A Quick Fix for America’s Worst Schools

“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.

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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 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?

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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.

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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.

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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 Adults
All 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.

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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 high school, Shoemaker requires students to turn in their homework at the beginning of each day.

Duncan has been a big proponent of turnarounds since his days as head of the Chicago Public Schools. There, he shuttered 38 schools between 2001 and 2006, many of those low performing. Parents, teachers and neighborhood activists erupted in outrage with each closing, claiming that the system was giving up on their kids, disrespecting teachers and dismantling an integral part of the community. Violence flared when students from rival neighborhoods were thrown together. After a few years, Duncan switched tacks, keeping kids in their local schools but replacing teachers and staff.

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The Chicago school closings are now acknowledged to have been largely unsuccessful. An October 2009 study by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research concluded that most students from shuttered schools did not see any improvement in education quality, mainly because they ended up at schools that were as bad as the ones they had just left. Several turnarounds — same kids, new adults — did show noticeable gains, however, according to a recent Chicago Tribune analysis of city schools. But on the whole, the experiment was a mixed bag.

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Duncan is undaunted. He often speaks of transforming the Education Department from the current lumbering bureaucracy that it is into an “engine of innovation” with the ability to try new things if there’s a chance they will work. The system can’t get any worse, he reckons, so why not reinvent? And as any scientist knows, it often takes many failed experiments to figure out what’s going wrong, let alone find a solution for it.

A Corporate Classroom
Like many of the buzziest concepts in education today, turnaround is a term cribbed from the corporate world. Many a failing company has been transformed by new leadership or some sort of reorganization. An education consultancy published a report last year that pointed to Continental Airlines and the New York City Police Department as entities that in the mid-1990s were able to effect “rapid U-turns from the brink of doom to stellar success.” (Hence Domino’s Pizza’s new ad campaign, the Pizza Turnaround, which highlights its efforts to make its core product taste less like cardboard.)

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Of course, the education establishment (i.e., the teachers’ unions and ed schools) likes to remind critics that children are not cogs and what works for companies may not necessarily work for schools. But the business analogy holds, says Mastery CEO Scott Gordon, if you see kids as customers and schools as the product to be reworked, perfected and sold. Mastery schools operate with obsessive attention to data. Daily and weekly figures on student performance, attendance, tardiness — these numbers are pored over by teachers who are themselves regularly monitored and evaluated. The goal is for every person in the building to be constantly improving.

Gordon believes that if you focus on the performance of the adults and the system in which they operate, student success is sure to follow. The biggest problem with many failing schools, he and others in the turnaround movement say, isn’t the kids, the parents or the community — though all three are undeniable factors. The key flaw is that the schools are poorly run. “We are trying to apply modern-management common sense,” says Gordon. “Invest in your talent, set goals — continuous improvement, constant feedback.” This differs, he says, from typical public schools, where teachers receive evaluations only once a year — light management exemplified.

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The unanswered question is how long Mastery and other new outfits can maintain such high levels of improvement. It’s also still unknown whether individual turnaround successes can be replicated elsewhere, or, to borrow another corporate catchphrase, whether such enterprises can be scaled up.

Philadelphia is about to find out. The city is launching a new initiative dubbed Renaissance Schools, which will try to overhaul perhaps more than 10% of the district’s schools over the next few years. Given how hard it would be to find entirely new staffs for that many turnarounds, the city recently renegotiated its contract with the local teachers’ union to extend the school day and year in Renaissance schools, where staff will get paid more and potentially receive bonuses based on performance.

That doesn’t fit the model of wholesale change preferred by turnaround evangelists. But that’s another lesson of school reform: half measures are often the best you can do. “There is an opportunity here to fix schools that haven’t worked for a long, long time,” says Ben Rayer, the chief charter-school liaison for the School District of Philadelphia and former COO of Mastery. “The money and the desire to do so are there now.” It’s easy to be paralyzed by the enormousness of the task, he adds. “But man, you just gotta start.”

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