U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan outlined an ambitious goal Wednesday in a conference call with the press: Revitalize the nation’s 5,000 worst schools, those he describes as the “bottom of the bottom.”
Duncan’s starting point would be a hard look at whether those schools should keep their current leaders and teachers.
His aggressive blueprint builds on a baseline premise: It’s the leaders and teachers in each school who can make the difference in student achievement, even when those kids come from homes without hot breakfasts, books or PTA-going parents.
In fact, one of Duncan’s strategies depends on firing most of the staff in failing schools.
“Adults will leave and children will stay,” says Duncan.
During his tenure as CEO of Chicago public schools, Duncan credited such staff shifts for changing the culture and achievement levels at failing schools.
“We replaced leaders, we replaced teachers,” he says. “And we saw some extraordinary results.”
Under Duncan’s proposals, systems would have to forsake scalpels and attack their worst schools with hatchets to qualify for federal school improvement dollars.
They would have to pick from a federal menu of four “rigorous interventions” to boost student achievement:
● Turnaround Model: Replace the principal and at least 50 percent of the school’s staff, embrace a new governance structure and adopt a new or revised instructional program.
● Restart Model: Close failing schools and reopen them under the management of a charter school operator, a charter management organization or an educational management organization selected after careful review.
● School Closure: Shut down a failing school and let students start fresh at a higher-achieving school in the district.
● Transformational Model: Replace the principal and adopt comprehensive reforms seeded with flexibility and intensive support.
Among the required changes: introduction of a performance pay plan for teachers in which student achievement is a factor and extension of learning time for students.
Duncan maintains that the No Child Left Behind Act — the sweeping federal school reform law passed under President George W. Bush — never led to the extreme changes required to revitalize and remake the nation’s worst-performing schools.
Duncan will use $3 billion from the Obama economic-stimulus package and $546 million from fiscal 2009 appropriations to prod states into more radical remedies for the nation’s 5,000 lowest-performing schools, half of which he says are urban.
Thirty percent are rural and 20 percent are suburban.
“This is a national problem,” Duncan says. “It hits at every level: rural, urban and suburban.”
And Duncan deems the problem too urgent and overwhelming to be addressed with minor tweaks here and there.
“In those schools, tinkering around the edges is not sufficient,” he says. “Those children are being poorly served in chronically underachieving schools, and marginal incremental change is not the answer.”
The school improvement grants are not confined to elementary schools.
Duncan emphasizes that he wants states to tackle their least effective high schools, the 2,000 referred to as “dropout factories.”
“Those 2,000 factories produce half of our nation’s dropouts,” he says, and an even larger percentage of black and Hispanic dropouts.
States would have to move quickly to identify their lowest-achieving 5 percent of schools and decide which of the four intervention options is the best match. (Some funds can go to other low-performing schools, which would have a bit more freedom in their reforms.)
Before the grants flow to schools, Duncan says states have to figure out “what caused the failure. What is the appropriate intervention to create the change that has to happen.”
Not surprisingly, educators resent any school improvement program that might require the firing of long-standing teachers and principals.
“Duncan apparently thinks that you can just demand and command improvement,” says Metro Association of Classroom Educators chairman John Trotter. “He wants to replace everyone ... except the ones who matter, the children.”
Trotter says the children in failing schools are the main problem.
“They are unmotivated and lazy. Yes, there are many incompetent and idiotic and mean administrators who need to go,” Trotter says. “There are even some bad teachers, but these are really rare. The problem starts with the students. What is Duncan going to do with some so-called students who act like miscreants each day?”
Duncan says the nation can’t afford to shrug off the dismal performance of so many schools or continue to offer excuses.
“We have to educate our way to a better economy,” he says. “All of our schools need to get better. And it has to happen now with a real sense of urgency. We are providing unprecedented resources. We expect unprecedented results.”
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