Until October, Texas owned the textbook debate. The Texas Board of Education, preparing last year for a book adoption, seemed determined to put a political spin into American history books Texas schoolchildren will be reading. That raised hackles and not just in Texas. A headline in England’s Guardian blared, “Texas school board rewrites US history with lessons promoting God and guns.”

Time and cool heads prevailed and the new Texas standards, adopted in August, are not much different from those in other states. The textbook hoopla calmed down. And then, last month, a Williamsburg, Virginia mother (who happens to be a history professor) noticed that her son’s 4^th grade schoolbook was—well, outrageous. It stated that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War, many led by Stonewall Jackson. This is not a view held by most historians.

The author of the book defended her work, claiming that she did her research on the Internet, where her source for information was the Sons of Confederate Veterans.  This created a bit of brouhaha. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson of Princeton University commented, “These Confederate heritage groups have been making this claim for years as a way of purging their cause of its association with slavery.”

Virginia has what is supposed to be a rigorous adoption system, books with agendas aren’t supposed to get through the process. This book was called “accurate and unbiased” by a committee tasked to read it. Virginia school districts, having spent a lot of money on the book, are now pulling it from classrooms.

Textbook nightmares are nothing new in the school world, and they are not unique to Virginia and Texas. But purchasing policies there, and in 20 other “adoption” states, determine content in textbooks for schools throughout the nation. Those books, routinely dull, are often error-ridden and biased. Actually the adoption process began with bias as a goal. After the Civil War, southern leaders didn’t want their children reading a northern version of that conflict. They set up their own school standards and the publishing industry complied with different books for Southern and Northern markets.

Today, in school districts in all 50 states, adoptions are usually a winner-take-all affair that leads to giant sales and huge profits for a few publishers. Those publishers spend their efforts—not on creating good books—but on promotion, gifts, and fancy presentations. Think of the power of lobbyists; textbook salespeople perfect lobby-like outreach to teachers and administrators.

This is not a minor affair: books are the intellectual meat and potatoes we feed our children. Shabby textbooks make a difference. They don’t have to be. Here are some suggestions:

• Have closed adoptions. No salespeople allowed. Let books and other teaching materials speak for themselves to teachers and committees. Don’t limit choices to books from textbook houses. Have librarians share their expertise. Let a subcommittee of children read the choices and submit their thoughts. If a book doesn’t work for its potential readers, it shouldn’t be adopted. And call in experts: historians to comment on social studies texts, scientists on science texts.
• If possible, do away with whole city adoptions.  The big bucks are just too tempting for those driven by bottom-line issues. Besides, given our diverse population, it doesn’t work for every fourth grade teacher in Los Angeles or Richmond to be forced to teach from the same history text. Have schools or even individual teachers pick books from a broad vetted list. Let some teachers, who can make a case for their decisions, pick volumes not on the list. Teaching U.S. history, or any subject, with good bookstore books, rather than texts, makes sense if a teacher wants to go that route. If we are to attract and hold sophisticated teachers we need to treat them as professionals rather than cogs in a bureaucratic wheel. Letting teachers choose their own books would not only support them and benefit kids, it might bring real competition to the schoolbook industry.

Some of our greatest thinkers have written books for children. Henry Steele Commager’s story of the Constitution is hard to top. Physicist Stephen Hawking is the author (along with his daughter Lucy) of a terrific physics adventure that is perfect for third graders. Why aren’t books like these read routinely in our schools?

Yes, the money-management folks will talk about the savings from mass purchases, an argument that doesn’t hold up. Most standard textbooks are outrageously overpriced.  Today’s massive adoptions bring billions of dollars in annual income to a few big publishers whose goal, as with most businesses, is to make money. Educating children is a minor consideration. Trade (bookstore) books are generally inexpensive.

How about assessments? Can they deal with a variety of books rather than one text? No problem if we assess ideas and what is usually the small number of essential facts that support those ideas. Currently our tests are shallow, dull, limited, and limiting. Detach them from specific textbooks and canned lesson plans and they can begin to test critical thinking tied to broad knowledge.

Some current conventional wisdom says the textbook issue has been solved. Books are out; technology is in. But, so far, online texts are aimed at test preparation, not deep thinking.  They promote skimming and browsing, not analytical reading. There’s a bigger issue here. We are giving up on whole book reading, which means losing our literary heritage as well as our national legacy. Right now, most schoolchildren have little access to what was once a shared body of heroes, villains, stories, and values.

As for our science scores, a recent study ranked us 48^th internationally. “48^th is not a good place,” said the New York Times. While hands on labs are exciting, without a story their concepts rarely stick. Only one state mandates science history. Ask your children: Who is Linus Pauling? How did we discover the atom? Chances are they won’t know.

Meanwhile, the current round of educational criticism is focusing on villainous unions and low performing teachers. Hardly anyone has looked in depth at factory-like education schools, administrator-heavy school systems, or the mental junk food we feed our children. All this is deeply discouraging to the good (and often great) teachers in our schools.

Photo credit: Judy Baxter

Recent belt-tightening (forced or otherwise) in education has resulted in major casualties to after-school programs around the nation. As funding priorities shift to privilege teacher prep and accountability, after-school programs have been among the first to get the funding axe.

The 21st Century Community Learning Centers, a federal framework to support programs that target under-served or at-risk populations, provide academic support to struggling students and create opportunities for exploring arts, sports, and music. They are emblematic of after-school programs everywhere—in what they do, what they don’t do, and how we understand after-school time at large. So a proposed budget increase of almost $100 million to the 21st CCLCs should come as good news, right?

Not necessarily, according to some in the broader education community. The proposed appropriations bill bundles 21st CCLC support with money to “expand learning time” by extending the school day, or year. A recent Education Week article notes the ambivalence among after-school providers, citing “fears that opening the program to extended-learning-time initiatives could come at the expense of high-quality after-school efforts.” The Afterschool Alliance, a national advocate for after-school programs, has taken up a standing opposition to the bill.

So, what’s going on here under the surface conflict of too many line items and too few dollars? Why wouldn’t the nation’s biggest after-school supporter want a huge network of after-school programs to receive more funding?

Even more buried than the defensive concern about diverted support, there is also a surfeit of competing ideas about what education could or should be—and not enough space, consideration, or funding to follow each of those ideas to any sort of fruition.

Current funding strategies are furthermore pushing after-school and other interventions (extended-day included) to fit themselves into the ever-more restrictive reform rhetoric of increased academic achievement. If programs can’t be shown to improve kids’ test scores, they’re passed over, slashed from the budget, and relegated to the “tried and failed” pile.

The expectations placed upon after-school programs in recent years (increasingly, say, with the advent and legacy of No Child Left Behind) have reflected this slow constriction of values. After-school hours are expected to be as academically enriching as the classroom hours from which children are directly coming—if not moreso, as after-school has increasingly been incorporated into NCLB’s “supplemental services” for remediation.

Once valued primarily as a safe space in the hours between school and home for kids in at-risk areas or circumstances, or as an outlet for the abundant energy and creativity that accompanies and overwhelms adolescence, after-school time has steadily been re-appropriated as school-time in a slightly different setting.

Research, however, has shown that after-school programs are perhaps not as up to this new task as their proponents (and funders) would like to imagine. Even among the 21st Century Community Learning Centers, research has shown the programs have “few impacts” on participating students’ academic performance. Reports from 2004 to the present, available through the Department of Education’s website, show that fewer than half of participating students’ grades improve, and less than one-third of students’ state assessment scores improve after spending time in a 21st CCLC.

Presumably, someone, somewhere is gearing up to use this data to add fuel to the competitive fire of education reform—and that might be what the Afterschool Alliance really fears. If these programs don’t work, toss them out, forget about ‘em, and bring on the extended day (or value-added teacher assessment, or private tutoring services, or those helper-monkeys they’re using at the Commonwealth Games)! But before we throw the babies out with the after-school bathwater, let’s look a little deeper. There is, in fact, research on the obvious flipside of the issue: what are after-school programs good at doing?

Robert Halpern of the Erikson Institute has spent significant time wrestling with this very question, in part by asking: why aren’t after-school programs good at academic enhancement?

Citing the heterogeneity of after-school programs, the lack of a cohesive professional “field” for providers, the mixed backgrounds of staff, and unstable or unsustainable relationships with the resources upon which they so heavily depend, Halpern argues that after-school programs are poorly equipped to take on academic remediation. In Halpern’s view, after-school programs are not extensions of schools, and shouldn’t be viewed as such. They should provide what schools can’t, not simply make up the difference.

Re-assessing after-school programs along these lines, as first and foremost spaces for acceptance, socialization, and exploration – a new spectrum of possibilities for after-school hours begins to emerge.

The strengths of after-school programming, in Halpern’s estimation, suggest to me the same rubric of what’s being variously defined as “deeper” or “student-centered” learning, or as “21st century skills”: self-guided learning, collaboration, problem-solving, and communication. The basics beyond the academic basics, if you will.

Furthermore, the development of many of these skills or competencies is in conflict with many of the institutional particularities of the modern school system (as Richard Halverson and Allan Collins suggest in their work on technology’s place in learning and education).

The debate over 21st century skills assessment is almost as hot as the debate over what exactly to call this skill set. But advances are being made, and indicators outside of test scores have also been tracked in after-school programs for as long as such programs have been assessed. In 2004, 21st CCLC after-school programs were shown to have some positive effects on student-adult interaction, parental outcomes, and feelings of safety and security among participating children.

The most recent 21st CCLC report, from 2007, shows the target goal of three-quarters of participating students “demonstrating improved homework completion and class participation,” has nearly been met. Other unexplored after-school indicators could include: increases in school attendance, elective or extracurricular participation patterns, creative output, community involvement, and perhaps eventually job placements and earnings.

After-school programs may be as necessary an experiment in improving American education as anything else—including the extended day, and value-added assessments (probably not those security monkeys, but who’s to say?). And we should be looking for ways to both support and improve that experiment by enriching the after-school field, creating professional development opportunities for staff, creating standards to which providers can reasonably be held accountable for their successes as much as their failures. We shouldn’t be blocking after-school support because we’re not sure if another solution is as valid—saying no to something that works because we’re not as sure about something else that could also work.

If education reform is really more of a series of parallel structures rather than a single declarative (to draw from my 8th grade grammar lessons)—if we have to try this, and this, and this, and this, to try to arrive at some answers, then after-school programming, 21st century skill development, and an extended school day or year all deserve both attention and funding. Otherwise we lose $100 million for after-school programs and an untold amount of intangible support for experimentation and innovation within a reform that will only, ultimately, be more than the sum of its parts.

The following is an excerpt from Rep. Jared Polis’s (D-CO) remarks at the PPI Capital Forum — Turnaround Schools: Rising to the Challenge:

Let me start by thanking the Progressive Policy Institute for their pioneering work, their work that led to the explosion of the charter school movement…as well as the support of PPI for education reform generally, which truly is a civil-rights issue. This is an issue of how does our society achieve equality, equality of opportunity, regardless of your race, your income bracket, your geography. The fact that you should have equality of free public education, regardless of your ZIP code, is the civil-rights issue and challenge for our current generation.

On the current blueprint for the administration: I’d give it an A-minus….If you’re asking me how to get it to an A, I would say, more of a focus on early childhood, as well as a focus on the continuum of early childhood all the way through higher education. And Colorado and other states are doing great things around access to higher education at the high-school level, moving to dual-enrollment options. I would love to see more of a federal emphasis on some of these programs that are successful on a state-by-state basis.

Two, I personally would like to see more explicit preservation and support for what had been done under No Child Left Behind with supplemental services and after-school programs, some of which have been proven effective, some of which haven’t been — but letting the data drive the process, in terms of making sure quality after-school programs are available in schools where the kids need it, be they provided by private providers or the school district itself.

…Personally, I would also like to see as much focus on career readiness as college readiness. I think that the plan gives short shrift to what we traditionally call vocational education in favor of college readiness, which, of course, is critical….But there is the reality that half of our kids or more will not necessarily be matriculating for a four-year university. Let’s look at what real, employable skills they can get from our public education system, even if those services are delivered by community colleges at our high school campuses or the kids are taking college courses while they’re there. Let’s look at that career-readiness piece at the same level as the college-readiness piece.

Kids really need to graduate and a diploma needs to mean both career and college readiness. They always put the career and college readiness piece in the verbiage, but really, everything below it is about college readiness, not career readiness. So that’s a personal issue that I would have….

Clearly, the turnaround area is one of the most topical and important areas. These provide a toolbox approach for capable and competent superintendents to take the reforms that they need at the schools that are persistently failing. Now, first of all, we need to acknowledge there is no excuse for a persistently failing school. People love to make excuses.

They say, well, they’re all – you know, none of them speak English or they’re all from poor communities or none of them have good home lives – and those are all very real challenges, and we all support a holistic approach to public policy. I think our health-care bill that the Congress recently passed will go a long way toward making sure that families from all economic background have the kinds of health care they need.

But again, we have seen models succeed with kids from diverse demographic backgrounds. We have seen schools in my district in Colorado, a charter school, Ricardo Flores Magon Academy, third-grade, 80 percent ESL, 90 percent free and reduced lunch, and yet, they reached 95 percent proficiency on the state test in reading and 100 percent proficiency in math. Again, you look at the demographics and you can say, why is this school succeeding, whereas another school that serves the exact same demographic – low-income, ESL, has almost, you know, the reverse, with only 10 to 15 percent of the kids proficient at grade level?

So no excuses. We know the kids can achieve. Let’s make sure that they have the opportunity to attend a school that allows them to fulfill their potential.

For a full transcript of the event, click here (PDF). For the video, click here.

The following is an excerpt from Will Marshall’s introductory remarks at the PPI Capital Forum – Turnaround Schools: Rising to the Challenge:

PPI has had a longstanding interest in school reform, going back to 1990, when we first started to agitate for this idea called charter schools even before the first school was opened in St. Paul, Minnesota. And throughout the years, we’ve worked on all kinds of reform issues. And we’re very happy today to talk about one that’s really heating up right now, this question of how you turn around low-performing schools in our cities and also in our rural communities.

Arne Duncan, our secretary of education, laid down a challenge last year with his Race to the Top fund. He challenged school leaders to turn around the 5,000 chronically underperforming schools in America and he’s made, I think, marvelous use of the bully pulpit of his job to leverage change around the country. It helps when you have $4 billion, too. That makes that bully pulpit all the more powerful. But really incredible changes in state legislatures and cities and contracts negotiated between school leaders and teachers’ unions, all before a whole lot of money has actually been spent, so it’s a heartening example of strong and bold political leadership.

And in the administration’s blueprint for reauthorizing ESEA, this turnaround challenge is embedded in that as well. Challenged states, states with lots of low-performing schools, are going to be required to turn around five percent of their lowest-performing schools, based on student achievement and growth and graduation rates, in order to qualify for grants from the federal government. So fortunately, in my view, we have a president and a secretary of education who are as serious as a heart attack about thoroughgoing school reform.

And we saw that in this case in Rhode Island, in Central Falls earlier this year, when the school authorities there, or the city, fired all the teachers in their local high school after they couldn’t come to an agreement about reforms there. And the president and the secretary of education, sort of, stood up for that, behind that decision. Now, they’ve since rehired the teachers because they’ve been able to work out a deal that will allow for reform to go forward there. But it was heartening to me that they didn’t flinch because this urgency is absolutely essential.

Closing the achievement gap in this country is proceeding at an agonizingly slow pace. It has been since the mid-’80s. And I think it’s really smart for our national leaders to target the worst-performing schools in the country. You know, of the bottom 5,000, 2,000 of those are responsible for 70 percent of all school dropouts, so it’s a good idea to focus on the ones that we really need to get on the triage table.

But obviously, there are some large and controversial questions about turnaround, which we want to explore today. I think there’s going to be ferocious political resistance if we start moving down this road. It’s going to make what’s gone before look like a picnic. You know, we’re talking about closing schools, the firing of many, and in some cases all, teachers in a school.

And obviously, there’s going to be blowback. Already, we’re seeing dissension on the Democratic side. This week, Rep. Judy Chu of California, a Democrat, came out with a report which is critical of the blueprint, calling it punitive. And then on the right, you have, on the conservative side, you have a lot of folks who believe it’s not punitive enough and who think that, really, the only remedy for failing schools is to close them down and reopen as charters, or maybe under private management.

So we’ve had high-profile defections from the reform camp, like Diane Ravitch, who we’ve worked with down the years. And in some respects, that’s puzzling to me, but so this question’s becoming increasingly fraught. Fortunately, we have a stellar group of folks here to talk about it today, to explore this issues….

First, let me just, you know, define the terms here because I think particularly for the non-experts, the laypeople, this whole turnaround issue’s sort of murky. What are we really talking about when we say turning around schools? Well, in the blueprint there are four models of intervention that school leaders must pursue to deal with low-performing schools, the bottom five percent. One is transformation, which entails firing principals and adopting research-based instruction and extended learning time – new governance models, structure.

The next is the redundantly named turnaround model, which entails the same things as transformation, except you can fire half of the school staff. The third model is the restart, to convert or to close down and reopen a school under a charter operator or another educational management organization. And the last and obviously most drastic is school closes and reopen – and sending kids to high-performing schools elsewhere in the district, if you can do that.

So our purpose here today is to explore the administration’s blueprint, to drill down on this question of what we know and don’t know about best practice and turnaround schools and to focus particularly on what turnaround means for Washington, D.C., which is why I’m so glad, thrilled to have Chancellor Michelle Rhee here today. Why focus on Washington? Well, one, we’re all here. This is where we work and play and I often think that Washington is an invisible city when it comes to the great national policy debates.

[…]

We want a beachhead for innovation, but we’ve still got a long way to go. We’re still on the margins of a big public school enterprise with 50 million students. And frankly, the quality in the charter sector’s been really uneven and the scale of effort is just not sufficient to what we need. So as an authorizer, I can say that our challenge is the same one that you face, Chancellor, which is to reduce the number of low-performing schools and increase the number of high-performing ones. And it’s a hell of a lot harder to do than it sounds.

And the stakes are absolutely enormous. I’m not going to go over the stats, which probably everybody in this room knows, about the achievement gap. One number just did leap out at me. It was in the Brookings Institution’s “State of Metro America” report, which said that 85 percent of black and Latino adults in the United States lack a bachelor’s degree – 85 percent. What does that tell you? That tells you that our public schools are not preparing lots of folks for success – not preparing them for college, which is increasingly a minimum passport to career success.

That’s a huge problem. Nothing is more important, I think, in our country right now than solving it and getting school reform right. Obviously, it’s critical to our ability to compete and win globally. But even more, it’s critical to our ability to reverse the really disconcerting tendencies towards inequality, economic inequality, that have opened up in the last decade or so, and to redeem this country’s central political promise, which is equal opportunity.

For a full transcript of the event, click here (PDF). For the video, click here.

Photo credit: WzrdsRule

The single greatest threat to our security and prosperity might not be terrorism or biological warfare — it just might be financial illiteracy. Our current economic crisis has myriad causes, but it can be traced to the failure of many Americans to make smart financial decisions. In light of this epidemic of financial recklessness, education leaders should consider making “life math” curriculum mandatory in our schools.

The standard mathematical curriculum in high schools — algebra, geometry, trigonometry, statistics, calculus — is designed to give students the building blocks necessary to further their education and, for some, eventually launch successful careers in science, medicine, engineering and other important fields. For the rest of us, mathematics beyond the basics is mental exercise that keeps us intellectually spry.

I had a great math teacher in high school, Mrs. Wanda Dostall, who helped me achieve the only “A” I ever earned in a math course. While I don’t remember a single algebraic or trigonomic function, the courses I took stimulated my critical thinking skills and challenged me to embrace complexity and search for answers. But that didn’t mean that I didn’t (frequently) ask the question (quietly to myself, and aloud), “When am I going to use this in the real world?”

And that’s why throughout high school, I looked forward to Mrs. Dostall’s “life math” course for seniors. ”Life math” was designed to give students the real-world math skills they would need to manage their personal finances and, hopefully, enjoy financial security. Unfortunately, school administrators decided the course was not “college preparatory” — and I never had the chance to take it.

It’s a shame because I, like most Americans, could have benefited from it. As an adult, I manage multiple checking and savings accounts, pay bills and taxes, and save for my retirement. I have multiple credit cards with varying interest rates. I have applied for and taken out loans, managed and paid down debt, purchased multiple types of insurance policies, and invested in the stock market – and these are just some of the many types of financial decisions that I have made, and many more that I will make in the future.

I also vote for leaders who make critically important financial decisions for our government and economy – they manage budgets, adjust tax rates, negotiate trade policies, administer jobs and safety net programs, regulate financial institutions, monitor fiscal policy, and so on.

This is real-world mathematics. But I never learned this type of real-world math in school. And to me, that’s problematic.

Why Financial Literacy Means a Better Citizenry

I remember Mrs. Dostall’s frustration with our high school’s decision to terminate the “life math” course. She understood that a course in financial literacy, while perhaps not “college preparatory,” was in fact “life preparatory,” and that the mathematics department in our public school had a responsibility to prepare young people for the real world.

I think she also understood that financial literacy is necessary to fulfill civic responsibility. Take a look at what’s been going on the last couple of years. Americans are angry about the Wall Street bailout, and rightfully so. But it’s not just the bailout that worries Americans. Our fiscal house is not in order. Our elected leaders spend more money on government programs, while they cut taxes. To fund the resulting budget shortfalls, they mortgage our future to China.

There’s much to be angry about, and sure, we can play the blame game. We can even attack government as the problem, as the right continues to do. Or, we can act like adults, face reality and own up to our own mistakes.

For too long, too many of us have chosen to live beyond our means. To get more non-essential goods and services too many of us can’t afford — but claim we can’t live without — we have amassed huge sums of debt. Too many of us have taken out loans we can’t pay off and taken on mortgage payments that consume half or more of our monthly incomes. We’ve made poor investments and failed to properly save for retirement.

And what’s really scary is that too many young Americans today, from the “me” generation of the ‘80’s through Generation X, were raised in working- and middle-class families that adopted materialism without consequence as a norm — a way of life that too many young Americans have come to expect.

If that’s not enough to convince you that we need our Mrs. Dostalls to once again teach “life math,” you can see how our poor financial decisions at home reflect the poor financial decisions made by our leaders in government and business. The culture of financial recklessness in Washington and on Wall Street is rooted in our own individual failings — and threatens the prosperity of all, including those who live responsibly and plan for the future.

I think Mrs. Dostall would tell us that we can prevent another prolonged recession; avoid another housing bubble, mortgage crisis and financial meltdown; restore fiscal responsibility; return to the surpluses we experienced in the Clinton years and pay down our debt; and secure our prosperity in a global economy. But for all that to happen, we must first take steps to increase our financial literacy, and make sure our government does the same and regulates Wall Street to balance short-term and long-term gains.

At age 27 with five years of experience in the workforce — and after some personal financial missteps — I am taking proactive steps to increase my own financial literacy. Looking back, I wish there had been a “life math” course available to me in high school, one that would have helped me understand how to create a realistic personal budget; taught me about credit, debt, loans and insurance; and given me lessons in investing for retirement. To equip the next generation with the skills and tools needed to succeed in the real world and chart our nation’s course to fiscal responsibility and prosperity, we should think seriously about making a “life math” curriculum mandatory in secondary education.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Progressive Policy Institute.

Photo Credit: Maximalideal/ CC BY-NC 2.0

Turnaround Schools: Rising to the Challenge

PPI’s forum examined the challenges facing administrators, students and teachers in bringing about lasting change to low-performing schools.

Download the full transcript.

PPI Capital Forum – Turnaround Schools: Rising to the Challenge

PPI’s forum will examine the challenges facing administrators, students and teachers in bringing about lasting change to low-performing schools.

Improving urban schools is slow, laborious work, like turning around the proverbial supertanker. But last week brought heartening evidence that Washington, D.C.’s schools have a competent skipper at the helm.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reported that the District’s traditional public schools boosted fourth-grade reading scores faster than any of the 18 urban school districts taking its test. Those scores rose six points over the past two years, while eighth-grade reading scores increased by four points. These gains have been widely hailed as proof – even by erstwhile skeptics — that D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s controversial efforts to boost student performance are beginning to get traction.

They are also good news for Mayor Adrian Fenty, who took over the schools three years ago and brought Rhee in to shake things up. Fenty is locked in a tough reelection fight with D.C. City Council Chairman Vincent Gray, who has sought to capitalize on a local backlash against the Fenty-Rhee reforms.

These changes, however, are likely to look like child’s play compared to the challenge Rhee faces now. She and other school leaders are under mounting pressure from the No Child Left Behind law and the Obama administration to turn around the city’s worst-performing schools. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has challenged struggling districts to turn around the nation’s 5,000 lowest-performing schools, and he’s dangling big carrots as an inducement.

What exactly does ”turning around” schools mean? In order for districts to get the federal money, they must choose one of four strategies to improve their worst schools: turnaround, restart, closure or transformation. Under turnaround and transformation, districts must fire principals, reform instruction and expand learning time. Turnaround also requires that they fire 50 percent of teachers in failing schools. Closure entails shutting such schools down and sending students to better schools in the district. Restart means closing the schools and reopening them as public charter schools or under another type of education management organization.

Why such drastic measures? Because a quarter-century of national attention on such schools, including big increases in funding, haven’t made much of a dent in the large achievement and graduation gaps between suburban, largely white students and urban minorities. Despite the gains in D.C. students’ NAEP scores, for example, the District still ranks well below the average of all U.S. schools, as well as schools in comparable large cities. Says Rhee, with characteristic bluntness, “We still have a ridiculously long way to go.”

It’s not that there haven’t been plenty of individual success stories, especially in the charter school sector which now includes more than 1.5 million students. The big question now is how to scale up the number of high-performing schools available to low-income kids, while dealing with chronic underachievers.

Progressive school reformers, led by President Obama and Duncan, have grown impatient with the agonizingly slow pace of improvement in poor urban and rural areas. With its $3.5 billion Race to the Top Fund, the administration is offering districts incentives to speed things up.

But not all Democrats are ready for more radical, and disruptive, change. Rep. Judy Chu of California last week released a report criticizing school turnaround approaches as unduly drastic and rigid. She won backing from the big teachers’ unions, including Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Skepticism about turnarounds isn’t confined to Democrats, either. Andy Smarick of the American Enterprise Institute believes that efforts to raise the bar for low-performing public schools almost always fail. The more realistic solution, in his view, is to shut them down and replace them with new and better ones, including charters.

But other reformers point to encouraging signs of successful turnarounds in places like Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia. A key obstacle to success, they say, are district bureaucracies and collective bargaining agreements that undercut the autonomy of school leaders and prevent them from firing bad teachers, extending school days and assessing teachers on the basis of growth in student performance.

PPI will illuminate the pros and cons of school turnarounds in a Capital Forum this Wednesday in Washington. It will feature Chancellor Rhee, Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), and several prominent turnaround experts and critics. The event will be webcast on ProgressiveFix.com starting at 11:30 a.m.

With Rhee driving change in traditional schools, and one of the nation’s largest public charter sectors, Washington is on the front lines of the school reform debate. Stay tuned for the coming battle over turnarounds.

Photo credit: The National Academy of Sciences