The ConnCAN Interview: Steven Adamowski

About Steven Adamowski

With nearly 35 years as a successful educator and school reformer, Steven Adamowski took over as Superintendent of Hartford Public Schools in fall 2006.  Prior to coming to Hartford, Dr. Adamowski was a senior fellow and managing director of the American Institutes for Research in Washington, D.C. As former Superintendent and Chief Executive Officer of the Cincinnati Public Schools, Dr. Adamowski led a massive district redesign, which produced dramatic gains in student achievement during his tenure. A Connecticut native, Dr. Adamowski earned his bachelor’s degree from Southern Connecticut State College, his master’s from Trinity College and his doctorate from St. Louis University. 

For the benefit of our readers, please talk about a few of the education positions you held before coming to Hartford.

I spent the last two years as a senior fellow at the American Institutes for Research in Washington, DC where I had the opportunity to study effective urban school districts.  Before that, I served as Superintendent of Schools in Cincinnati, and was there for five years. When I started in Cincinatti, eight big cities in Ohio were very low-achieving and classified in “academic emergency.” Of those eight big cities, we were the only one to turn around and come out of academic emergency. Prior to Cincinnati, I served as Associate Secretary of Education in Delaware, during the Tom Carper Administration.

What was it about being Superintendent of Hartford that most interested in you in this position?

Well, let me start off by saying that coming back home to work in Connecticut was not something I had anticipated. I was taken by Mayor Perez and his vision for the city and by the outstanding search committee made up of Hartford and statewide leaders. And there were probably three things that attracted me, or made me feel this was doable, and a place where I could be successful. One was the political stability created by the Board and the strong Mayoral form of government. Secondly was the scale of Hartford, at 25,000 students, it seemed to me to be very doable in terms of scale and getting your hands around it and being able to move rapidly. Third was my perception of the civic capacity of the community. Hartford had a much bigger civic capacity than the majority of places I’ve been involved with, and many more people who were willing to step up and assist in the reinvention of the school system.

Reflecting on your 35-year-long career in education, would you say that there is any distinguishing characteristic that you possess or experience that you bring to your role as Hartford’s superintendent?

I think it is fair to say that I’ve learned a lot and that I’ve learned it the hard way. There is a science to raising student achievement in urban areas. And while it is not rocket science, there is a methodology to it. At the American Institutes for Research, my colleague Joseph Olchefske and I had the opportunity to study successful urban school districts nationally. Of the 14,000 school districts, about 150 are  “urban” districts. Of those 150 urban districts, only 20 have been successful in raising student achievement and sustaining it for some period of time. And if you study those 20, there are a set of common characteristics. They all have strong leadership, boards that are policy-oriented and not micro-managing, a strong focus on a few key areas, and a theory of action. This theory of action is a major strategy that is designed to raise student results beyond the incremental gains you would get if you were simply spending more money or tinkering around the edges. So one of the things I think I am able to contribute is some knowledge and expertise in terms of how you develop a theory of action, how you implement it. This is systematic work and requires a methodology. Beyond that, it requires a lot of political will.

There are urban public schools in Connecticut that are achieving breakthrough results in raising student performance. What do you think is necessary for us to see Connecticut’s first breakthrough across an entire district, and in so doing, what would be the biggest likely challenges?

That is part of what I was referring to in terms of having a theory of action. Right now we have islands of excellence. You can’t bring these individual school successes to scale without a system-wide methodology. It is that kind of reinvention at the district level that I think is absolutely critical. You have to maintain a portfolio of schools and constantly improve your portfolio—adding high performing schools and dropping lower performing ones, but also creating a level playing field in terms of equity and being able to build the capacity of schools. It requires a major strategy in addition to the political will to sustain it for a period of time.

Your plan puts a strong emphasis on parental choice. Please explain why that is so important.

We certainly have a body of research that supports the fact that parents who choose their schools are more involved in those schools and are more empowered in them. This takes on added significance for Hartford, because currently we have a dual system of schools. We have a number of host magnets that we operate to facilitate the goals of the Sheff settlement. Many of them are higher achieving than our other schools, and they are all resourced at a much higher level. Then we have the schools where everyone else goes to school, and they are resourced at a much lower level, and they are much lower achieving. Fifty years after Brown, we cannot maintain a dual system of schools. The path open to us is to have an all-choice system of schools in which every parent has a choice of a good school.

If you could speak directly to administrators, teachers, parents, and concerned citizens, what would you want them to know individually about how they could help to make this plan a success in Hartford?

The school is emerging as the unit of change and the locus of success. We have a school system that is on its knees and we need to get it on its feet. If you are a parent, we want you to choose your school and to be involved in that school. Every one of our schools will have a parental contract that will spell out your responsibilities and your commitments. If you’re a teacher, we want you to step up and choose the school where you are the most committed and interested in the program. If you’re a stakeholder, or one of our many donors, you can help ensure the success of a single school. You may not be able to change the world, you may not be able to change our entire school system, but you could change the direction of an individual school.

Is there anything else that you would like to say or that you hoped to be asked ?

I would just like to emphasize the compelling nature of the crusade we are undertaking here. This is probably Hartford’s last chance to establish a viable school system. If we are to have a viable city, we have to have a viable school system. We have to be able to demonstrate that we can be successful with the clients that we have, not the ones we might want to have.  This is a school system that, first and foremost, is concerned with and can be successful with Hartford residents—before it can attract others to come here. The stakes are very high for our city right now and we have to apply everything we know in terms of an urban school reform strategy and work with as much focus as we possibly can to make this successful. I am glad to be a part of it, and we look forward to all the support that we can get from organizations like yours—ConnCAN—and other partners who have similar aspirations for our city and our state.