During his speech Friday at the National Press Club,????Secretary Duncan again talked passionately about the opportunity for reform and improvement. Content-wise, it was largely his standard speech--the assurances from the ARRA with some additions here and there. Importantly, he again????put the spotlight on the nation's worst schools, talking about the need to address the lowest performing one percent each year.
He said there should be no more tinkering; we need a "dramatic overhaul." He accurately pointed out that these schools have in many cases been failing for years, even decades, and that the students deserve better. ????This was good stuff. ????Kudos to the secretary.
Unfortunately, he also made the following claim, which is misleading at best:
???????I want to ask the country to think very differently about those schools at the bottom...We know what works...What we have????lacked is the political will to do the right thing.???????
The truth is that we do not know how to turn around the nation's worst schools. Good, smart people have been trying for decades, and our success rate is extraordinarily small. He went on to say that there are too few states, districts, and nonprofits trying to turn around these schools, when in fact, the number and variety of such efforts are staggering. They just seldom work. (See more from me here and here.)
He advocated for the development of more "turnaround specialists," an idea taken from the for-profit sector and now in vogue among some education reformers. What he failed to mention is that the vast majority of turnaround efforts in private industry fail too.
Duncan deserves credit for focusing on these schools, but we need to make sure they get the right kind of attention, not another 40 years of meaningless interventions.
You can think of the range of school improvement efforts as a continuum from weak on the left to strong on the right. The best intervention, in my opinion, is all the way to the right, which is closing the school permanently and opening new schools to serve the students.
Duncan occasionally talks about this strategy, and he's a proponent of charters and new starts, so this is a good sign. But he talks more frequently about keeping the school open and moving adults out. This is a weaker intervention for several reasons, most importantly because it often has the effect of recycling low-performing teachers through the district. If closures and new starts are a 10, this strategy is an 8 (turnaround specialists are about a 2).
I have two hopes moving forward. ????First, that the Department will use the School Improvement Grant program and dollars from the two major ARRA discretionary grant programs to fund 10s, not 7s, not 5s, and certainly not 2s.
Second, that Secretary Duncan will stop saying that we know how to turn around failing schools. This isn't the case, and it gives false hope. For every successful turnaround (and there are very, very few), there are countless failures. ????And many of those failures used the same strategies as those that succeeded. This is difficult, uncertain business.
This kind of humility is needed because even the strongest intervention--closures and new starts--is not a????fail-safe????method. ????Invariably, some newly started schools will not be good, but if given the right environment in which to operate, their chances of success will be higher.