Markham Middle School in Los Angeles has become the poster child for the systemic failure to turn around troubled schools.<\/p>\n
In 1997, Markham was on the bottom of the heap in 1997 when the average student scored in the 16th percentile in math and the 12th in reading.\u00a0 Since then, the Los Angeles Unified School District and the state have subjected it to at least three different intervention programs costing upward of $3-million.\u00a0 Still, in 2009, only 12 percent of Markham\u2019s students scored proficient or advanced in English and 8 percent in math.\u00a0 The English scores declined for 48 percent of the students, and math scores declined for 59 percent between 2008 and 2009.<\/p>\n
One would think that drastic measures would be called for.<\/p>\n
On a larger scale, that is exactly what U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan proposes.\u00a0 He is targeting the lowest five percent of schools nationwide. Earlier this year both he and President Barack Obama supported firing all the teachers and the principal in a Rhode Island school, repeating a school-closing-reopening strategy Duncan used when superintendent in Chicago.<\/p>\n
However, the research on turning around failing schools suggests that the clean sweep approach isn\u2019t particularly successful.\u00a0 The lessons of turnaround efforts support thoroughness, coherence, and attention to detail rather than a single lightening bolt. (See reports from Chicago here <\/a>and here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n The first of history\u2019s lessons concerns the failing school label<\/a>.\u00a0 California has 1,183 schools labeled as failing, nearly a quarter of those in the country.\u00a0 Mississippi has 9.\u00a0 No one thinks its schools are better than those here.\u00a0 The disparity between states with high levels of labeled schools and those with few is largely a function of how tough each state\u2019s tests and standards are.\u00a0 California has shown singular courage in sticking to its relatively high standards.\u00a0 Most states have not.\u00a0 Setting low standards has been the predominant state policy response to the federal No Child Left Behind Act.<\/p>\n Once on the failing school list, it\u2019s hard to get off.\u00a0 A recent Brookings Institution report showed that 63 percent of California schools with an eighth grade that were in the bottom quarter two decades ago remained there in 2009.\u00a0 Some 2,782 schools were listed in Program Improvement status by the California Department of Education in 2009-2010.\u00a0 Only 79 exited program.\u00a0 Both the state and the nation have created an unmanageable number of schools to target its failing school resources. (See John Fensterwald’s report.)<\/a><\/p>\n History\u2019s second lesson is that we know how to turn around these schools; it\u2019s just hard and complicated.<\/p>\n The Consortium on Chicago School Research, the country\u2019s best city-focused education policy organization, studied 200 elementary schools over a period of two decades.\u00a0 It found that schools that adopted five essential supports were ten times more likely to foster substantial improvements in reading and math than those that lacked even one of them. \u00a0(Report here<\/a>)<\/p>\n The schools that got better scored high on measures of school leadership, parent and community ties, professional capacity of the faculty, school learning climate, and instructional guidance<\/em>.\u00a0 None of this is surprising.\u00a0 All of it reiterates the central message that solid school organization drives improvement.\u00a0 Buying an intervention program or superficial adoption does not.\u00a0 Improvement comes from inside.\u00a0 Help and guidance can come from external sources, but there is no substitute for the school doing the hard work of self-improvement.<\/p>\n