Don't save bad schools--terminate them; The Turnaround Fallacy
Jay Mathews with an important and spot-on article about how – and how not – to fix failing schools. In short, SHUT THEM DOWN!
This year's hot education topic is fixing what is broken. The first sentence of U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan's July 22 speech was: "Today, I want to focus on the challenge of turning around our chronically low-achieving schools." It is a noble quest I have long supported. But I have come to wonder if it might be a big waste of time and money. Most efforts to save such places have been failures.
Why not just close them down and start fresh? Why kill ourselves trying to root out the bad habits of failing schools?
The latest push in that direction comes from Andy Smarick, a University of Maryland summa cum laude who has worked in the Maryland legislature and the U.S. Congress, started a charter school, did a stint in the Bush Education Department and now is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Instititute in Washington. He has written a piece in the Winter issue of the journal Education Next, "The Turnaround Fallacy," that offers the best argument to date for ending our useless rearrangement of desks and jobs at bad schools and beginning a new emphasis on start-ups.
…Susan Schaeffler, the founder and head of the successful KIPP schools in D.C. (all of them start-ups), once told me she thought she could fix one of the worst regular schools in the city if she had the power -- which she has at KIPP -- to hire and fire teachers at will. But as Michelle Rhee is discovering, such powers are unlikely to come to urban principals, at least not to the degree that Schaeffler enjoys at KIPP.
In my recent visit with Secretary Duncan, I asked him about Smarick's piece. He said he thought we needed to do both start-ups and turnarounds to help kids who need a good education. In some neighborhoods of Chicago, where he ran the public school system, the local schools are so crowded and available space in the neighborhood so rare, that closing one school and sending children to start-ups of their choice would not work.
Okay, but some start-ups have succeeded in abandoned school buildings. Many cities, such as New York and D.C., have room for start-ups, and have had successful ones, some of them charters and some run by the school districts.
Perhaps Duncan should move more of his $4.35 billion in stimulus money in that direction. I can think of one politically advantageous way for the Obama administration to make this work, and win support from all sides of the education debate.
Here’s an excerpt from the article Mathews links to by Andy Smarick (full text below):
The history of urban education tells us emphatically that turnarounds are not a reliable strategy for improving our very worst schools. So why does there remain a stubborn insistence on preserving fix-it efforts?
The most common, but also the most deeply flawed, justification is that there are high-performing schools in American cities. That is, some fix-it proponents point to unarguably successful urban schools and then infer that scalable turnaround strategies are within reach. In fact, it has become fashionable among turnaround advocates to repeat philosopher Immanuel Kant’s adage that “the actual proves the possible.”
But as a Thomas B. Fordham Foundation study noted, “Much is known about how effective schools work, but it is far less clear how to move an ineffective school from failure to success…. Being a high-performing school and becoming a high-performing school are very different challenges.”
In fact, America’s most-famous superior urban schools are virtually always new starts rather than schools that were previously underperforming. Probably the most convincing argument for the fundamental difference between start-ups and turnarounds comes from those actually running high-performing high-poverty urban schools (see sidebar). Groups like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) and Achievement First open new schools; as a rule they don’t reform failing schools. KIPP’s lone foray into turnarounds closed after only two years, and the organization abandoned further turnaround initiatives. Said KIPP’s spokesman, “Our core competency is starting and running new schools.”
Start Schools from Scratch
Ask those who know how to run high-performing, high-poverty schools why they start fresh, and they’ll give strikingly similar answers—and make the case against turnarounds.
A study done for NewSchools Venture Fund found that the operators of school networks believed that “changing the culture of existing schools to facilitate learning was difficult to impossible.” One compared turnarounds to putting “old wine in new bottles.”
Tom Torkelson, CEO of the high-performing IDEA network agrees: “I don’t do turnarounds because a turnaround usually means operating within a school system that couldn’t stomach the radical steps we’d take to get the school back on track. We fix what’s wrong with schools by changing the practices of the adults, and I believe there are few examples where this is currently possible without meddling from teacher unions, the school board, or the central office.”
Chris Barbic, founder and CEO of the stellar YES Prep network, says that “starting new schools and having control over hiring, length of day, student recruitment, and more gives us a pure opportunity to prove that low-income kids can achieve at the same levels as their more affluent peers. If we fail, we have only ourselves to blame, and that motivates us to bring our A-game every single day.”
KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg says simply, “The best way we can look a child in the eye and say with confidence what kind of school and environment we will provide is by starting that school and environment from scratch.”
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Don't save bad schools--terminate them
Jay Mathews
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2009/11/dont_save_bad_schools--termina.html
This year's hot education topic is fixing what is broken. The first sentence of U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan's July 22 speech was: "Today, I want to focus on the challenge of turning around our chronically low-achieving schools." It is a noble quest I have long supported. But I have come to wonder if it might be a big waste of time and money. Most efforts to save such places have been failures.
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The Turnaround Fallacy
http://educationnext.org/the-turnaround-fallacy/
Education Next, Winter 2010 / Vol. 10, No. 1
Video: For as long as there have been struggling schools in America’s cities, there have been efforts to turn them around. The lure of dramatic improvement runs through Morgan Freeman’s big-screen portrayal of bat-wielding principal Joe Clark, philanthropic initiatives like the Gates Foundation’s “small schools” project, and No Child Left Behind (NCLB)’s restructuring mandate. The Obama administration hopes to extend this thread even further, making school turnarounds a top priority.
posted by Whitney Tilson at 10:23 AM
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