It was a rough weekend for education reform in Ohio's dailies. First, the Cincinnati Enquirer beats up on the state's voucher program (I take plenty of issue with the reporter's use of data to inform the article but will save that for another day). Then the Columbus Dispatch reports that most Ohio schools "overhauled" under No Child Left Behind failed to make significant improvements in their new iterations. The Dispatch analysis is correct--most of these schools aren't doing any better now than they were before. The question is, why?
The head of the state education department's school-improvement office said there is no single answer to how to fix failing schools and pointed to the state's work to help districts better pinpoint what is wrong in the first place and how to prioritize what to fix. The principal of an overhauled Columbus school said it takes time, at least five years, for real improvement to be seen.
I think the reason "overhauled" schools, as a whole, haven't improved in the Buckeye State is because most of them haven't been fundamentally changed. NCLB's definition of overhaul (aka "restructure") is broad, and guidance from the federal education department permits a persistently failing school to restructure by doing everything from expanding/narrowing the grades it serves or firing the principal to closing the school altogether or turning it over to a private management company. Too many schools opt to make small, and easy, tweaks instead of embarking on earnest, dramatic transformation.
In Columbus, the changes were small. Examples from three schools include: 1) introducing merit pay, 2) strengthening a school's "international focus," 3) and abandoning the Montessori approach, adopting a dress code, and introducing character education. Certainly, some of these changes would be worthy components of a larger turnaround effort, but tinkering and tweaking can't be expected to produce major results, and no one should be surprised when they don't.
