDeWalle said. It can take five to 10 years for academic indicators like improved state test scores to materialize, she said. But other indicators, like suspensions or school fights, can be a sign that the school’s culture is improving and academic improvement will soon follow, she said.

Today, Phalen operates three campuses in the Indianapolis school district. The network’s leaders have done a good job of reaching out to parents in the neighborhoods the schools serve, VanDeWalle said. That outreach is crucial at the beginning of such partnerships, she said, because even in troubled schools, parents, students and other community members have strong relationships with teachers and administrators. Those people may not always react well to the news that the district is bringing in an outside entity to take over their school, especially if they aren’t involved in the process from early on, she said.

“Change is always hard,” she said.

Tennessee charter partnership wasn’t a success

Tennessee tried a similar approach in 2012, when it used a $500 million Race to the Top grant to establish the Achievement School District, a statewide district intended to turn failing schools around. The program allows the state to take over low-achieving schools and hand them over to charter school operators. Today, the achievement district covers 28 schools across Tennessee, all but two of which are in Memphis.

The achievement district’s goals were ambitious: it aimed to move some of the state’s lowest-achieving schools into the top 25% within five years. But Ron Zimmer, a professor and director of the University of Kentucky’s Martin School of Public Policy and Administration, said the program never lived up to expectations.

While he was a faculty member at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Zimmer was among a group of researchers who tracked the Achievement School District’s progress. In 2018, that team published a five-year review of the state’s school turnaround programs in which they concluded the state-run schools performed no better than other low-performing schools that received no intervention.

The Achievement School District was one of two school turnaround models Tennessee adopted in 2012. Under the other model, low-performing schools were placed in Innovation Zones, or iZones. Those schools remained under the control of their home school districts, but received greater autonomy and financial support. Schools in the iZone program showed “moderate to large” improvement in student test scores and sustained many of those gains over the first five years of the program, researchers wrote.

One of the earliest problems the Achievement School District encountered was a lack of buy-in from families, Zimmer said. The schools kept their zones in their school districts’ geographic enrollment plans, he said. That meant that students attended the school not because they or their parents had opted into a charter program, but because they lived in those schools’ districts.

“The families felt like they were a bit blindsided,” Zimmer said.

That buy-in is important, Zimmer said, because many charter networks operate on programs that only work with commitment from students and families. They often have longer school days and assign more homework than traditional schools. Many of the operators that took over Tennessee schools had track records of success in schools they started themselves, Zimmer said. But students at those schools had enrolled there because their families picked that option over a traditional school.

Achievement School District officials tried to do outreach in their schools’ communities later, Zimmer said, but by then, the damage was done. As the program progressed, the district never recovered in those communities from a public relations standpoint, he said.

“You only can start these things once,” he said.

Staffing was also a problem, Zimmer said. The Achievement School District model depended heavily on recruiting the best teachers, he said. But there are only so many high-quality teachers in the Memphis area, Zimmer said, and after a while, there weren’t enough to meet the district’s need. So those schools were never able to offer the level of instruction the district hoped for, he said.

The way charter management organizations took over operations of Tennessee schools also created administrative headaches, Zimmer said. Rather than bringing those organizations in to take over the schools all at once, the Achievement School District phased them in by grade. That meant that within a single school, a charter operator ran some grades while the school district oversaw others. That arrangement was awkward and didn’t lead to a positive school climate, he said.

Jacquet will remain a Fort Worth school

A key difference between the Tennessee plan and the Fort Worth school district’s partnership with Phalen is that, where Tennessee’s school turnaround program allows the state to take over struggling schools, Jacquet will remain in the Fort Worth school district — a fact that several district officials emphasized during Wednesday’s town hall meeting. As such, Jacquet will receive its share of any federal stimulus money the district receives, said Scribner, the superintendent.

Phillips, the school trustee, said during Wednesday’s meeting it’s important that district leaders bear in mind that the students at Jacquet aren’t the reason for the school’s struggles. The students are brilliant and talented, he said, and it’s up to the adults who run the district to make sure they’re able to succeed.

Phillips said he’s been impressed with what he’s seen from the charter network so far. Phalen, the founder of the namesake charter network, has strong credentials and a good track record with struggling schools, Phillips said. But more importantly, Phalen, who is Black, has a history of success working in predominantly Black schools and understands the Stop Six neighborhood, Phillips said.

“It’s one thing to be able to check a box with credentials,” Phillips said. “But we really need people who actually understand culture.”