Follow AAE on:
Subscribe to RSS Feed:
| Study: Poor Performing Schools Rarely Get Shut Down |
| posted by: Alix | December 16, 2010, 05:00 AM |
|
Despite tough talk from politicians, school officials and reformers, underperforming schools are rarely closed according to a new study. Released this week by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, the report finds that low-performing public schools—both charter and traditional schools—are often resistant to significant change and are rarely closed completely. Upon review of ten states over five years, analysts found that only about one percent had improved enough to exceed their states' academic performance minimums five years later, and less than ten percent had even broken out of the lowest 25 percent of schools in their states. Despite such low performance, only 19 percent of the lowest-performing charter schools and 11 percent of their more-traditional public school peers had been closed after five years. The state-by-state analysis showed little difference. "Real turnarounds are extremely scarce, and shutdowns were a little more common but still pretty scarce," said Fordham Institute President Chester E. Finn. The statistics are sobering at a time when education experts are calling for more accountability and commonsense reform. We regularly hear from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about turning around failing schools, but the question remains: is the goal really feasible? "We need to overhaul our accountability systems to make it tougher for bad schools to continue," suggested Finn. Certainly realistic goals regarding improvement and accountability need to be put into place if we expect any results for our school children. Jack Jennings, the president and chief executive officer of the Center for Education Policy remarked, "You have to start from scratch, and you never know what you're going to get when you try something radical. It may be the only solution in some situations, but a new school in itself is not necessarily better; that depends on if the new school has better teachers, is safer, has higher goals and aspirations." A full copy of the study can be found here. Support for this project was provided by The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Doris and Donald Fisher Fund, the Koret Foundation, The Walton Family Foundation, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. What do you think about the results? Should under-performing schools be closed? Comment below.
email to friend
Print
comment
Permalink
Comments (1)
 |
Sign up for AAE Emails
Blogroll
- American Board (ABCTE)
- Edspresso (CER)
- Eduwonk
- Flypaper (Fordham)
- Intercepts (Mike Antonucci)
- Jay Greene
- Joanne Jacobs
- Joe Williams (Democrats for Education Reform)
- National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
- Politics K-12 (EdWeek)
- Road to Teaching
- Teacher Beat (EdWeek)
- InformED (AIR)
- This Week in Education
