During my college year abroad, I had the unique experience of being asked to be the judge in a local beauty pageant on a remote island off the coast of Scotland. (Disclaimer – this experience in no way reflects the general fondness that I have for Scotland and their wonderful people). The first responsibility as a judge was to select the contestants for the pageant. Now young people on this island generally quickly moved to the mainland or got married, both of which disqualified them from the competition. I had no idea how hard it was to find people to actually compete in this contest, and after spending some time trying to find contestants, I was ready to choose anyone just to get it over with. And those that might have wanted to compete may not have gotten asked. The contest ended in disaster with the festival organizer’s daughter getting chosen as the queen with much speculation that the whole thing was rigged, and my best friend and travel mate laughing at me ever since.
As I read a couple news stories over the last couple of weeks about school districts considering their options in competing for a share of the $415 million in School Improvement Grants (SIG) in California, I was reminded of the hardships of running a beauty contest when no one really wanted to compete. Here are three California districts that are currently rethinking their options – Oakland, Mt. Diablo, and San Diego. And according to ES colleague Chad, Iowa may be having the same problem.
Currently each state has gone through an elaborate process to determine which schools are eligible to apply for a SIG grant. Because the grant levels are so high – $150,000 to $6 million over 3 years, there is an expectation that most school districts will take it seriously, and go after the money. If they do, the SIG grants could become a mini Race to the Top in each state to see which schools districts are willing to out reform the others. Just take a look over a couple of the state SIG applications and the scoring rubrics that will be used to determine which schools will get funding. It looks very Race to the Top like to me.
But, what if these reforms are just too much for local politics to handle. Will districts just opt out and not apply? Or more likely will districts put in proposals that really don’t go far enough to meet the requirements of the program and federal regulations, and see what the state does with their application (much like many states threw together weak RTT applications and hoped for the best). If school districts even in a budgetary wasteland like California are considering walking away from this funding, what will be the response in states with more stable budget situations?
And, as we move toward eventual reauthorization of ESEA, this issue of opting out of school turnaround will need to be addressed. If a “chronically lowest-achieving” school can continually avoid the most serious sanctions by not receiving a SIG grant to fix it, then the issues of low performance will continue. There is a need for additional flexibility beyond the four options- turnaround, restart, closure and transformation – especially for rural schools. But, states must begin to ensure that these lowest performing schools in their state can not hide from reforms by simply deciding not to play.
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5/11/2012 | U.S. News & World Report highlights ideas from "Moving On Up: How Tuition Tax Breaks Increasingly Favor the Upper-Middle Class." 
5/11/2012 | In Diverse, Steve Burd comments on the Obama administration's plans to address student debt. 
5/11/2012 | Kevin Carey talks to Salon about the government's role in rising student debt.
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“what if these reforms are just too much for local politics to handle.”
Combine your statement here with your previous post and you get a fuller account of what is on the districts’ plates. In addition to firing and relocating 1/2 of new teachers in failing schools, writing SIG grants, thrashing out RttT plans, cutting budgets, and dealing will the educational challenges in poor schools that increase dramatically during economic downturns – and doing so before school reopens – all of the stakeholders are going to be overwhelmed. We just resolved the plan for one of our two schools being turned around, but the district hasn’t even started on the school that will be much more difficult politically. And any day, they’ll have to start hiring and rehiring teachers – without even knowing how to cut the budget enough, or even how much we have to cut the budget.
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