In this country, we have all sorts of mistaken ideas about education. One is the notion that American public education is a disaster, the idea repeated often by Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, Michele Rhee, Jeb Bush, and others who want to privatize public education. They refuse to realize that schools reflect their community and their society. Typically, schools in affluent communities are highly regarded and well-resourced. Typically, schools in segregated and impoverished communities have low test scores. Another idea without basis is that someone will come up with a solution to the problems of the schools in impoverished communities that can be quickly scaled up everywhere and these schools will end poverty. There are many “if-thens” embedded in that last sentence. My view is that school improvement goes hand in hand with improvement of people’s lives. That is not to argue against school improvement–every school can improve–but to say that we are too quick to grab onto innovations and promote them without giving them a chance to mature and prove themselves.

 

The latest example is the P-Tech High in Brooklyn, New York. The school opened a few years ago; it has not yet had its first graduating class. Yet President Obama and Secretary Duncan visited the school, and the president singled it out in his State of the Union Address. It has already been replicated in sixty other schools across the nation, without waiting for the model to be fine-tuned. The school promised that all of its students would graduate with a high school diploma and an associate’s degree in six years.

 

Now the school is finding out how tough it is to keep its promises.

 

NPR reports:

 

P-TECH completely overhauled the school-to-career pipeline, creating a six-year program that blended the traditional four years of high school with two free years of community college, plus IBM internships and mentorships. And it offered all this to some of the students most underserved by the current system: Most are from low-income families, African-American or Hispanic, and a majority are boys.

 

The school accepts students by lottery, not entrance exam. That means, unlike other early college programs, there are no academic requirements to get in. The high school’s website states boldly: “With a unique 9-14 model, the goal for our diverse, unscreened student population is 100% completion of an associate degree within six years.”

 

Riding the waves of good press, P-TECH was quickly replicated all over the country.

 

But five years in, a year before the first full graduating class of the original school is expected, the model is showing signs of growing pains. Many of its students failed college courses early on, and internal emails obtained by NPR reveal disagreements across the many parties to this partnership over how best to serve those students….

 

Of the original 97 students who started at P-TECH in Brooklyn in the fall of 2011, 11 have already earned associate degrees. At least four took jobs at IBM; the other seven are continuing at four-year colleges.

 

By June 2016, IBM says, about 1 in 4 of the original P-TECH students should have an associate degree. That, after five years, already beats the national graduation rates for poor community college students of color.

 

But the goal, on P-TECH’s own website, isn’t 25 percent. It’s 100 percent in six years.

 

And the school is being replicated quickly, in the bright glare of publicity, before the kinks have been worked out and the model has been proven sustainable.

 

I hope that P-TECH is able to survive and prosper. It sounds like a good model. But I also wish that politicians would stop promoting miracle cures and pronouncing schools to be successful when they have barely developed their strategies. This was a favorite tactic of Arne Duncan and even President Obama. A few years ago, I wrote an article about “miracle schools,” and what I have learned over time is that there are no miracle schools. Every time a politician points to a miracle school, take another look. Good schools are the result of dedication and hard work by educators and students, and you can’t wave a wand to produce them overnight.