Closing 5,000 Schools
The Obama administration has proposed using federal funds to prod school districts into closing the bottom 1% of schools over the next five years, and then reopening them with new leadership and new teachers.
In the private sector, troubled businesses undergo turnarounds all the time. Rather than closing and reopening, a new CEO is brought in, usually from the outside. That new CEO develops a plan, evaluates the leadership team and the people with fresh eyes, makes changes to the team, sets fresh goals, and requires accountability for results.
I think this may be one of the things that President Obama has gotten right. But regardless of what you think of this policy, I find it interesting that they’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to get around the tenure and union rules is closing schools and starting from scratch. And based on this article, even that may not make it possible to get the bad teachers off the public payroll.
“If we turn around just the bottom 1 percent, the bottom thousand schools per year for the next five years, we could really move the needle, lift the bottom and change the lives of tens of millions of underserved children,” Duncan said.
In particular, the administration wants to fix middle schools and high schools, focusing on “dropout factories” where two in five kids don’t make it to graduation.
Duncan, a former Chicago schools chief, has plenty of experience with school turnarounds. Chicago targeted several public schools for turnaround, eight of them last year, while Duncan was still in charge. It’s too soon to know how the eight fared.
What happens to teachers when an entire staff is replaced depends on local contracts with teachers’ unions. In Chicago, some lost their jobs, while some reapplied and were hired.
But in New York, many whose jobs were eliminated by school closings wound up in a reserve pool of about 1,100 teachers who have continued to receive paychecks while working mostly as substitutes.
Don’t get me wrong: I think unions played a significant role in building a middle class back in the 1800s and early 1900s. And there are some areas where they could play a positive role today. But it’s largely become about political power and legislating advantage for themselves…just take a look at the California budget mess as a prime example.
When tenure and union rules protect poor performance and mediocrity in our kids’ education, perhaps it’s time to consider what we value more. The vast majority of teachers who work hard and care about their students have nothing to fear from change.
Bottom line: when you have no fear of losing your job for poor performance, you’re not incentivized to work hard. We’re actually lucky that the vast majority of teachers care so much about their students that they do so without the incentive.
