The U.S. House and Senate have passed separate bills reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Soon, conferees from the two houses will try to hammer out a final agreement to send to President Obama. As they do so, they should insist on a strong federal hand in helping our nation’s neediest students.
That will take some work. The bills that passed the House and Senate dramatically scale back the federal role in holding states accountable for raising student achievement. This is an understandable reaction to what many lawmakers, educators, and parents saw as the overly prescriptive nature of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). But it would be a mistake to use disgruntlement over NCLB as a whole as an excuse to abdicate any and all federal responsibility to make sure we do what works to help students who are stuck in the country’s worst schools.
{mosads}We don’t need to theorize what will happen if the federal government eases pressure on states to deliver improvement. We already know the results will be dismal. For more than a decade, the federal government has used the School Improvement Grant (SIG) program to provide extra funding to reform the bottom five percent of schools, while leaving it up to states to decide how to spend the money. Since 2009, nearly $6 billion has been spent to help turnaround about 1,700 schools. While nearly two-thirds of schools receiving SIG funds have improved their performance in math and reading, the average amount of improvement is nowhere near large enough to deliver real hope to students.
One reason SIG hasn’t produced better results is that the federal government hasn’t insisted on significant reform. Faced with competing political forces, entrenched bureaucracy, and special interests, most states and school districts take the path of least resistance. Of the four reform models allowed under SIG, three-quarters of the schools receiving funds have chosen the least-disruptive – and least-effective – intervention, called transformation. By contrast, fewer than one-fifth of the schools chose the more-aggressive option of replacing the principal and at least half of the school’s staff. What’s most frustrating is that we know that we know the least chosen option is overridingly the most effective. A study in Massachusetts showed that of those schools that replaced 45 percent or more of staff in the first year, 75 percent made significant gains; of those schools that replaced less than 45 percent of staff, less than a third did so.
The problem is that too few states and school districts choose to act on that kind of knowledge. Research from Harvard has shown that intensive tutoring, increased learning time, and a culture of high expectations are at the core of every successful turnaround effort. High quality charter schools like Mastery, Green Dot, and LEAD have shown how to do this work consistently. We’ve also seen encouraging progress in places like Tennessee and New Orleans, which heavily recruited high-quality charter school leaders to turn around their failing schools. Yet only about 80 schools out of 1,700 around the nation have been converted to charter schools though SIG. Think how many more students could be helped if states and school districts felt compelled to take more aggressive action to improve their worst schools.
Members of Congress working on a final ESEA reauthorization have a choice. They can punt responsibility for school reform to states – a politically appealing option for politicians who have gotten an earful about federal overreach on education policy. Or they can show real leadership by insisting that state and local officials use federal funding to dramatically improve failing schools. This shouldn’t be a hard call. Generations of Democrats and Republicans have agreed that giving children an equal shot at success requires giving them a good education. Congress has the kind of opportunity to act here that comes along only every seven to ten years. Allowing students to languish in terrible schools when we have the knowledge we need to help them improve would be a moral tragedy of the highest proportions.
Rees is the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Barone is director of policy at Democrats for Education Reform. They worked together on the 2001 Re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act while Rees worked at the White House for Vice President Dick Cheney and Barone worked for Rep. George Miller (R-Calif.) who was the top Democrat on the House Education and Workforce Committee.