What happens when policymakers create statewide school districts to turn around their worst-performing public schools? In Louisiana and Tennessee, Recovery School Districts (RSDs) have made modest-to-strong progress for kids and serve as national models for what the future of education governance might hold.
In the Great Lakes State, the story is more complicated.
In Redefining the School District in Michigan, Nelson Smith examines the progress of the Education Achievement Authority (EAA). The EAA shares basic features with its brethren in Louisiana and Tennessee in that all three are charged with resuscitating the state’s worst schools within the confines of a separate, autonomous school district.
But unlike the RSD in the Bayou State—which comprises over eighty schools statewide—the EAA is so far a smaller effort; it is responsible for just fifteen schools, all in Detroit, with further expansion stymied. Like Tennessee's Achievement School District (ASD), the EAA was created in response to the Race to the Top competition. Yet it is an interesting hybrid of both existing models, combining the governance reforms of the RSD and ASD with a big push for competency-based learning.
States that want to embrace this approach to school turnarounds need to create conditions that are essential to success, Fordham’s report concludes. Michigan’s effort—though laudable and in many ways heroic—was hobbled from the start from too many compromises and too little political support.
Download Redefining the School District in Michigan to learn more.
This is the second brief in a three-part series. Find the first policy brief, Redefining the School District in Tennessee, here.
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If you have questions about the book, please email Amber Northern.
