For much of the last two decades, beginning with the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, our top political leaders have shown concern about children stuck in failing public schools. NCLB required districts to do something — not enough, but something — about those schools. Presidents George W. Bush and Obama both called education “the civil rights issue of our time.” And President Barrack Obama’s Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants created incentives for states and districts to act.
Some states went further than others. New Jersey and Massachusetts took over entire school districts. Louisiana created a Recovery School District (RSD) to take failing schools from their districts and hand them to charter operators. Indiana passed a law allowing the state Department of Education to do the same. Tennessee, Michigan, North Carolina, and Nevada emulated Louisiana’s RSD, to one degree or another.
Predictably, the bureaucracy fought back. School boards, district administrators, and teachers unions all objected. Adult jobs were at risk, after all, and adults vote, while children don’t. In 2015 Congress backed down, replacing NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which, despite its name, significantly reduced the pressure on districts to do anything meaningful about failing schools. As the teachers unions ramped up their pressure, Michigan killed off its takeover district, Georgia’s governor tried to create a takeover district but was defeated at the polls, Nevada killed off its Achievement School District, and North Carolina’s Innovative School District took over just one school. Just recently, the Indiana legislature repealed its legislation authorizing the state to take over failing schools.
Yet millions of children still languish in low-performing schools, where they are less likely to develop the skills or habits necessary to get into college or the military or succeed in anything but low-paying jobs. Most of them are from low-income families, many of them Black or Brown.
This should be a national scandal. In the era of Black Lives Matter, it should be the civil rights issue of the day. But with the glare of publicity focused on other, equally appalling problems — on police officers who kill unarmed Blacks and legislatures that restrict voting rights — it is not. That’s a tragedy, because Black minds matter, too.
If you are a governor, legislator, education commissioner, or district leader who wants to help low-income and minority children get a decent education, what can you do? We still have far too many schools that fail their students year after year. Is increased “support” of the kind suggested by ESSA enough to generate significantly better outcomes? Not often, according to the research data.
Takeover districts with wholesale replacement of existing schools can work, but the political backlash they unleash makes elected leaders leery of them. In their absence, state leaders should do two things. First, make it painful for districts to let their worst schools stagnate, by closing them, handing them to nonprofit operators, or appointing a new school board. Experience shows that district leaders will scramble to avoid such outcomes. Second, give districts an attractive path to turn those schools around by encouraging them to create “innovation zones,” in which schools have the flexibility they need to change, and ensuring that those schools are accountable for performance by appointing a zone oversight board that can replace them if they fail or help them replicate if they succeed. The zone board’s job would be to do whatever it takes to turn the schools around: bring in new principals, replace staff — replace everyone at the school, if needed — even bring in a proven outside operator, such as a charter management organization, to run the school. States should encourage this with a carrot: roughly $1,000 extra per pupil, per year, for zone schools, for the first three-to-five years.
An independent, appointed zone board, organized as a not-for-profit 501(c)3 organization, would ensure that when schools continue to struggle, something is done about it. Typically, when this happens, boards replace principals. If failure continues for several years, they should have the authority to replace entire schools. Elected school boards have proven reluctant to replace schools, for fear of the blowback. Turnout at school board elections is often under 10%, which means a few hundred angry voters can defeat a board member. And nothing creates angry voters quite like closing and replacing a familiar neighborhood school, even if it’s doing a poor job.
We have learned, over the past three decades, that with few exceptions, real change will not occur unless it is driven by local leaders. Innovation zones are locally owned: They require approval by the elected school board, their members are usually prominent local civic, community, and philanthropic leaders, and some of the schools remain in the hands of local principals. The zones give local leaders a workable structure, and the carrot and stick give them an incentive to act. Such zones are succeeding in cities as diverse as Springfield, Massachusetts, South Bend, Indiana, Los Angeles, and several Texas cities: Waco, Ft. Worth, and Lubbock. Other places are even using them to help a group of decent schools go from good to great.
Creating effective innovation zones is not necessarily easy. But after decades of trying different strategies to help children trapped in failing schools, it appears to be our best bet.
Between 1989 and 1995, New Jersey pioneered a new strategy to deal with districts full of failing schools: state takeover of school districts in Jersey City, Paterson and Newark. Since 1989, 29 states have passed legislation allowing such takeovers, and at least 22 have tried it. Most have not been very successful. Only in cases where those appointed by the state have a clear improvement strategy and the political power to impose it has takeover yielded significant improvement.
Massachusetts had some success when it helped Boston University take over Chelsea’s school system in the late 1980s. Almost 25 years later, the state took over the Lawrence schools and also produced significant improvement. In contrast, New Jersey’s takeover districts languished for decades. Only when the state embraced rapid expansion of charter schools as its strategy in Newark did that district begin to turn around. New Jersey then pursued the same strategy in Camden, with equally significant results.
But most takeovers come with no coherent strategy and achieve little. Legislators in both parties are pushing to repeal Ohio’s takeover law, and in most states, the current political climate makes takeover a non-starter.
In 2003, Louisiana pioneered another approach. Its legislature created the Recovery School District (RSD), a statewide school district to take over failing schools and hand them to charter operators. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it voted to place more than 100 New Orleans public schools — all those performing below the state average — in the RSD. As I documented in Reinventing America’s Schools, this strategy produced the most rapid improvement of any city in the nation.
Governors and legislators in other states took note, and soon there were bills to emulate the RSD in a handful of other states. In Michigan, the governor created the Educational Achievement Authority in 2011, but he could never persuade the legislature to authorize it or fund it properly, so it remained small and unsuccessful, until the legislature killed it. Virginia passed a bill creating an Opportunity Education Institute in 2013, but the courts ruled it unconstitutional, “because it was created by the general assembly rather than by the state board of education, and because it superseded local district control,” as one analyst summed it up. Nevada passed an Achievement School District in 2015, but it was underfunded and the Democrats abolished it as soon as they took control of the legislature in 2019. North Carolina passed a similar bill in 2016 but limited the new district to five schools, and by 2021 it had taken charge of only one school, amid considerable pushback from districts. Georgia Governor Nathan Deal proposed an “Opportunity School District” and secured a two-thirds vote in the legislature to put it on the ballot as a constitutional amendment in 2016. But after an expensive campaign against it by the teachers unions, 60% of voters opposed it.
The one robust effort to emulate the RSD occurred in Tennessee. In 2010, Tennessee’s legislature created an Achievement School District (ASD), to take over the state’s worst schools. The bill also allowed districts to create innovation zones for low-performing schools and grant them significant flexibilities. Because this strategy showed such promise in its early years, it is worth examining its experience in some detail.
Tennessee’s strategy was particularly aggressive in Memphis. By 2016 the ASD had taken over 29 of Memphis’s more than 150 district-operated schools. The ASD turned 23 of these schools over to charter operators, recruited from all over the country, and ran six itself. Unlike Memphis’s other charters, ASD charters were neighborhood schools, not schools of choice. Their students were among the poorest in the district, both in terms of finances and academic performance.
Meanwhile Shelby County Schools (SCS), Memphis’ school district, had moved 21 schools into an Innovation Zone, on its own initiative. In its “iZone”, as it quickly became known, the district lengthened the school day by an hour, using federal School Improvement Grant funds to pay for it. After that money ran out before the 2015-16 school year, the district turned to grants, donations, and its regular budget.
District leaders recruited their best principals to take over iZone schools and gave them the authority to hire staff, and those principals recruited the best teachers they knew. Teachers could earn bonuses based on student performance, and their schools provided intensive support and coaching. Principals were not constrained by union contracts, because Tennessee teachers no longer had collective bargaining rights. All teachers had to re-apply for their jobs once their school entered the iZone, a reality that led to hundreds of layoffs. But once a teacher was rehired and had tenure, firing was still difficult.
There were other limits on autonomy: iZone schools had only about half the autonomy a charter school enjoyed. Principals didn’t control most of their budgets, for instance, and they could choose their own curricula and assessments only if their first-year test scores were above a certain threshold.
But both the ASD and the iZone thrived in their first three years. ASD schools struggled during their first year with high student turnover and discipline issues, but later improved. Tennessee uses a Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) to measure student growth, which factors in students’ socioeconomic status. It rates schools on a scale of one (slowest growth) to five (fastest). In 2015, second- and third-year ASD schools averaged level five, while first-year schools averaged level one.
Innovation Zone schools showed faster academic growth than the ASD for their first two years, but in 2014-15 the ASD outpaced them. By 2016, seven iZone schools had improved enough to jump off the “priority list” — the bottom 5% of schools in the state, by performance. Unfortunately, those results came at the expense of district schools that lost talented principals and teachers to the iZone. Predictably, they showed declining performance.
Still, the combination of the iZone and the ASD gave Memphis a more aggressive strategy to deal with its worst public schools than almost any other city. Of the 69 priority schools identified in Memphis in 2012, by 2016 only a handful had escaped some intervention: 28 had been taken over by the ASD, 21 had been moved into the iZone, and 13 had either been closed or consolidated with other schools.
But taking over schools and closing schools generates fierce political resistance, and Memphis was no exception. As a result, according to Chris Barbic, the ASD’s first superintendent, by 2015 Governor Bill Haslem had retreated from his initial support for such aggressive strategies. Disappointed, state Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman departed, and his successor, Candice McQueen, was more intent on mollifying superintendents and principals than taking over schools. Reading the tea leaves, Barbic left the ASD in early 2016. The commissioner never allowed Barbic’s replacement to follow through on ASD plans to spin off its direct-run schools into a new charter management organization, nor to replace struggling ASD schools with stronger operators. Nor did the state place any more failing schools in the ASD. Its performance stagnated — some ASD schools excelled, others lagged far behind. Within a few years, many in the state considered it a failure.