One-percent solutions

"There's not one big thing. There are one hundred one-percent solutions."

That quote, from a leader of a charter chain that's been successful with urban students, has been sticking in my mind as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools goes into the next round of budget-slicing.

It's from "A Chance to Make History" by Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America. She lays out a lot of thought-provoking ideas about what it takes to break the cycle of failure for low-income and minority students. Among them: The best predictor of teacher success may be such personal characteristics as leadership, resilience and high energy, rather than any combination of credentials and skills. One charter chain has given their teachers a battery of psychological tests, "searching for the disposition of teachers who are getting the best results," she writes.

One of her central arguments is to stop searching for "silver bullets and silver scapegoats," instead acknowledging that it takes a lot of small, difficult changes to make a big difference.

At first blush, that clashes with the sense of urgency that she and many others bring to the quest for better urban schools. "Incremental change" is almost a dirty word in such circles. And Kopp is not counseling anyone to be content with a smidgen of improvement each year, in hopes that kids will be doing fine by, say, 2030.

She does warn that no one approach -- not small schools or small classes, not more money or more technology, not charters or vouchers, not even Teach For America -- can turn the tide.

"The achievement gap in America is massive," Kopp writes. "If we think in terms of mapping student performance on a one hundred-point scale, the black-white achievement gap appears to be about thirty-five points. Meanwhile, virtually all of the strategies mentioned in this chapter, even if we accept only the most optimistic research about their impact, might close the gap by only one, two or three points."

That's sobering. New efforts and reform strategies tend to be sold as The Big Answer -- perhaps understandably, since their creators are trying to rally taxpayers, politicians and/or grant makers to invest millions of dollars. And yes, reporters also tend to be more captivated by silver bullets than one-percent solutions.

I'm remembering how back in the 1990s, CMS rolled out Bright Beginnings prekindergarten as something close to an inoculation against failure. Keep the kids from falling behind in kindergarten, the pitch went, and they'd sail through school on par with more advantaged peers, graduating from high school and going on to lives free of poverty and prison.

Now the first Bright Beginnings tots are in high school and hard data is scarce. But it's clear that the pre-K is more like a year of being fed -- it's far better than malnutrition, but it doesn't mean much if many more years of healthy meals don't follow. It may be more than one percent of the solution, but it's far from 100.

Starting this month, Bright Beginnings and a whole lot of other programs face scrutiny and possible cuts. It's sort of like a high-stakes game of Jenga. CMS officials say they've already pulled out all the easy blocks. Now they've got to slide out a lot more pieces -- and hope the tower doesn't collapse.