Brokering Schools: When the State Takes Over

What constitutes “failing” when it comes to a school? How should failure be judged? And what should happen after a school is determined to be failing?

Under the best circumstances, those closest to a troubled school would be aware of the situation and take steps to intervene. The school administration and the community’s elected education representatives (the school board) would be on top of the situation. They also would, through firsthand knowledge, understand whether the school was actually failing or merely struggling with difficult circumstances. This is a key distinction.

Many schools struggle to educate students coming from troubled homes, impoverished neighborhoods, and disadvantaged communities. Often it is an uphill battle made worse by limited resources, outdated facilities, and other negative factors within the district.

True local control would argue for communities assessing their schools and seeking assistance when needed, not state education bureaucrats abstracting from sterile test scores some notion of whether a community’s schools are succeeding or failing. The current state model is top-down bureaucracy. But that’s not the worst.

Again, in the best circumstances, if a community were to assess that one (or more) of its schools was failing to serve students and parents, it might approach the state for assistance. Responsive—rather than autocratic—state education leaders might then muster resources to intervene, providing to the local community the kinds of assistance necessary to reset the school, literally, to help the school recover a sound educational footing and move forward. After all, the state has greater resources than many local communities, and sometimes schools do require positive interventions that are beyond the scope of local expertise or financial resources. (In truly dire circumstances even federal intervention can be necessary, such as during the early years of desegregation.)

Unfortunately “the best circumstances” do not apply to Indiana’s methods of determining when a school is “failing,” because the measures of failure are simplistic and suspect. Moreover, when the state “takes over” it does not muster resources to help restore the school to good educational health. Instead, the state acts as a broker, essentially giving the school—accompanied by tax dollars—to a private management company. The company is not held accountable to the state or the local community in any meaningful way. And, in most cases, the management company is motivated not by a drive to educational excellence but by the desire for and expectation of financial gain.

A case in point is Gary, Indiana’s Theodore Roosevelt Career and Technical Academy, now called Theodore Roosevelt College and Career Academy and operated by EdisonLearning Inc. If the name “Edison” sounds familiar, it should. Back in the 1990s Chris Whittle launched a for-profit education enterprise called Edison Schools Inc., claiming that his company could run schools better and for less money than could public school districts—and make money for his company’s shareholders. It turned out to be a hollow claim.

Edison stock was traded on NASDAQ for four years, reaching a high of nearly $40 a share in 2001 before the share value plunged to 14¢. In 2002, Whittle was courting Roger Milliken for a possible bailout. Now Whittle is back with the latest incarnation, EdisonLearning, which has, in essence, been given Roosevelt to turn around, at least theoretically, and on which to turn a profit, again theoretically. The track record on either score has not been impressive.

James K. Glassman, writing in the Wall Street Journal in 2005, commented:

Today, instead of owning 1,000 private schools, Edison merely manages 157 public ones. What happened? Edison had nowhere near the funding to construct such a gigantic enterprise so quickly, and Mr. Whittle and Mr. Schmidt [a partner] lacked management skills and patience. After early setbacks in starting his private schools, Mr. Whittle decided to switch focus entirely and sought management contracts from urban school boards. With no experience dealing with big-city unions and politicians, Edison blundered into disaster after disaster. "Too often," writes Mr. Whittle, "what rules schools is politics, not grades." He should have recognized that fact earlier and stuck to creating his own low-cost schools.

State takeovers are an iffy proposition at best. They are propelled not by local desires but by political ideology reified through sterile assessments that focus on numbers rather than the people who have most at stake—local students, parents, teachers, administrators, concerned citizens, and elected officials. What the state does with and to the schools it takes over is equally iffy, given the questionable choice of companies such as EdisonLearning Inc.

Usurping local control is egregious in itself. Doing so in order to divert tax dollars into the hands of private enterprise is illegitimate. And doing so in the name of improving education is, to put it kindly, disingenuous. 

What to Do About the School Calendar

Like the drawing of attendance areas and the determining of daily starting and ending times, arranging the school calendar can be fraught with contention. Let’s start with the basics. The vast majority of U.S. states (three-fifths) require 180 student contact days—in other words, days when school is in session and students are present. A handful of states require fewer days, an even smaller handful more days. Apart from guidelines in a few states, decisions about how to array those school attendance days across the calendar are local prerogatives.

Traditionally the American school year has begun around Labor Day and ended around Memorial Day, give or take a couple of weeks. This pattern is not universal even among English-speaking countries. In the United Kingdom, for example, public schools provide 190 attendance days, usually extending from September to late June or early July. Australia’s students, in the Southern Hemisphere, start the school year in January or early February and finish up in mid-December, with their longest holiday coinciding with Easter.

In recent years some groups and individuals here in the United States have touted the advantages of “year-round” schools. Funding constraints usually argue against increasing the number of attendance days, and so “year-round” must be taken simply to mean arranging attendance days differently, most often by shortening the traditional long summer break and inserting longer breaks during the other seasons.

There is no one best way to arrange the school calendar. Common variations include these models in which the first number represents consecutive attendance days (weekends and holidays excepted) and the second number represents vacation days: 45-15, 60-20, and 45-10. As an example, here’s a link to a 45-15 calendar used during the 2007-08 school year in the Beaufort County Schools in South Carolina: http://www.nayre.org/Beaufort,%20SC%202007-08_Year_Round_Calendar.pdf.

Salem News (www.salemnews.com) provided a succinct overview of a few important pros and cons concerning year-round school schedules:

• Kids in year-round schools are at an academic advantage. A Duke University study found that kids in year-round schools are less likely to forget what they’ve learned because they don’t experience the long break that occurs during summer vacations with traditional schools. That’s a sentiment echoed by Charles Ballinger, executive director emeritus of the National Association for Year-Round Education. “The longer students are away from material, the more forgetting occurs,” Ballinger says.

• Kids spend the same amount of time in the classroom, just on a different schedule. When many people hear “year-round schooling” they understandably assume kids will be spending more time in the classroom. In fact, many year-round schools have the same 180 days of schooling as their traditional counterparts, they just have shorter, more frequent breaks. This schedule, proponents of year-round schools suggest, helps to keep the education process ongoing, unlike traditional systems wherein students must re-acclimate themselves to school after long breaks.

• What about child care? Parents opposing year-round schools often cite the potential difficulty finding child care should their school system make the switch. Traditional summer vacations enable parents to use college students also on summer hiatus to look after their children, or send the kids off to day camp. Shorter breaks during fall and spring offer no such luxury, making it difficult, particularly for single parents, to find adequate child care.

• Aren’t kids busy enough as it is? Opponents of year-round schools also suggest kids today, who tend to be involved in more extra-curriculars than their parents ever were, are busy enough and need the traditional summer break to relax and regroup.

Certainly there are additional pros and cons. The bottom line is that making a school calendar is a local decision and it must conform to local needs as well as be educationally sound. The only  meaningful way to go about designing the local school calendar is to involve community members, including students and educators, in determining how best to respond to the needs and desires of the largest majority of citizens.

Common Core A-Comin'

On the heels of the Republican National Convention comes an interesting perspective on the Common Core State Standards, courtesy of Education Week. In an article dated August 30 and titled, "Common Core State Standards Dividing GOP," author Alyson Klein opines that conservatives are divided broadly into two camps. One camp embraces the Common Core Standards, as evidenced by a majority of Republican governors whose states have signed on to the standards among the total of 46 states—including Indiana—and the District of Columbia.

However, another camp sees too much of a federal stamp on the Common Core State Standards, with some members deriding them as "Obamacore." The standards, developed jointly by the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) and the National Governors Association, get a mixed review even among the inner circle. Writes Klein, "Tom Luna, the Idaho superintendent of public instruction, and the president of CCSSO, rejected the idea that the standards were cooked up by the feds, saying he was part of the state-level conversations at their inception." On the other hand, Klein quotes Luna as saying, "If it [the standards] ever becomes a mandate, Idaho would be the first state to get out."

The GOP platform generically embraces "high standards" in education but is silent on the Common Core. "Still," writes Klein, "some state lawmakers—including Sen. Mike Fair of South Carolina, an attendee here—are trying to get their states to dump the standards, or at least delay their implementation."


Readers who have not already done so might want to explore the official Common Core website at http://www.corestandards.org.