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November 18, 2010 - 4:39 am Comments Off

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How do you feel about America’s Worst Schools Get A $4 Billion Fix?
“Ba-Boom!” Leroy Hayes describes sitting in his seventh-grade English class at Philadelphia’s Shoemaker Middle School when he heard the explosion. It was startling but not necessarily surprising, he says. Crazy stuff happened all the time at Shoemaker. Once, he recalls, a student urinated into a soda bottle during class and threw it in a math instructor’s face. Crazy stuff. After hearing the big explosion, Hayes and his friends rushed out of the room and discovered that someone had set off fireworks in the corridor. “The school was in chaos,” the 11th-grader remembers of the 2005 incident. “People were laughing and screaming and saying, ‘Do another one, do another!’ It was out of hand. But,” he adds, in a succinct assessment of the crisis in U.S. public education today, “it’s not like we were learning anything in class anyway.”In 2006, Shoemaker was considered one of Philadelphia’s most troubled schools. Fewer than a third of its eighth-graders exhibited proficiency on the state math exam. Fewer than half were proficient in reading. Violence was common, and students had full run of the hallways. Most of the bulletin boards had been torched, and the principal’s office had metal bars on the windows. One teacher says even the UPS guy was hesitant to go inside.Three years later, students walk through Shoemaker’s halls quietly in single-file lines, the school’s walls are graffiti-free, test scores have increased dramatically, and packages are presumably being delivered on time. If this sounds like an entirely different school, that’s because it basically is. In fall 2006, the School Graffiti 2006 District of Philadelphia gave the building over to Mastery, a local operator of charter schools–that is, ones that are publicly funded but privately managed. The adults left, the kids remained, and the once failing school has been turned around.We’ve known for a long time that there are too many bad schools in the U.S., dropout factories that shove barely literate children through the system. Because of No Child Left Behind (NCLB)–the George W. Bush–era education law that forces every school to report whether it makes “adequate yearly progress” toward nationwide math- and reading-proficiency standards–we can now point to exactly which schools are the lowest performing and the least improving. With that information in hand, the question becomes, Well, what do we do about it?The Obama Administration has a plan: take the 5,000 worst schools in the U.S. and give them more than $4 billion over three years to get a lot better–fast. It’s the emphasis on speed that makes this endeavor something new. The government has thrown big money at education for decades, with very little to show for it. Even under NCLB, most of the failing schools that were forced to make changes did the bare minimum required by federal mandates.The White House’s new approach amounts to Extreme Makeover: School Edition. Fire the teachers and principals, turn schools into charters, lengthen the day and year, or shut the schools down completely and send the kids elsewhere. These so-called turnaround strategies–which aim to increase test scores, decrease dropout rates and improve classroom culture in short order–are perhaps the most ambitious part of President Obama’s education-reform agenda. But it’s a high-risk intervention. “This is like telling doctors to pick patients with the most advanced forms of cancer and make them better,” says Jack Jennings, president of the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy.So how often does rapid transformation work? In 2008, the Institute of Education Sciences, the Education Department’s research arm, published a guide to turning around low-performing schools that noted that “the research base on effective strategies … is sparse.” In other words, taxpayers are betting billions of dollars on what essentially remains a crapshoot.Keep the Kids; Bring In New AdultsAll that said, few would argue with the proposition that radical steps are needed to fix the country’s public schools. Champions of the turnaround approach say that where it has been applied properly, the early results are encouraging. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has cited Mastery Charter Schools as a shining example of how to right a capsized ship. So far, Mastery has used the same approach at each of the three schools it has taken over from the School District of Philadelphia since 2006: retain the students, spiff up the place, and bring in new teachers and administrators.Mastery has already increased test scores by double digits in each school, partially through a “no excuses” philosophy that stresses personal discipline as much as academics. Students noticed the attitude change immediately. “They really brought down the hammer,” says Samuel Cowans, a 17-year-old Shoemaker student who was at the school when the weekly food fights and daily brawls gave way to uniforms and silent halls. Now a combined middle and
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