Two big factors driving the Detroit school district’s financial crisis won’t be solved by cleaning up the books.

First, the district’s schools don’t work. They produce stunningly bad results—far more drop outs than graduates and graduates who aren’t academically ready for college or careers. This failure generates the “black flight” from the city and into charter schools.

Second, governance of the district is unaccountable for results. The faces may change—new board members, new superintendents--but somehow the culture doesn’t. It’s a culture of low expectations, denial of the “brutal facts” of performance, and business-as-usual. There appears to be no capacity within the district’s leadership to redesign the school system to radically boost its performance.

Detroit is not alone in this. Big city school systems around the country—Washington, D.C., New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles, for instance—are mired in persistently poor performance that penalizes low-income minority and immigrant students and families. In those communities two large-scale innovations point the way to better education results.  Even in Detroit—where the education and political establishment clings to the old, failing model it controls—there are signs of these innovations taking root.

The first innovation is in the redesign of schools for low-income African-American and Latino students so they will beat the odds by staying in school, graduating, and going to college. These schools are designed to engage low income, “at risk” students in learning. They are small and personalized, not the big, impersonal, factory-style schools that traditional school districts keep operating.  Although some are charter schools, others are innovative schools within existing districts, and still others are private, religious schools. They share a basic model that works.

The second innovation is in school governance. Education reformers in Detroit and across the country have broken the grip of locally elected school boards over governance of schools. For most of the 20^th century governing authority over schools was in the hands of local elected school boards. Now, though, it is in many hands: Start with mayors in New York (1.1. million students) and Chicago (400,000 students), the first and third largest school districts in the nation. Then add in the hundreds of "authorizers" that states now allow to charter schools outside of traditional districts--universities and community colleges, county governments, Indian tribes, state legislatures, state boards of education, and nonprofit organizations.

• In Michigan the second largest school system, with 30,000 students, is not a traditional district, but the 58 charter schools authorized by Central Michigan University.
• In Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest school district, the mayor, and school board created a nonprofit, the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, which controls 10 schools (18,000 students) that were in the school district until their teachers voted to join the new partnership.
• In New Orleans, a post-Katrina shakeup by state government left the traditional school district with only a small fraction of the students it used to have and put the rest into the care of charter schools authorized by the state or “recovery district” schools run directly by the state. Now charters school “own” a majority of the city’s students. 
• In Houston, two charter school networks, Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and YES Prep, plan to launch 55 more schools by 2017 and capture total enrollment of 30,000 students, some 15 percent of the city’s market.
• In Dallas, a community college, Richland College, created an "accelerated learning" charter high school for students to earn an associate's degree and high school diploma at the same time.

Both of these innovations—school redesign and governance—are present in Detroit, but you have to look closely to find them.

A growing number of schools, mostly charters, are performing much better than the district as a whole, and even reaching suburban-school level results. At the general admissions school we work with, University Preparatory Academy (UPA), a K-12 system with 1,600 students, more than 90 percent of students graduate and enroll in 2- and 4-year colleges and skilled training programs.  UPA shares many design principles with other successful big city schools.

They are small schools, ranging in size from 125 to 500 students, with small classes. They offer every child powerful and enduring relationships with teachers, and provide mentors from the world of work and other parts of the community. They provide each student some form of personalized learning such as individualized student learning plans tailored to each kid’s skill level, learning style, maturity, and interests, rather than using one-size-fits-all curricula and textbooks. They hold high expectations for all students and usually offer college preparation as the expected path for every student. There is no general education track. They rely heavily on partnerships with institutions in the community, especially to provide students with learning experiences in diverse real-world settings. Their governance systems allow the schools to maintain their strategic focus on high-performance achievement by students.

Of course these schools display some variety. Their designers choose different school themes such as “college prep,” science, or the arts, and different grade configurations, instructional approaches, and student discipline code—but these variations don’t compromise the basic design principles or results.

Our research—looking nationally for schools that work with low-income, minority students—found that redesign of the whole school, as UPA has done, is the single most powerful leverage point in big city school systems for producing dramatic improvements in student achievement. We don’t mean engaging in curriculum battles, buying new textbooks, or toughening high-school graduation requirements. Such actions alone won’t make a significant difference in urban school graduation rates or student learning. What does work and what is already being done here and elsewhere is the radical redesign of urban schools to ensure student engagement first and then student academic achievement. This redesign creates a new kind of school that uses teachers, curriculum, performance data, community resources, time, and technology in new ways to engage students in and make schools accountable for learning.

Innovation in school governance is also underway and producing compelling results. In Detroit, some 40,000 students attend charter schools—meaning 25 percent of schooling is governed, not by the traditional district, but by charter boards and the dozen universities and other entities that authorize them. This “market share” only seems likely to grow as state barriers to more chartering in Detroit erode and/or the city’s mayor receives some authority over schools. It’s not hard to foresee a time when more than half of the city’s children will attend schools governed outside of the old elected board model.

Governance innovations are not a panacea, but they have two important virtues. First, they can establish governance that is strategically focused with clear, measurable goals, rather than micro-management focused, conflicted and confused. When Adrian Fenty became mayor of Washington, D.C. in 2007, he immediately got the city council to abolish the city’s elected school board. “There are a lot of things you can do to improve urban education,” Fenty says, “but getting rid of the school board is at the top of the list.  When you have nine people who are going to vote on every little thing, let alone the controversial things, nothing’s going to get done.”

Second, the new governance can be more directly held accountable for the results of the schools. Mayors who run school systems face judgment at the pools every four years. Charter school boards must renew their contracts, their permission to operate, every few years. A scheduled “day of reckoning” is not a guarantee that these schools will perform well—but it’s a start toward accountability.

It seems likely that the Detroit district’s new no-nonsense financial czar, Robert Bobb, and new funds in the federal stimulus legislation will set the system back on its feet, at least temporarily. But it will take innovation—big changes in school design and governance accountability that produce dramatic improvement in results—to get the system running in the right direction.