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Special Report
Expulsion
Dropout factories need to be shut down.
The notion that America’s worst public schools can be improved by simply replacing principals and some of their teachers, is as much a part of President Barack Obama’s master plan to reform the nation’s education system as it is of Hollywood films such as Lean on Me. But a trip to Indianapolis’s Emmerich Manual High School will kill those dreams in an instant.
One of seven high schools within the sprawling Indianapolis Public Schools (IPS) district, Manual is one of the nation’s worst dropout factories. Three out of every five of Manual’s students drop out before graduation, a level of academic failure that has likely persisted longer than the Circle City’s embrace of NFL football. Over the years, IPS has instituted numerous reform efforts, including the replacement of principals, to something called the Alpha Program (which monitored the classwork of Manual’s constantly bulging population of 16-year-old freshmen), and even a move funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to break up Manual into smaller high schools within the same building. None of it has met with any success.
But then, how could IPS turn around Manual when the district itself is an absolute mess? Even after reform efforts by three superintendents over the past two decades, IPS remains the worst-performing urban school district outside of Detroit’s notoriously atrocious system, with nearly all of its high schools failing to graduate more than 60 percent of their students. The woeful performance of all of its high schools back in 2005 (when the author co-wrote the first major editorial series on the nation’s dropout crisis) even shocked Johns Hopkins researcher Robert Balfanz — the man who coined the term “dropout factory” — who declared that IPS was the “the first district I have seen where all high schools are doing this poorly.”
Little has changed since then. Twenty-eight of its 64 schools are currently deemed academically failing by federal and state education officials — including some that have held the label for five consecutive years.
Considering the experience of Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan (who struggled through a modestly successful reform of Chicago’s public schools), the president should know better. Yet Obama and Duncan embrace this dubious notion. They are using $3.6 billion in federal stimulus dollars — and plan to direct billions more through the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act — towards helping states dabble in such turnaround efforts.
Unlike Race to the Top, Obama’s other reform effort isn’t addressing the systemic bureaucratic and academic problems within the districts that run these schools — or address the low quality of teaching and curricula at the heart of the problems within American public education. Nor does the plan force states to actually do the one thing that is best for children and taxpayers alike: Shut down the dropout factories and replace them with charters and traditional public schools staffed by more-competent teachers.
At the heart of Obama’s and Duncan’s turnaround effort is the School Improvement Grant (SIG), an afterthought in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that also made Race to the Top a reality. States and school districts that tap the fund must initiate any one of four “turnaround models” for the nation’s worst schools — including the 2,000 high schools responsible for more than half of the 1.2 million students dropping out each year.
Only one of the SIG models — shutting down the schools and replacing them with traditional public and charter schools — likely works (and would be the most-responsible thing to do on behalf of the kids and taxpayers stuck with the academic eyesores), but it is also the least-enticing to school bureaucrats for obvious reasons. Instead, they are latching on to the other three models. One is a rather basic turnaround that involves replacing the principal and at least half of a school’s teaching staff. The other, called the Transformative Model, involves teaching new curricula and so-called professional development for teachers (usually done during the school year at the expense of the students).
Nothing about SIG has appealed to Obama’s main foes on education reform —the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and other defenders of traditional public education — nor are they pleased that he has made school turnarounds an element in his version of No Child, their longstanding bête noire. Last month, California Congresswoman Judy Chu — a longstanding ally of teachers unions — unveiled a polemic which proclaimed that SIG imposes “heavy burdens” on districts and limits their “flexibility” in teaching students. This, of course, fails to consider the even-heavier burden of failing schools on students, their parents and the rest of us who pay for them.
At least Obama and Duncan have proved willing to challenge teachers unions and traditional education circles, who have long-embraced the old chestnut that schools are failing because the students who attend them sometimes come from impoverished backgrounds. That argument is belied by the very success of charter schools such as those of the Knowledge Is Power Program, which focus on the very same poor white, black and Latino children. By promoting the expansion of charters through Race to the Top, Obama is actually fostering the kind of choice families need.
But in embracing school turnarounds, Obama and Duncan are embracing a concept similar to that of the corporate restructurings undertaken in the private sector. And this is the one time Obama shouldn’t follow Corporate America. As with the private sector, public education is littered with school turnarounds that have gone awry.
Bat-wielding principal Joe Clark’s seven-year overhaul of the notorious Eastside High School in hardscrabble Paterson, N.J. — which was dramatized by Hollywood in Lean on Me — went to seed shortly after Clark resigned amid controversy in 1989; 21 years (and numerous principals) later, it remains a dropout factory. Just 11 percent of California elementary schools forced by state officials to undergo turnarounds made “exemplary progress” three years later, according to former Thomas B. Fordham scholar Andy Smarick; a mere nine percent of failing schools in Ohio put into restructuring improved student achievement one year later.
The fact that the turnarounds are overseen by the very districts that managed the schools into academic failure in the first place makes success anything but likely. The same culture of incompetence at the school is usually mirrored by central office bureaucrats who fail to embrace private-sector techniques for managing teaching staffs (and everything else). In Indianapolis, for example, onetime John Marshall Middle School Principal Jeffery White ran afoul of bureaucrats and IPS Superintendent Eugene White during his own unsuccessful turnaround effort of the failure mill.
The success of the NEA and AFT in assuring that teachers are insulated from all but the most-desultory forms of performance management — including dismissals — also complicates turnarounds. The laggard teachers tossed out of their old schools end up in other schools within the district, acting as a contagion of academic failure. That many of America’s teachers are poorly trained in the first place — thanks to university schools of education — also complicates any turnaround efforts.
Obama and Duncan may be better off sticking to Race to the Top, which despite its emphasis on consensus, is actually fostering (relatively) bold moves by states such as Colorado, California and even New York to ditch tenure and embrace private-sector style performance reviews. SIG was a failure even before it got off the ground because school turnarounds don’t work.
About the Author
RiShawn Biddle the editor of Dropout Nation , is co-author of A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era. He can be followed at Twitter.com/dropoutnation.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (46) | Leave a comment
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Appleby| 6.8.10 @ 6:58AM
Why not simply boot out all the kids who do not want to learn, and reduce the school population to those who do?
Harry the Horrible| 6.8.10 @ 8:57AM
Gotta baby-sit the others or it might interfere with their mothers' careers or whatever.
Steve| 6.8.10 @ 9:56AM
Genius, sheer genius...that way all the kids who you boot out and have no education and no employable skills can sit around on wellfare for the rest of their lives...
Son Of Sam| 6.8.10 @ 10:19AM
How's about "no diploma, no welfare"? While we're on the topic of "sheer genius" explain to us the difference between welfare -- where you get to sit on your ass for free with no accountability-- and these dropout factories, where students get to sit on their ass for free with no accountability?
stand strong until freedom dawns
Son Of Sam
Harry the Horrible| 6.8.10 @ 11:03AM
So they should be allowed to hold back kids who want to learn? Its not like a High School Diploma is worth much now... or endows the graduate with any "employable skills."
Maybe what really need to do is create two track system - a trade school track and a college prep track.
And we really need to restrict access to the college prep track - too many kids arrive in college without the basic skills required by the colleges.
MAREK| 6.8.10 @ 11:51AM
I taught high school history for 5 years in inner city chicago prior to earning a law degree and leaving full time teaching and have sent 5 of my own kids to high school. Harry is right about one thing- too many kids are being put in college level courses who never should even consider going to college. The problem is there are no manual arts programs anymore. The focus is almost completely on going to college. Big mistake for a lot of kids. Also the drop out factories will continue until kids are not allowed to enter high school unless they can actually read. Believe it or not many of my former students could barely read or write. How do you teach a class with some bright students when you have to slow everything down to try to reach (or control as the case maybe) the bored, disruptive, frustrated illiterates?
Kenny| 6.8.10 @ 7:05AM
Public education as it is now constituted cannot be reformed.
American education policy should rely on free market forces which would mean vouchers for all parents -- not just underpriviliged ones.
This would improve the quality of education while lowering its cost. The only losers in this arrangement would be the teachers unions and the other parasites attached to the education establishment.
PolishKnight| 6.8.10 @ 9:57AM
Vouchers are a good start, but this model is still on the same philosophical level as a "single payer" system that conservatives regard as socialism when applied to health care.
Whether vouchers or "free" public education, the elephant in the room is that such measures are a part of the welfare state that rewards financially irresponsible parenting. Combined with child-support payments for unwed mothers and infant abandonment centers, conservatives have unwittingly fallen prey to emotional blackmail that births (pun intended) a massive matriarchal, secular society.
Richard Baker| 6.8.10 @ 7:13AM
Close the public schools, give the money to the parents to find a private/parochial school of their choice, and fire the teachers and administrators. The system in place is unredeemable because of sheer incompetence and indifference.
Curly Smith| 6.8.10 @ 8:06AM
When revitalizing failing factories the TQM mantra "you get what you measure" always comes into play. So, what do we measure in schools? What is the single most important metric? Attendance. Schools get their State and Federal money based on the number of occupied seats. And, if you were wondering, that's why school districts have "truancy round-ups". It's not about educating the kids, it's about the money.
So, of course, a massive hue and cry arose when NCLB passed and objective standards were implemented. NCLB said "you will qualitatively measure how well you're spending taxpayer money". Schools and teachers naturally revolted, they were only supposed to measure attendance. How dare Bush pass an "unfunded mandate", why the notion of kids taking tests... it's unheard of!
If you looked at the failing districts, you'd find that 99% of the focus is on the district and 1% is on the kids. Any business will fail when the majority focus is on the business and the minority focus is on the customer. And yes Virginia, that even holds true for monopolies.
Melvin| 6.8.10 @ 8:12AM
It is not a matter of schools, teachers and administrators, its a matter teaching the dogma of Liberalism.
Fire a teacher Liberalism is still there, fire an administrator Liberalism is still there, close a school Liberalism like a cancer just manifests itself in another school.
If we truly want to improve our schools then we have to go all the way back to where the teachers, and future administrative bureaucrats went to college.
Teachers and administrators are like candy in a PEZ dispenser get rid of one and another one pops into place exactly a carbon copy of the one that preceded it.
So if we truly want to improve government run education, we first have to get rid of the lousy college professors who indoctrinate future teachers and administrators with their vile crap of Liberalism.
Take a good hard look of what infects our schools. Social reengineering, revisonist history, and bad science/biology.
The California School System teaches kids that Arizona is un-American for trying to control it's borders.
Maybe colleges who recieve public funds need a Fairness Doctrine in education because right now these future educators are only getting the Liberal side of education and not the Conservative side.
Afterall teaching the Conservative side of education would be the fair way to teach, wouldn't it? And we all know how Liberals love the word "Fairness."
Sean| 6.8.10 @ 8:40AM
Melvin you are on the right track. It is amazing that the lowest performing college students make up our Schools of Education. If you want to change education for the better. You need to have vouchers for all students. Also get rid of the teacher certification programs as they currently exist. Why would you want the lowest performing students you can get to then turn around when they age and run the education of others?
caitlin| 6.8.10 @ 10:55AM
I don't understand. All the teachers I know weren't allowed to take their final education classes which they needed in order to do student teaching unless they had at least a 3.00 average. How is that the "lowest performing students?"
Sean| 6.8.10 @ 11:08AM
Caitlin, here is a link that will explain it http://www.jewishworldreview.c.....041999.asp . Also grade point average has nothing to do with academic performance in a lot of these college education classes. They breeding grounds for liberal social engineering and if you go along you will get a good grade.
caitlin| 6.8.10 @ 12:06PM
Thanks.
As the article states, the public schools that do well, are the ones in the more well off areas. I'm all for privatizing schools. Competition would make for better everything. However, in the lower classes, there is still parental ignorance and apathy. How can that be overridden? Would the school be able to kick out the kids who consistently fail like in a present private school? I'm coming up with a lot of questions. Maybe I need to read some more about how private/public schools operate.
Curly Smith| 6.8.10 @ 1:39PM
How much do you value "free"? You're not alone, very few people have much regard for free stuff versus the stuff they actually pay for. Parents sending kids to private schools are directly footing the bill; parents sending kids to public school don't see the bill, they think it's free so they think that it has no value. However, it some areas it costs $24k per year to "educate" each kid -- that's almost $300k to get them a high school diploma. And the parents, not some rich white dude living in the suburbs, pay for it one rent check or property tax bill at a time. The parents might have some interest if they ever figured out that they're throwing a quarter of a million dollars away for every non-educated child but you'd have to get past the race demagogues to deliver the message.
Dan Hirsch| 6.8.10 @ 8:34AM
Consider the auto industry. Historically management and organized labor sat across from each other. In the schools, the administrations and the school boards are populated with...organized labor.
Get the union teachers out of 'management' and you might have some hope of improvement.
And when they scream at you that only professional teachers are capable of running education, I'd respond, "Doesn't look like it."
Good luck America - the only real option is homeschooling the dropout factories to death, i.e. responsible parents deprive the schools of students and hence revenue.
Oh yeah, and another thing! Start prosecuting the fathers of those babies born to babies. And stop coddling those babies having babies.
This is not rocket science!
Tom Davis| 6.8.10 @ 10:19PM
>"Consider the auto industry. Historically management and organized labor sat across from each other. In the schools, the administrations and the school boards are populated with...organized labor. "
No. School boards are elected from the community at large. Our school board consists of a building contractor, the owner of a Radio Shack, a CPA, and two housewives. None are part of a union.
>"Get the union teachers out of 'management' and you might have some hope of improvement."
A number of problems here. For one, union teachers are not in management. Administrators are the management, and administrators very often are former teachers who were failures in the classroom and were "kicked upstairs" when they took enough classes to get administrators' certificates.
A much better picture of a school district is the teachers being small businessmen and the administration being an intrusive government. I know there are a few bad teachers, but they rarely last very long because their ineptitude makes them miserable at their jobs.
The really kooky ideas in education don't come from teachers. They come from administrators who read publications written by white tower college professors who have probably never been teachers in public school classrooms themselves. Educational innovation almost always fails, and that is because administrators and the academic elite think they know more about teaching than the ones who have to do it every day. I could write a book.
And when they scream at you that only professional teachers are capable of running education, I'd respond, "Doesn't look like it."
Good luck America - the only real option is homeschooling the dropout factories to death, i.e. responsible parents deprive the schools of students and hence revenue.
Oh yeah, and another thing! Start prosecuting the fathers of those babies born to babies. And stop coddling those babies having babies.
This is not rocket science!
Tom Davis| 6.8.10 @ 10:28PM
Oops, left out some comments:
>"And when they scream at you that only professional teachers are capable of running education, I'd respond, "Doesn't look like it."
Public education works just fine for the top 80% of students. As for the other 20%, only the most naive utopian would believe that unmotivated kids with low IQ's can be made ready for the Ivy League if only we would listen to the "experts".
>"Good luck America - the only real option is homeschooling the dropout factories to death, i.e. responsible parents deprive the schools of students and hence revenue. "
Homeschooling usually works very well, for the same reason that private schools work very well--the quality of students is controlled.
>"Oh yeah, and another thing! Start prosecuting the fathers of those babies born to babies."
I'm all for that. How would it work and what would it accomplish?
>"And stop coddling those babies having babies."
Okay. So how would we do that? Kick them out of school? Please, since you know so much, give us your specific ideas.
>"This is not rocket science!"
No, it's not rocket science. It is harder than rocket science, and that is proven by the observation that rocket science has honest research and rockets have improved tremendously in the last 50 years.
Louis Jenkins| 6.8.10 @ 8:34AM
The California School system teaches kids that Arizona is un-American. That's exactly right. Why does California bother with what a neighboring state is up to? We're spending too much time teaching what is fairness. Let's be honest-life is not fair. Why can't students be taught the three Rs, and to heck with all the other stuff? But NO, the liberal life style has to be injected into curricula, and that, folks, is the downfall of education.
mejamom| 6.8.10 @ 11:24AM
If all schools were private, competition for profit would offer the best teachers, curriculum,etc. There will be a choice of what parents want their child to learn, be it a conservative or liberal bent. That won't go away. But at least the number of lazy teachers, non performing students and uncaring parents might be diminished.
Tom Davis| 6.8.10 @ 9:30PM
>"If all schools were private, competition for profit would offer the best teachers, curriculum,etc. "
If all schools were private, the bottom 50% of the population would not go to school at all past 8th grade. They wouldn't have the money. The private schools already get many of the rich, bright students, and their success as educators is due almost entirely to the fact that these rich, bright students don't pose the same problems in classrooms as the dregs of society do.
>"There will be a choice of what parents want their child to learn, be it a conservative or liberal bent."
The people with money have that choice right now, in private schools or homeschooling.
>"But at least the number of lazy teachers, non performing students and uncaring parents might be diminished. "
No, it won't be. If you were to take any Ivy League prep high school and fill it with the idiots from Indianapolis, their performance wouldn't change at all. The thing that distinguishes private schools from public schools is not the teaching or the curriculum, but the nature and number of the bottom-of-the-barrel students. In a private school, the worst students may not set the world on fire, but at least they have a work ethic and will not urinate on the walls when no one is watching.
Jaye| 6.8.10 @ 11:30AM
My parents had to flee the KCMO school district when it was ruined in the 1970s. I was there and saw the problems. Kids from the projects were wild and just wanted to create chaos and sell drugs at school. Hard core, disfunctional urban districts need to be run like boot camp. They need smart, tough teachers (like drill sargeants) and their goal should be a high school diploma by age 16. Then some training while working unless Obama manages to get rid of all American jobs in the next couple years.
Swift| 6.8.10 @ 12:22PM
If the rich could pay someone to die for them,the poor would make a good living. So...Kids who don't drop out or learn can provide a source for spare parts...
Ben Hull| 6.8.10 @ 12:57PM
This article acts like there was a golden age in education, there never was, nor will there be. I have several points to make:
1. This experiment of educating the masses, dreamed up by Jefferson, is a complete failure & always will be.
2.Kids with IQs of 85 will never master academic subjects. How many kids in failing schools have this average ? The majority, that's why there failing & dropping out.
3.Actually this failure & dropout rate shows that many of the public schools in question do have integrity, otherwise they would just pass them & save themselves the headache.
4.Charter schools will do no better if they have to take all comers, this is the big handicap of public education.
5.No Child Left Behind mandates that all students will be above average by 2014. Will somebody explain the principles of basic satistics to these morons who establish policy that this is a satistical impossibility.
Tom Davis| 6.8.10 @ 9:32PM
Great post. It is odd that no one outside of education seems to know this stuff.
jeff| 6.8.10 @ 1:08PM
When I used to do hiring we would have to reject just about all the applicants that had only a public highschool diploma from anywhere in California.
Most of them were unable to read, write or comprehend the most simple instructions. The number of entering freshman in the CA state university system requiring remedial classes is staggering.
jeff| 6.8.10 @ 1:11PM
Of course there was a time when a drop out could go to work at the local mill, or warehouse and make a decent living. Those days are gone though.
I have wondered for years where all the "C" students were going to work.
Ray Wilson| 6.8.10 @ 1:56PM
I'm a high school teacher in Oregon. I teach chemistry and a lower-level algebra class that is made up entirely of students who have already failed Algebra I before. I'm going to flunk about half of my students this semester because they either skip school 65% of the time or do no work at all when they are here. They are probably going to drop out. Is it my fault? If so, what should I be doing differently?
Ben Hull| 6.8.10 @ 3:06PM
Oh, this just proves you are the problem. If you were smarter, more entertaining, better educated & paid less, you could get unmotivated, low IQ kids to learn higher math, even though it is impossible, you could do it if you were not a public school teacher. The key is to teach at a charter school & then you can make the impossible possible.
Troy| 6.8.10 @ 9:53PM
Seriously though, in about 2 years or so I'm going to be in the same situation in New Mexico that Ray is in Oregon. I'm planning on moving to the sticks and teaching there just because of what I've heard of (APS) Albuquerque Public Schools (bureaucracy instead of education.) Is there any place to get advice?
Joe B| 6.8.10 @ 5:49PM
How about closing down all public schools, drastically reducing property taxes, and making private school tuition tax deductible? Parents who really believe education is important will choose schools wisely and demand accountability in exchange for extending their kids' enrollment contracts. The need for private schools to maintain enrollments -- or fail -- focuses the minds of school administrators, who can save their own three year employment contract bacon only by hiring effective teachers.
As for the terminally stupid and their spawn -- there are always jobs in roofing, gardening, and tire repair.
Nate| 6.8.10 @ 9:35PM
Oh there are other things for "the terminally stupid and their spawn" to do Joe B. I'm sure you could name a few. Where are you working these days?
Jeamar| 6.8.10 @ 10:46PM
Closing public schools to give $ to parents to choose wouldn't help much. The most frequent comment in the high school teacher's lunch room about dysfunctional or badly behaving, unmotivated students is, "Have you met his/her parents." I'm sure readers would be shocked at how many parents wouldn't be bothered to seek out better educational opportunities for their children.
Nate| 6.9.10 @ 2:37PM
Why don't we close the Pentagon and give the money to parents?
1 trillion a year plus?
Voucher that.
Marie| 6.8.10 @ 11:17PM
We are started running into problems when education became a right. Now it's longer education that's a right. Now it's the right to be warehoused in a government institution until old enough to go on welfare. Bring back competition. That's what made our country great. Kick every kid out at age 14 and make them compete to get into high school. Bring back apprenticeships for the ones that don't make it. (Oh, the unions will love that one.) Lets go back a hundred years before liberal philosophy grabbed hold of our schools.
irish19| 6.9.10 @ 1:00AM
The problem with apprenticeships and the like is, as a couple of posters pointed out, that the jobs aren't there anymore. The same goes for manual tracks in public schools.
As for the liberalism part, to my mind we started having problems when the focus shifted from self respect and self control to self esteem and self actualization (whatever that means).
Marc Jeric| 6.9.10 @ 2:25AM
My school experience in Europe was as follows:
1) Everybody had to pass the ptimary 4-year school; at the end a laggard was given two chances to repeat the 4th grade; if unsuccessful this left only born idiots with no further schooling obligations - eventually they were trained as garbage collectors, street sweepers, or janitors;
2) After the primary one went into a lycee or gymnasium - 8-year program interrupted after the 4th grade by the so-called small baccalaureate; those who passed continued through grades 5-8, and those failing were sent to a trade school; if not passing any of the grades 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 one could repeat that class once and if not successful could join a trade school;
3) after completing successfully the 8th grade of the gymnasiom or lycee, all had to take the big baccalaureate exam: usually this consisted in two 8-hour days of exams in writing an essay in one own language, then another essay in a chosen foreign language. the first day; the second day was spent in mathematical problems, and then there was a choice: physics, chemistry, geography, philosophy, etc.
Those passing the big bac had the right to compete for a place at university; those who did not became secretaries, bureaucrats, salesmen, etc. - including those not accepted at universities.
potkas7| 6.9.10 @ 7:50AM
Your point is well taken.
After we've fired all of the teacher and principals, disbanded the unions, closed the failing schools we're still left with one inescapable fact: Academic Ability Varies - some kids are just smarter than others. If we concentrate our efforts only on the factories of education, without considering the raw materials of education, the students, things will never improve. Some kids are not destined for university and we short-change them by insisting on a one-size-fits-all model of education. Broaden the curricula, bring back technical and trade schools, give kids an opportunity to find their niche and excel at it.
jbolty| 6.9.10 @ 12:39PM
In todays world a garbage collector is a highly paid and unionized city government job with a fat pension at the end.
Je Me Rappelle| 6.9.10 @ 8:02PM
I am a secondary education public school teacher, convinced that public school cannot succeed in today's America.
Public schools have outlived their time because they are part of government. Roughly 100 years before our Constitution was written, Pennsylvania founder William Penn wrote this about governments:
"Governments, like clocks, go forth from the motion men give them, and as governments are made and moved by men, so by them they are ruined too. Wherefore governments rather depend upon men than men upon governments. Let the men be good, and the government can't be bad; if it be ill, they will cure it. But, if the men be bad, let the government be ever so good, they will endeavor to warp and spoil it to their turn."
If you value your children, consider private or home schooling.
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