Seldom do stakeholder committees convened by state departments of education put forward truly bold recommendations. Instead, their reports are too often full of requests for more money and status quo-friendly ???reforms.???
And since most work nowadays related to failing schools is dominated by the deeply flawed ???turnaround??? craze, I had doubly modest expectations for Maryland's ???Policy Practitioners' Workgroup??? on chronically underperforming schools.
But to my surprise and delight, the workgroup's report is excellent. Whether its recommendations are adopted or not (and they certainly should be), it may???if we're lucky???signal a new era in state interventions in the nation's worst schools.
Three of the group's ideas deserve particular attention. The first is absolute music to my ears: close schools that are in a persistent state of failure. Though the committee set the bar at nine years of failure (entirely too many in my book), the underlying point is key. If improvement efforts fail, shutter the school and start fresh.
Second, the committee recommends that local superintendents be empowered to petition the state superintendent for waivers from local union contracts when schools reach NCLB-mandated restructuring. Similarly, it recommends that any school in improvement status be able to waive union contract provisions if 70 percent of the school's faculty agrees.
Third, it recommends creation of a ???Teach for Maryland??? program, based on Teach for America, to increase the supply of talented people teaching in needy areas.
In this short report, an inconspicuous workgroup provides a fantastic roadmap for addressing failing schools:
1. Close persistent failures
2. Open new schools
3. Provide school leaders additional authority and flexibility
4. Ramp up human capital efforts
Kudos and congratulations to the committee members for their recommendations, its chair Bernie Sadusky for his leadership, and state superintendent Nancy Grasmick for convening a doughty group to work on this important subject.
--Andy Smarick