Taxpayers are entitled to know why so many schools are failing and what’s being done to remedy their shortcomings.
But when explanations are offered, they are too often rejected out of hand as excuses.
One of the reasons is the existence of what are known as high-flying schools that seem to successfully educate students from the most chaotic backgrounds. According to the Education Trust, there are about 3,600 public schools that qualify as high-flying.
The designation applies to schools that are high-performing (ranking above the 67th percentile in average state standardized test scores), and high-poverty (having more than 50 percent of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches).
If these schools are effective, taxpayers demand to know why other schools can’t get similar results. In a nutshell, it’s a matter of reproducibility and sustainability.
In the U.S., there are 50 million students enrolled in 90,000 public schools staffed by 3.2 million teachers.
To date, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has identified 5,000 schools that have no hope of improving enough to meet even minimal standards.
As a result, they are slated to be reconstituted. This means the entire administrative and teaching staff will be fired, and be required to reapply for their positions
The rationale for this Draconian policy is that if principals and teachers were doing their jobs properly, their schools wouldn’t be in a fix in the first place.
However, this presumption is called into question by the fact that only 16 percent of the most impoverished schools are high-performing compared with 54 percent of relatively wealthier schools.
Obviously, something more than teacher competency is involved in the discrepancy. But for the sake of argument, assume that the assessment is correct. Where will enough qualified replacements come from?
Reformers assert that lavish sign-up bonuses, starting salaries in the low six figures and alluring merit pay will be enough to achieve the goal of attracting the best teachers. But even if they’re right about the recruitment side, what about the retention side?
KIPP schools, which are widely considered the ultimate model, require teachers to put in 10-hour days, teach half-days every other Saturday and accept four weeks off in the summer. This schedule may not seem particularly taxing until it is put into context.
Under a traditional schedule, schools hire more than 200,000 new teachers for the first day of school every year.
By the time summer rolls around, however, at least 22,000 have quit. Moreover, nationwide, 5.2 percent of teachers are absent on any given day.
The result is that students have substitute teachers for nearly a year from kindergarten through 12th grade.
What’s going on?
It’s not the low salaries that drive teachers out of the profession; it’s the sheer exhaustion that comes from trying to reach disadvantaged students.
A Stanford University study published this month in Social Forces focused on Teach for America, whose elite college graduates for the past two decades have signed up to teach in some of the nation’s most troubled schools.
It found that burnout and disillusionment were common as a result of the inequities of the classroom.
That’s not surprising. The truth is that a great deal is known about how good schools work, but little is known about how to improve bad schools.
According to the University of Virginia’s School Turnaround Specialist Program, there is little to offer based on rigorous research. The number of schools nationwide that have emerged from reconstitution is tiny.
Moreover, what works well in one school does not necessarily transfer to another school with a similar student body. When Jaime Escalante, whose career at Garfield High School in east Los Angeles was immortalized in “Stand and Deliver,” transferred to Hiram Johnson High School in Sacramento, Calif., he was unable to duplicate his success.
But the story of high-flying schools doesn’t end there. To qualify for the designation, schools do not have to produce high achievement over time or in multiple grades.
They simply must produce data of high achievement in only one grade for only one year. That’s hardly enough evidence to instill confidence in taxpayers who are fed up with years of dismal outcomes.
If that’s not enough to raise eyebrows, when schools report performance on tests, they do so based on the establishment beforehand of a cut score. This minimum benchmark can be set so low as to make practically all students in all groups look good.
That’s why it’s so important at the start of a new decade to view the claims of high-flying schools as models of reform with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Walt Gardner taught for 28 years in the Los Angeles Unified School District and was a lecturer in the UCLA Graduate School of Education.
