There's a lot of buzz in the policy community right now around scaling up high-performing charter schools and turning around low-performing public schools. That's mostly because??Arne Duncan has been talking up these issues and indicating that he wants to put big bucks behind both efforts.
I'm more enthusiastic about the former than the latter, but there's reason to be skeptical about both. That's because I don't hear a lot of straight talk (except on Flypaper, of course). Let me try to offer some.
First, when it comes to scaling up great charter schools, we usually ask the wrong question: how can we take a fantastic charter school and replicate it many times over? The right question to ask is: what??kind of charter school model lends itself to scaling-up? And my answer is that such a model wouldn't rely entirely on??"superstar teachers" that are inevitably in short supply, particularly outside of a handful of hip cities where lots of young people want to live. Instead, we should be looking for charter schools that get solid results with mere mortals, perhaps through creative staffing strategies, the smart use of technology, a strong curriculum, etc. Show me a charter school model with good test score gains and teachers who work no more than fifty hours a week, and that's the one I would fund to take to scale.
Second, when it comes to turning around failing schools, we should recognize that a failing school is a symptom and not the disease. The disease is the dysfunctional school system, with its poorly aligned incentives, bureaucratic proclivities, civil-service-style job protections, inequitable funding formulas, out-of-date data and management systems, and cumbersome union contracts. You can fix a failing school, just as you can treat a cough or a headache, but if you don't fix the system (or remove the school from the system by, say, turning it into an independent charter school), you won't cure the underlying ill, and eventually the school will be failing once again.
The challenge is that fixing dysfunctional systems is really hard, and there's no evidence than any big city district leader has succeeded in doing it. That's why, on the whole, I'm more optimistic about scaling up good charter schools--but only if we tackle??that task honestly and thoughtfully, too.
