Even before the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act shot across the sky, many districts and states had embarked upon heroic efforts to identify failing schools and set them right. The underlying assumption is that external, top-down interventions can correct the shortcomings of unsuccessful schools and transform them into places where children successfully learn.
If that assumption doesn't withstand scrutiny, a lot of school-accountability schemes are in trouble and NCLB won't work very well. Such efforts presuppose that state-mandated changes can fix dysfunctional school systems and that district interventions can repair broken schools. NCLB itself sets forth a complex, seven-stage cascade of 31 separate interventions. Some involve "sunshine" - gauging pupil achievement against state standards and yearly progress goals and publishing lists of which schools do and don't measure up. Some involve freeing students to find better schools or re-deploying a portion of the federal Title I money for private tutoring and the like. Others entail school-devised "improvement plans," coupled with technical assistance from districts. After two years "under improvement," still-failing schools get designated for involuntary "corrective action" by their districts. This may mean replacing staff, restructuring schools, installing new curricula, outsourcing the schools' management, etc. The balkier the school, the more severe the intervention. And a similar cascade of top-down correctives is supposed to be undertaken by states when entire districts fail to make adequate progress.
How likely is all of this to work? That's the question Ronald C. Brady examines in a fine new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Though NCLB as a whole is new, it turns out that just about all of its elements have been tried before, so Brady found a good deal of data spanning seventeen different interventions undertaken by at least thirty jurisdictions in 22 states, some dating back as far as 1989.
What he learned is sobering, though not catastrophic: "The intervention experience is marked more by valiant effort than by notable success. A...'success rate' of 50 percent is high and most interventions yield positive outcomes at lower rates." Sometimes, moreover, those positive outcomes are meager. In New York, for example, about half of the schools placed "under registration review" have improved enough to leave that list - but "over 80 percent of their students still 'need extra help' to meet state standards or have 'serious academic deficiencies' in the two core subjects being monitored under NCLB." Of six schools "reconstituted" by Prince George's County, Maryland, just one "was able to 'catch up' with its peer schools by virtue of the strong performance gains it made, one...appeared to be on a path to catching up...while the remaining four remained far behind the state average."
Just as troubling as the modest impact of these intervention schemes is their almost random nature. Among the seventeen strategies that Brady examined, none "resulted in compelling evidence that it is superior to other interventions in terms of effectiveness." Moreover, they're hard to implement (and the stronger the intervention, the more difficult to effect), costly, controversial, and challenging to sustain.
Brady derives a number of policy implications from this review, including the fear that NCLB expects "too much too fast" and the likelihood that "some children will still need more" than NCLB offers by way of cures for failing schools. Allowing the kids to leave is one promising option, albeit one that didn't work very well this year. Brady's report suggests that districts ought to focus on making that part work better since it seems unlikely that they'll be able to fix a lot of their faltering schools.
Which is not to say they shouldn't try. Top-down interventions sometimes manage to turn around failing schools. But we dare not take for granted that this approach will work most of the time. Thus Brady's perceptive report stands as a rebuke to those who oppose school choice on grounds that what we really need to do is focus on fixing the public schools we already have. This analysis makes plain that we don't yet know how to do that very reliably.
If you have not yet downloaded your own copy of Brady's report, you can find it on the web at http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/failing_schools.pdf. To see what Education Week had to say about the report, go to http://edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=21fed.h22 and scroll to the bottom of the page.
