Education Sector Press Release
For Release: Restructuring 'Restructuring'
- For Immediate Release: April 6, 2010
Contact: Kristen Amundson, 202-552-2849
Washington D.C. — The story of America’s failed efforts to turn around the lowest-performing schools can be summed up in the tale of Markham Middle School. Located in the Watts neighborhood of Southeastern Los Angeles, Markham’s student body is predominantly low-income Latino and African American students. In 1997, the state of California labeled the school a low-performing school. In that year, the average Markham student scored at the 16th percentile in math and the 12th percentile in reading. Since then, the situation has only gotten worse.
Under the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, school districts are supposed to take dramatic action when a school like Markham continues to show such low student performance. Yet in the new Education Sector report Restructuring 'Restructuring': Improving Interventions for Low-Performing Schools and Districts, Senior Policy Analyst Rob Manwaring finds that school districts and states often avoid making the hard choices that might lead to real reform.
Manwaring documents how few states and districts use the tools provided to them by NCLB. Instead of closing schools or replacing personnel, districts and states most often choose other, less aggressive actions. So they hire consultants. They redesign the curriculum. They create smaller learning communities.
Markham Middle School has tried most of these reforms with no success. It has also received over $3 million in state and federal remediation funds. According to Manwaring:
"Markham Middle School is still, educationally speaking, a wreck. Sixteen percent of teachers are working under an emergency credential, 30 percent of classes in core academic subjects are taught by teachers who are not 'highly qualified' … only 3 percent of students scored proficient in math, and only 11 percent met that goal in English."
The Obama administration has made "turnaround" a major priority—vowing to fundamentally restructure and reshape the nation’s lowest-performing schools. And, with $3 billion in the stimulus and more promised through the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, there is a unique opportunity in the months and years ahead to dramatically improve our country’s lowest-performing schools.
Not all turnaround efforts will be successful, but allowing the status quo to continue in these lowest-performing schools is also not acceptable, argues Manwaring. Improvement funding is already being distributed to states, and it will be largely up to states to ensure that districts use this funding to support sustainable reform at their lowest-performing schools. Granting the funding is only the first step. States must follow through and ensure that districts meet the commitments that they are making by receiving these funds.
Restructuring 'Restructuring' lays out a series of specific policy changes that can be made at the local, state, and federal levels. As the federal government begins the reauthorization of ESEA, this new Education Sector report provides an excellent opportunity to broaden awareness of this issue—and to lay the groundwork for policy changes at all three levels.
Read Restructuring ‘Restructuring’: Improving Interventions for Low-Performing Schools and Districts.
Education Sector is an independent think tank that challenges conventional thinking in education policy. We are a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization committed to achieving measurable impact in education, both by improving existing reform initiatives and by developing new, innovative solutions to our nation's most pressing education problems.
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Education Sector Reports
Restructuring 'Restructuring': Improving Interventions for Low-Performing Schools and Districts
- Author:
- Robert Manwaring
- Publication Date:
- April 6, 2010
In 1997, the state of California labeled Markham Middle School as low-performing. Located in the Watts neighborhood of Southeastern Los Angeles, Markham is stuffed with over 1,500 students in just three grades, sixth–eighth. Roughly 70 percent of the students are Hispanic, and 30 percent are black. Eighty-two percent are poor. That year, the average Markham student scored at the 16th percentile in math and 12th percentile in reading.
Over the next 11 years, the state and then the federal government under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) enacted a series of reforms designed to turn Markham and other schools like it around. Officials affixed a variety of alarming labels to these schools: “chronically low performing,” “failing,” or “troubled.” They drew up plans, disbursed funds, and hired specialists. Principals and teachers came and went, while politicians of all stripes vowed to get tough and do what it takes to reform these schools or close them down. Yet, at the end of all that, Markham Middle School was still open for business, still serving low-income and minority students, and still low-performing. In 2009 only 3 percent of the students were proficient in math and 11 percent in English.
Markham Middle is not unusual—there are many hundreds of similar schools nationwide. While advocates and interest groups for the past eight years have contested the merits of NCLB—arguing about standardized testing, “Adequate Yearly Progress,” and the best way to properly identify the worst schools—schools like Markham have been mired in chronic failure. Even today as Congress considers reauthorizing NCLB, much of the debate continues to center on what measures should be used to label schools as high-performing, low-performing, or somewhere in between. Relatively little attention has gone to fixing schools that, like Markham Middle, look bad no matter what method of evaluation is used to label them. The biggest challenge in public education is no longer determining which schools need help. It’s determining how to help them, and when to decide that no amount of help will do.
Unfortunately, many states appear to be taking the same approach to reforming low-performing schools that they’ve taken to identifying them in the first place—that is, exploiting their flexibility in interpreting NCLB to avoid tough choices on behalf of vulnerable students. In 2006 and 2007, Education Sector published two reports on the school identification process. The reports featured “The Pangloss Index,” a summary of education statistics reported by states under NCLB. The index revealed that many of the states reporting the best results—high test scores and graduation rates, low levels of school violence, and few schools identified as failing under NCLB—achieved those results not through actual educational excellence but through their implementation decisions, including setting unusually lax achievement standards. And when states and districts have acted, change has often come in the form of serial, ineffective reforms that leave chronically failing schools resistant to intervention.
President Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have made “turnaround” a major priority of the administration, vowing to fundamentally reshape the nation’s worst performing schools. Duncan has targeted the lowest 5 percent of schools, stating that “we cannot continue to tinker in terrible schools where students fall further and further behind, year after year.” The administration has put both a reauthorization proposal and money behind this goal. In March 2010, the president released a “blueprint” for the reauthorization of NCLB that would target meaningful interventions at the lowest 5 percent of schools. In addition, the stimulus package set aside $3 billion to begin this work. Some believe that President Obama and Duncan have taken a heavy-handed approach. But to move beyond tinkering to genuine reform, they’ll have to confront the sobering reality of NCLB implementation: When it comes to taking meaningful action on behalf of students trapped in schools like Markham Middle, the hard work has barely begun.
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