After a decade of No Child Left Behind and three years of Race to the Top, officials are getting much better at identifying “failing schools.”
Now we know.
A failing school is one with low test scores and low graduation rates.
A failing school enrolls large numbers of students who are eligible for free or reduced price lunch (i.e., poverty).
A failing school enrolls large numbers of African American and Hispanic students.
A failing school enrolls large numbers of students who are English language learners and new immigrants.
A failing school has disproportionate numbers of students with disabilities.
Based on current federal policy, these are the ways to “turnaround” these failing schools.
Fire the principal; fire half or all of the teachers; turn the school into a charter school under private management; close the school.
What, specifically, is done to address the educational needs of the students? See previous sentence.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Very well put. That’s it. That’s the whole plan, wrapped in pretty paper of anti-union, anti-teacher, pro big corporations cronyism. There is nothing to address inequality and equity. Nothing for the forgotten children.
Nothing is done (by the reformers) to address the educational needs of the students. What the reformers are doing isn’t about the students. The reformers know that the parents of the aforementioned kids do not vote, so what the reformers do to them won’t matter in the voting booth and in the polls. It’s all about privatizing the next public service in America. The prisons are done. The hospitals are on their way. The military is on its way. Public roads are on their way. Police forces, firefighters, sanitation workers, etc. are next. The more public services that are privatized, the more money the 1% makes.
Really?…the more public services are privatized, the more money the 1% makes. In my opinion…Problems in the quality of education began when the federal government and the teachers unions stepped in. Education is not a place for government…and teachers are not being held accountable because the unions protect them from losing their jobs when they are proved to be poor teachers. The best thing that could happen to education FOR our children is to give education back to the state level and get rid of the unions. Get back to caring about the child. I love teachers and know many personally and have family who are educators but to blame the failure of the education system on the “1%” is just preposterous…REALLY !!
Was the koolaid good?
I was going to ask the same, Karen. Sounds like she has had several pitchers full.
Glenda says that education is not a place for government. I think the local government, the local community does and should have a say in the running of the schools. I don’t understand Glenda’s obvious hostility towards teacher unions. The states with the highest performing schools, such as NJ, have a unionized teacher corps. The right to work states or the states in which teachers’ unions are very weak are doing worse than states like NJ, CT and Mass with their unionized teachers. “…..but to blame the failure of the education system on the unions is just preposterous…REALLY !!” Finland, with a highly rated educational system, has a 100% unionized teacher force. Unions assist excellent teachers from being fired on trumped up or false charges. By the way, Glenda, unions don’t hire the teachers, they don’t evaluate the teachers and they don’t give teachers tenure after the 3 or 4 year trial period. Unions and tenure just guarantee DUE PROCESS not a job for life, REALLY!!!
Only poor administrators can’t fire poor teachers. There has never been a union contract anywhere, ever tht didn’t allow for a competent principal to remove an incompetent tenured teacher. And it’s even easier to just non-renew a loser before they become tenured. This is the biggest of all the lies told about unionized teachers.
Glenda, what are you thinking when you lump the federal government and the teacher’s unions together? Ask any teacher you see what they think of federal educational policy right now and I’ll bet you a ham sandwich you’ll find they are very unhappy with the Feds.
It sounds to me like Glenda wants to ban teacher unions through some type of legislative process or act of Congress. How nice of Glenda to deny teachers their first amendment rights. This sounds quite undemocratic or as Glenda might say, just preposterous…REALLY !!
Glenda says: “Problems in the quality of education began when the federal government and the teachers unions stepped in.” Really? Where is the documentation for this assertion? Where’s the proof as opposed to some ideological prejudice? Teacher unions have been around for quite some time while the federal government’s heavy handed involvement in education is of a more recent vintage.
No, you’re wrong. Teachers unions don’t protect bad teachers. teachers unions don’t keep teachers from being accountable. Teachers unions don’t force administrators to hire bad teachers. These things are not happening. There is no data, there are no studies, there is no evidence to support your viewpoint. You are simply parroting the ad hominem attacks perpetrated by the corporate interests who are dead set on transferring TRILLIONS of dollars from the public coffers into their own pockets. PERIOD.
“Get back to caring about the child?” How dare you? The students are ALL I care about. I didn’t join this HONORABLE profession for the job security, the long summers off, or the big paycheck. I joined it to give back to my country. Neither I nor my colleagues across the country are attempting to ROB our country of the schools that the American people paid for. The “1%” is doing that.
Do you know why the Chicago teachers have set a strike date for Sept. 10? It’s not because they want to keep ”poor” teachers in the classroom. It’s not all about wages, either. Do you think they would have the support of parents and students if it those were the reasons?
Glenda,
True conservatives (and I am one…yes, a Conservative with a hijacked party) know that government must provide infrastructure to the public (that would include roads, police/fire, armed forces…etc.) and the founding fathers knew that the obligation of government was to educate the populace so that educated voters could choose the best candidates (see the writings of Jefferson for more examples)…now, as for ridding our country of unions; sorry, that’s just not going to happen until you get rid of the American Medical Association or the American Psychological Association…just two examples of professional organizations that represent the interests of their members (and I could go on)…we care about the children…if we didn’t, we wouldn’t keep working our butts off in this incredibly oppressive atmosphere where we’re mocked, called fat and lazy, and told almost daily that we’re bad…and held up as the causes for all the troubles in this country over the last 5 years; we wouldn’t stay after school to mentor, coach, or sponsor activity clubs for our students for free ; we wouldn’t spend money out of our own pockets for kids to participate in school activities or trips; we wouldn’t continue to sweat and suffer over the need for success and achievement in our classes; we wouldn’t handle 190 students a day and still keep a smile on our face…I care about students and the people who run MY union (the Charlotte FEA) care about children…but I care about my peers and my co-workers who are breaking down and ending their day in tears more and more; who are finding themselves facing stress levels they have never considered before; and who are considering leaving a profession that they love because that 1% you mention simply want to cash in and profit from education…so if you care about the future of this country, you should really listen to the educators, not the businessmen about the future of education.
A failing school? To me it seems a phrase that cannot exist except in the minds of those who would destroy it. The larger concept of school is anywhere someone is teaching children, teens, and adults. Anyone who needs to learn something seeks out a teacher who can share or show or demonstrate and engage the students in the learning process. Positive parenting includes teaching. Grandparents teach. But this is not the same as what professional educators do. A parent can apply a band-aid. Give Tylenol. Check for a fever. This is not the same as healthcare.
It seems to me there are many kinds of teaching and there is confusion about the real process of professional teaching in our K-12 public schools. The process of teaching done and needed to support our citizens future. The rigor of teaching needed to provide the security our nation needs. The complexity of teaching needed to enable all students to reach their immediate and future potential.
So the insulting identification of the teaching by professional educators as this easily replaceable, interchangeable widget while simultaneously assigning the entire responsibility of the failing school on these same educators shows a stupidity and ignorance not only of education and teaching, but a total lack of understanding of society, humanity and the complex psychosocial interactions that occur in any community no matter the size.
It is shocking to find adults, so-called highly educated people in public positions willing to humiliate themselves on record and for eternity with their ignorant statements regarding the education system and the professional educators in it. History will be hell for them.
As long as teachers gather with the goal and desire to provide the education and skills to students to ensure they have the ability to make positive choices, to succeed with hard work and to know that there is a future and hope; then the school isn’t failing no matter what anyone says. Could it be better? Of Course! Professional teachers know this and want it to be better and strive to improve it, AND IF they have the time, energy and support to do so they will. They are the soul of the school and the students the purpose but the community must provide the support; local, state and national.
A school cannot fail as long as there are teachers there attempting to teach, despite the neglected or pathetic conditions around them.
However, our schools CAN have the rug pulled out from under them by greed and ignorance. The business world does this all the time. It is called a hostile takeover. ” A hostile takeover is an acquisition in which the company being purchased doesn’t want to be purchased, or doesn’t want to be purchased by the particular buyer that is making a bid. How can someone buy something that’s not for sale? Hostile takeovers only work with publicly traded companies. That is, they have issued stock that can be bought and sold on public stock markets. ”
All these for profit companies know this and how it is done. The “stock” of public schools? We were owned by the teachers, parents, students, communities, states, nation, humanity. Now we are being bought out and fired. Bought with lies, manipulation of data and unethical and immoral manipulations. Replaces with “their” school boards and administration and teachers. The public doesn’t care about Enron, the mortgage crisis, natural disasters, wars or education until it was DIRECTLY EFFECTED THEM. The reformers are counting on this.
If we survive, as an educator I need to work for public respect and recognition of what I do. The value added must be related to what I DO not what my student does. I must work to control my profession and not allow non-educators to dictate what I am or what I do. I will then calculate the VALUE of that.
A response to Glenda on this weekend celebrating organized labor: Your opinion, “Problems in the quality of education began when the federal government and the teachers unions stepped in.” implies that the without government support and a professional and stable workforce, schools would do a better job of educating America’s children. For over a century, American public schools have been the great equalizer allowing all children, including those of immigrants like my parents, to assimilate into our society. Federal support for compulsory education is not a recent intrusion. Likewise, teachers’ unions have been around since the middle of the last century and flourished during a time period when American schools produced an educated populace that innovated, created, and was the envy of the world. Your comment implies a cause and effect that assumes our entire system of public education was doing fine until government and unions got involved. That timing has no basis in fact.
You might also note that the states with the highest union membership also have the highest educational outcomes while the states with the lowest union participation fared as among the worst. The top six: Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maine, and Minnesota are among the most heavily unionized in the country with a participation rate of 76%-100%.http://www.statemaster.com/graph/edu_bes_edu_ind-education-best-educated-index#
http://www.irs.gov/uac/SOI-Tax-Stats—Exempt-Organizations-Business-Master-File-Extract-(EO-BMF)
Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, all ranked in the bottom ten despite having a negligible union presence of 0%-20%. So if unions were such an impediment, Glenda’s statement that “problems” in quality are the outcome of unions “stepping in” would be supported by data. In fact, if the federal government and teachers’ unions were such an intrusion on the progress of schools, we would not have had world class schools at all in the last century. If facts are important, she would see that the correlation is much more closely related to poverty rates and the number of high-needs special education and English language learners concentrated in certain schools than the red-herring of government intervention and teachers’ unions. If high-poverty schools are taken out of the equation, American schools perform as well as any in the world. So blaming teachers instead of the ills of poverty is not the answer.
I also disagree with other canard that “teachers are not being held accountable because the unions protect them from losing their jobs when they are proved to be poor teachers.” Teachers are held accountable and can be summarily fired for poor performance or any reason during the probationary period of time before they are granted tenure. This is measured in YEARS. In New York, it is three years during which time teachers are observed and rated by trained supervisors. After that time, all tenure does is provide due process which means that the district must prove before an independent arbitrator that the teacher is not competent. That is the antithesis of your statement. After years when a teacher can be fired on the spot, a tenured teacher can be removed after a fair hearing. And a teacher proven to be “poor” can be fired. “Proven” is the key word here. I have seen teachers removed for reasons that have nothing to do with pedagogy such as reporting grade inflation, changing of test scores, special education violations, reporting sexual harassment, or for speaking up at a faculty conference. That is why tenure is important. It allows teachers to speak up without fear. It protects children whose IEPs are being ignored or who are handed a diploma based on cheating, bogus credit recovery, inflated grades, to boost a school’s data.
And what is a “poor” teacher in her opinion? A teacher who shows low standardized test scores for a given year? The margin of error in those scores is enormous as is reliability based on the variation in outcomes from year to year. Many good teachers wrongly demonized and demoralized as a result.
Teachers’ unions allow us to fight for smaller class size because we know children packed like sardines into a classroom perform worse than those who can receive more attention in optimum conditions. It’s in our contract.
Teachers’ unions allow us to attract and retain the best and the brightest teachers. Who believes that anyone would be attracted by paying lower salaries, cutting benefits, eliminating job security, and removing due process? Who believes that anyone would be attracted by the specter of dismissal because they took on the challenge of the most at-risk students which impacted the test scores? Who believes that anyone would be attracted to a job where every moment is geared toward test preparation at the expense of developing creativity, intellect, and a broad curriculum? Who believes anyone would be attracted to a job where they might be publicly shamed in a newspaper after working so hard to help high-needs students? Maybe that’s why the turnover rate is so high that 50% of new teachers leave in their first five years.
In my generation of teachers, a career of 20, 30, or 40 years was not unusual. We were respected, collegial, and entrusted to prepare our lessons without commercially purchased, scripted plans. It was a calling, not a job and there was great satisfaction in that. We took low salaries (mine started at $7,950/yr with a college degree) in return for a promise of a pension and benefits.
Finally, let’s not deny that corporate interests, without using the term 1%, are looking for profit in public education money. The lucrative contracts for technology going to Rupert Murdoch, for testing going to Pearson et al, for textbooks, for privately owned charters, are impacting the meager funding provided for the classrooms.
On this Labor Day weekend, I salute the hard working teachers for bearing up under this vilification and carrying on with doing the most important job in America with caring and dedication.
They just scatter the special needs, low performing, troubled students to other borderline schools so the reformers can advance their school takeover plans, never addressing the students at all. Those students are pawns in sadistic game of monopoly where they have all the money and can make all the moves, they just need the realestate to put up thirds houses and hotels.
Sent from my Samsung smartphone on AT&T
Diane,
A question:
“based on current federal policy” — Are you saying that there are in fact no “turnaround” schools? Please explain.
A comment or two:
Some of the reasons you state may be characteristics of some or even many “failing” schools but that doesn’t make those characteristics defining of failing schools.
Your title implies a desire to define it. While there is no clear definition that I’m aware of yours is more political rhetoric than a definition.
Here’s a question to start:
What if half (or even a quarter) of the children from a particular school drop out of school before graduation?
Wouldn’t that be a start to a definition?
I’m not blaming teachers, administrators, our government, or the 1%, just attempting to start to define the question.
If you really had to define a failing school, how would you? Or would you say there is no such thing?
The post defined a failing school.
Perhaps it’s just semantics, but your first statement regarding low test scores or low graduation rates seems like a starting point. On the flip just because a school has a high percentage of students in poverty or has a large African American demographic it doesn’t necessarily lead to a failing school in my experience — or according to my working definition.
You asked:
What, specifically, is done to address the educational needs of the students?
While you give the federal policy answer, here is some of what I’ve seen in many schools I’d define as turnaround.
-Teacher student retention from year to year is high – above 90%
-Students express greater satisfaction in school and often can clearly express their educational goals.
-Teachers are both warm and strict.
-Teachers accentuate the positive — pointing out many more positive behaviors than corrections.
-The time in ELA and Math is increased while preserving time for other important classes including the arts.
-Character traits are explicitly taught.
This is documented in district and charter schools.
Feel free to keep the conversation going. Do I have it wrong?