Few Americans believe that closing failing schools is the best way to improve education, according to results from a national poll Phi Delta Kappa International released today.
Eighty-four percent of respondents said when a public school has been failing for a number of years, the best approach is to keep it open and try to improve it, rather than close it.
If a school is kept open, 62 percent of respondents said the best way to improve education is to replace school administrators and teachers rather than to provide more resources to the school.
The findings have particular relevance for the Atlanta area, where dozens of schools in Atlanta Public Schools and DeKalb County could be subject to state takeover if Gov. Nathan Deal's Opportunity School District plan is approved by voters this spring.
That plan would allow the state to take over “failing” schools and shut them down, run them or convert them to independent charter schools.
And Atlanta Public Schools is in the midst of its own, separate school turnaround effort. That effort has already closed some schools and will replace entire staffs at other schools as part of the process of hiring charter school groups to manage them.
The survey from PDK International, a professional association for educators, is based on a random, representative 50-state sample of 1,221 adults this spring with a margin of sampling error of ±3.5 percentage points.
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