Mayor Herenton is another important ally. Overall, Memphis gets high marks for effort from Robert E. Slavin, a professor of education at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Not everyone is so upbeat. One reformer who works with the district and asked not to be identified says it is still at heart an old-fashioned, immobile bureaucracy. Though the superintendent is committed to change, enough of her troops are not, so the status quo prevails, this observer says.
New teachers enter with enthusiasm but quickly adapt to an organizational culture of inertia.
Too often, the reformer says she hears teachers express pride that their school has the second-best test scores in the city, while overlooking the fact that even the best schools are still performing poorly compared with the rest of the state and nation. Discipline and safety are also a growing concern. For the first time in 20 years, teachers' union members said in a 1996 survey that safety and discipline, not salaries, should be the No. 1 concern in contract negotiations. In the end, however, most observers say the district deserves credit for making considerable progress. Ms. Bodilly of RAND points to the state's fairly rigid teacher certification laws that make it difficult to create multiage classrooms, for example.