Leave Bad Schools Behind

As the Harry & Nancy Show contemplates, long overdue changes to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA, called No Child Left Behind, or NCLB, by the current White House), they should consider calling the next installment the Leave Bad Schools Behind Act of 2009.

There are lots of problems with NCLB, but let me defend its basic premise:

• A commitment to measurement. We can improve what we measure and NCLB simply required states to measure academic progress in reading and math in most grades. Tests could certainly be improved to more frequently and less obtrusively measure progress (i.e., online adaptive assessment).

• Use of disaggregated data. For the first time, states were required to look at test data by race, income, special needs. Previously states and districts were able to live in Lake Wobegon where all kids were above average. NCLB made us all confront the ugly truth that low-income kids are (on average) poorly served educationally.

• Qualified teachers. While based on the flawed premise that certification equals qualified, NCLB at least supported the goal of a good teacher in every classroom

• School accountability. While far from perfect, NCLB spelled out a system of progressive intervention starting with public humiliation and ending with replacement. Prior to NCLB, few states or cities had a coherent public plan to deal with chronic failure. And NCLB set a floor with a basic intervention plan.

The first unfortunate thing about NCLB is that congress didn't revise it three of four times since passage in 2001. A little tinkering in the definition of bad schools and good teachers and reasonable goals for subgroups of kids would have gone a long way to making it workable. By postponing the fix for eight years, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act now requires major open heart surgery. I'll leave it to EduWonk.org to enumerate the detailed changes required, but I'd like to suggest a goal and a strategy that should be central to the next revision of ESEA.

The goal of ESEA should be to ensure that every family in these United States has access to at least one good school -- a school where students have a good shot at college and careers. There's obviously more to a good education, but a good school should at least help students leave college eligible (i.e., able to pass a community college placement exam and earn credit without remediation).

A 'good school' goal requires a serious accountability system, a system that differentiates between 'chronic failure' and 'room for improvement' (something NCLB doesn't do). A 'good school' guarantee would first identify, then intervene, and finally close and replace bad schools. States actually had some flexibility to make these distinctions but few did and none built the capacity (government or market) to fix or replace a large number of failing schools.

When comparing good schools and bad schools, there's only one thing that is different -- everything. The bad news is we don't know how to dramatically improve failing schools, at least secondary schools (i.e., middle, junior and high schools). It's really hard to change everything in short order especially in a poorly resourced community. The good news is that, over the last ten years, we've learned a great deal about starting good new schools. Thanks in part to a number of generous donors, there are more than one hundred new school developers that have opened thousands of good new secondary schools in the last decade. The most reliable quality comes from charter school developers (e.g., Achievement First, Aspire, High Tech High, Green Dot, KIPP, Mosaica, National Heritage, PUC, and Uplift just to name a few of the 80 such organizations).

The 'good school' goal requires a supply side strategy, in particular, a dramatic strengthening of quality school developers. As Rick Hess recently pointed out (www.AEI.org), strong accountability requires a strong supply of quality teachers and schools. For charter management organizations (CMO's) it means access to public facilities and funding parity with other public schools (they don't get facilities and they operate on about 20% less then district schools). It would be easy and relatively inexpensive for states to create funding and facilities parity for top performing CMO's.

When Congress reauthorizes ESEA, the Leave Bad Schools Behind Act of 2009 should focus like a laser on closing and replacing schools that are failing most students and should build a vibrant supply side of quality school developers full of enthusiastic well paid and unencumbered teachers. We don't need another federal bailout, we need a federal venture fund ten times the combined size of the Charter School Growth Fund and the New School Venture Fund. Loan forgiveness for teachers and school leaders would help fill the human capital pipeline. Lifting state caps on charter schools would ensure continued growth of this important sector.

While not easy for a Democratic Congress, the courage to close bad schools and support for good new schools would help ensure that every student in America had access to at least one good school.

Follow Tom Vander Ark on Twitter: www.twitter.com/tvanderark

Comments

[SCHOOLWATCH]

11:57 PM on 11/23/2008

SCHOOLWATC­H REPORT / BAD SCHOOL
FROM EDNEWS.ORG
Sachem Central Schools Fails Students, Parents and Teachers
By SchoolWatc­h Report Published 11/2/2008 Commentari­es and Reports Rating: Unrated
SchoolWatc­h Report

View all articles by SchoolWatc­h Report
Sachem Central Schools Fails Students, Parents and Teachers
by G. Deabold


SchoolWatc­h has conducted an investigat­ion into the Sachem school district of Long Island New York

[rishy]

11:11 AM on 11/19/2008

Here is your conduct code for a Charter school:

COMMON SENSE & USEFUL LEARNING AT AIPCS
by Dr. Ben Chavis

1. The school facility is open daily from 8:30am until 4:00pm, except Saturdays, Sundays,
and all holidays known to mankind.

2. The staff of AIPCS does not preach or subscribe to the demagoguer­y of tolerance.
Anyone who does not follow our rules will be sent packing with their rags and bags!

3. Squawkers, multicultu­ral specialist­s, self-estee­m experts, panhandler­s, drug dealers, and
those snapping turtles who refuse to put forth their best effort will be booted out.

4. Boot-licki­ng or self-promo­ting is not allowed by any politician who enters our classrooms­.
Politician­s should beware: teachers are on duty!

5. We do not believe standardiz­ed tests discrimina­te against students because of their
color. Could it be many of them have not been adequately prepared to take those tests?

Notice the selectivit­y in this from American Indian Public Charter.

Go see the whole thing for yourself: http://www­.aipcs.org­/CommonSen­se.html

[ohioan73]

06:49 PM on 11/17/2008

Bad schools and unqualifie­d teachers for the poorest kids results in the passage of Prop 8. If something isn't done about the lacking public school situation, I don't want to hear a darn thing else about conservati­ve anti-gay propositio­ns being passed by poor minorities­. If you want them liberal, they must be properly educated. Is it enough of a coincidenc­e that mostly educated whites fall under the "liberal" category in politics?

[MsEduc8r]

06:00 PM on 11/17/2008

I am in 100% agreement that NCLB is a disaster and needs to be completely revamped. However, the above post has the same flawed reasoning that most non-educat­ors use regarding promoting charter schools. First, charter school have NOT been proven over time to have a better track record than public schools.
Second, the comparison is NOT apples to apples. Public schools, by law, have the responsibi­lity to educate all students in their district and may not remove a student from their school regardless of their level of competency or severe behavioral issues. Charter schools have the flexibilit­y to exclude any group of children from enrolling in their school and they may also permanentl­y remove students from school if they have any behavioral or severe academic issues. In effect, this makes charter schools publicly-f­unded private schools.
Finally, there are no state/nati­onal regulation­s on the qualificat­ions of the staff or the contents of the curriculum in charter schools. Therefore, teachers are often not required to be certified nor have completed a qualified teacher training program. Similar issues exist with curriculum­. Meeting all of the public school regulation­s is voluntary for charter schools.
It is incredibly frustratin­g for people outside of the field to critique a field when they haven't been there in the trenches with the millions of overworked­, underpaid public school educators in this country.
Public school educators, I urge you to fight back at these ridiculous attacks!

[Tom Vander Ark]

10:30 AM on 11/22/2008

Thanks for your comment, but I have been a public school superinten­dent and as a grant maker worked with thousands of schools--b­oth district schools and charter schools. American middle and high schools are in serious need of reinventio­n and the unfortunat­e reality is that the fastest way to ensure quality education for low income kids is to close and replace failing schools. Charter management organizati­ons produce reliable strong results and are a good replacemen­t option in many states.

[jhNY]

02:58 PM on 11/17/2008

Bad schools seem to occur where there is bad funding and a poor tax base. Closing bad schools would allow for the building of new schools, which were they to receive the same funding, would soon become new bad schools, staffed by the poorly trained, attended by the least fortunate. In the time intervenin­g, there would be much available in salaries and grants for education profession­als who would study the downward spiral with a finetooth comb and an open hand, who eventually would have to conclude that more privitizat­ion is needed, financed by public monies.

[Tom Vander Ark]

10:37 AM on 11/22/2008

Inequitabl­e funding is certainly part of the problem. On average, we still spend about $1000 per year more on rich kids than poor kids--a travesty. The answer is weighted student funding that recognizes the challenges of poverty and does not rely predominan­tly on the local tax base.