Important and worrisome Ed Week article on Secretary Duncan's speech to the Council of the Great City Schools. Urban superintendents want even more flexibility on turnaround rules. That's bad news. Rather than closures and new starts, here's more reason to believe we're going to see more of the meek and ultimately unsuccessful interventions of the past.
Although he somewhat pushed back against the backlash, Duncan continues to take the wrong approach to this issue: "What we want to do is get the best educators in the country to go to the toughest schools," he said.
That's a major mistake. Yes, we want the most at-risk kids to have great teachers, but there's no reason that has to happen in persistently failing schools.
We shouldn't send our best people into the worst situations. We should send them into the best opportunities. The broken schools of yesterday don't need to exist in perpetuity. As we know--now with exceptional confirmation from Loveless--failing schools seldom become excellent.
We need to move from talking about the needs of failed schools to the needs of the students currently assigned to those schools.
I hope the secretary changes his formulation to, "What we want to do is get the best educators to teach disadvantaged students in schools that work." That means new schools.
--Andy Smarick