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.

Read the rest on The 74.

Supporters of Cindy Marten, President Biden’s nominee for Deputy U.S. Secretary of Education, laud her success in closing achievement gaps during her eight years as superintendent in San Diego. Unfortunately, such claims are false.

Linda Darling-Hammond, who led Biden’s transition team on education, cites Marten’s “enormous work” and “knowledge base on how to improve schools and close opportunity and achievement gaps” for poor and minority students as her lead qualification. When the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee holds its hearing on Marten this Wednesday, it should scrutinize that claim.

Complaints against Marten include inequitable treatment of families with special needs students, disproportionate rates of suspensions and expulsions for Black and Brown SDUSD students, financial mismanagement, mishandling sexual abuse cases, a serial lack of transparency, and retaliation against truth-tellers.

Read the rest on RealClearEducation.

Standardized testing has become controversial in a way few predicted a decade ago. As I wrote in the first piece in this series, test scores give us important information about the quality of schools, but they leave out a lot of other important information.

Consider, for instance, the school that suddenly had to take in 60 new students midyear, because a nearby school closed. The newcomers’ scores on tests given two months later would not tell us much about the quality of that school.

Or how about schools that were closed for a month because of a hurricane and flooding? Wouldn’t their scores misrepresent their quality?

And what about specialized schools, like those that focus on dual-language immersion or the performing arts? Would reading and math scores really tell us what we need to know about their performance, if we don’t also rate them on how well kids are learning their second language or their singing, dancing or acting.

Outstanding schools do many things that test scores don’t measure, such as engaging families, motivating students, regularly assessing their progress, offering remedial help for those who are behind and paying attention to social-emotional learning. Science tells us that these are all important practices. Wouldn’t it be nice if state accountability systems encouraged schools to use them?

Read the rest of the piece here.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) want to give up to $50,000 in debt relief to every American with student loans. Though they claim to be progressives, there is nothing progressive about this. It would benefit households in the top half of the income scale far more than those in the bottom half. Almost half of those with student debt have graduate degrees, after all.

It’s no wonder so many working-class voters have abandoned the Democratic Party. Bailing out college graduates with decent incomes will convince many that the Republicans are correct: The Democrats are elitists who don’t care about those without college degrees.

President Biden proposes to forgive only $10,000 in student debt, targeted to borrowers from low-income families. That is a more progressive approach, but it won’t help those who never went to college. According to the Census Bureau, only roughly 36 percent of Americans over age 25 have four-year college degrees, while 38 percent never attended a day of college. Only 20 percent of U.S. households have student debt.

With a little creativity, the president could help needy borrowers while also investing in non-college goers. Specifically, the administration should propose $10,000 per person in “career opportunity accounts” for working Americans aged 18 to 55 who earn less than $75,000 a year. Roughly two-thirds of all full-time, year-round workers earn less than $75,000. (To avoid penalizing those who earn just over $75,000, the money could be phased out between $70,000 and $80,000.)

Read the full piece here.

Despite heated rhetoric to the contrary, most Americans think we need standardized tests, to make sure kids are learning the basics. Last year, 61 percent of adults surveyed by Gallup and Phi Delta Kappa thought it appropriate to use test scores as a main factor in judging school quality. But in a previous version of the survey, five years ago, most respondents said other indicators, such as graduation rates, employment rates, and student engagement, were more important.

There is a lot of wisdom here. We need standardized tests to see if students are learning to read, do math, write, and understand science and history. If we don’t measure such things, how will we know which schools are failing and need to be replaced?

But for the last two decades, heavy reliance on test scores has encouraged cookie-cutter schools focused on preparing students for tests. Instead, we need diverse schools that cultivate the joy of learning, engage students in meaningful thinking and help them develop the character skills — such as conscientiousness and self-control — that lead to success in life.

Read the rest here.