At first blush it didn't make any sense: Why was Secretary of Education Arne Duncan speaking about school turnarounds at the big National Charter Schools Conference this morning? Charter school people generally hate the idea of turning around failed public schools, and for good reasons. Namely: it almost never works, and then the failed public schools have the name "charter school" attached to them to boot.
But if you dig into his speech and connect the dots, his strategy begins to become clear. He knows that??lots of turnaround efforts won't work--and he needs for there to be new charter schools to serve the students left behind.
Now, he couldn't just come right out and say that. As he straddles the Democratic divide on education, he had to pay homage to the teachers unions ("We are beginning a conversation with the unions about flexibility with respect to our most under-performing schools. I expect they'll meet us more than halfway - because they share our concern. They understand that no one can accept failure.") and speak fervently about his intent to resuscitate thousands of failing schools ("We can start with one or two hundred in the fall of 2010 and steadily build until we are doing 1000 per year.").
But as I wrote last week, most of these initiatives will fail because they are addressing the symptom and not the disease. They are trying to fix individual schools when it's the dysfunctional system that's broken, but addressing that problem means blowing up collective bargaining agreements, civil service protections for central office staff, antiquated funding streams, dubious curricular models, and more. None of which is likely.
With all of that in mind, read this passage about??the "last of our four turnaround models," which is "simply to close under-performing schools and reenroll the students in better schools." (Note to Arne: how is that a turnaround?)
This may seem like surrender - but in some cases it's the only responsible thing to do. It instantly improves the learning conditions for those kids and brings a failing school to a swift and thorough conclusion.
Well, it instantly improves the learning conditions for those kids if they have somewhere better to go. Which is why he needs a lot new high-performing charter schools--unencumbered by charter school caps--ready to pick up the slack.
A Republican secretary of education would have just said, "Let's close the worst public schools in this country and hand the keys over to well-run charter school networks." A Democrat has to "try" to fix the schools first ("investing" several billions of taxpayer dollars along the way) before "not surrendering" and shutting them down. While inefficient, the Democratic strategy ends up in the same place as the GOP one, just a lot more slowly.??Which is perhaps the best we can hope for.
