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.
The better solution can be found among reform-minded
districts such as New York City, Washington, D.C., and even
Duncan’s own Chicago, which have taken the strongest steps to
overhauling themselves: Shutting down dropout factories,
embracing charter schools, opening higher-quality traditional
schools, improving teacher quality, incorporating data-driven
decision-making of the kind usually found at Google, and allowing
school principals to hire and remove laggard teachers.
New York City has shut down 91 dropout factories since 2002
(which were replaced by charters and new, higher-quality
traditional schools). This included Evander Childs, a notorious
high school where gunplay was nearly as prevalent as the
pervasive culture of academic failure. Thanks to the shutdowns,
along with new schools with stronger teaching and curricula, New
York City’s graduation rate has increased from a bottom-barrel 37
percent to a (slightly less atrocious) 50 percent. Declared John
Thomases, an official with the New York City Department of
Education : “You have to change the system in order to improve
the school.”
After all, companies that fail shut down all the time. Why
shouldn’t failing schools?
