In the education wars of the past 20 years, one of the most contentious issues has been what to do when a school is rated as failing for four or five years in a row. In some cities, at some times, district leaders have replaced such schools — the administrators and staff, not the buildings — with more promising teams. But 2015’s Every Child Succeeds Act removed any pressure to do that, and outside of a few districts, little of it is happening.
As a result, millions of urban children are stuck in failing schools, which should be a national scandal. Experience is clear: Replacing a struggling school is far more effective than trying to turn it around.
The Obama administration poured billions of dollars into School Improvement Grants for struggling schools, to strengthen them. Studies show some improvement, but hardly enough to justify the huge expenditures. It is very difficult to turn around a failing school when the staff remains largely the same and the bureaucratic web of rules and constraints within which it must work remains unchanged.
A research team recently reviewed 67 studies that examined such turnaround efforts. On average, they showed only moderate improvement. The one exception came when states or school districts replaced failing schools with charter schools. This replacement strategy yielded double the impact of the turnaround efforts on math test scores and almost 10 times the impact on reading/English language arts.
Replacement strategies in cities from New Orleans to Chicago to Newark have produced rapid improvement. After Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, the Louisiana legislature voted to move all but 17 New Orleans public schools into the state’s Recovery School District, which over the next 10 years replaced them with charter schools. Over that decade, New Orleans experienced the most rapid school improvement in the nation. A respected research team at Tulane University concluded that replacement of failing schools accounted for 25 to 40 percent of that improvement.
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