The Sad Tale of Markham Middle

Let me also endorse Rob Manwaring’s new report on the problem of chronically under-performing schools. In particular, I like this section, about the struggles of a woeful middle school in Watts:

In 1997, the state of California labeled Markham Middle School as low-performing. Located in the Watts neighborhood of Southeastern Los Angeles, Markham is stuffed with over 1,500 students in just three grades, sixth–eighth. Roughly 70 percent of the students are Hispanic, and 30 percent are black. Eighty-two percent are poor. That year, the average Markham student scored at the 16th percentile in math and 12th percentile in reading….

Shortly after being identified as a sub-standard school in 1997, Markham was chosen to participate in a federally funded program called the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD). Over the next three years, Markham worked with an external consultant to develop a plan to implement 11 specific changes to the way it did business, using comprehensive reform strategies that were “scientifically research based,” including programs like Success for All, Roots and Wings, and Modern Red Schoolhouse. The plans had to give teachers and staff high-quality professional development and other supports, provide opportunities for meaningful parent and community involvement, and ensure sustainability over time. The CSRD program was eventually discontinued at the federal level because evaluations of the programs had mixed reviews.

In 1999, California adopted a new statewide accountability system, part of its compliance with the previous version of NCLB, the 1994 Improving America’s Schools Act. Test scores at Markham were still dismal, and the school was assigned to the state’s Immediate Intervention / Under Performing Schools (IIUPS) program. As a result, Markham received an additional $200 per pupil—over $200,000 per year—to hire an external consultant and develop and implement a new reform plan that contained 22 specific requirements, including contracting for external assistance, reviewing and reallocating budgets, and disaggregating and analyzing data to identify barriers to improvement. While California attempted to integrate the IIUPS and CSRD programs, Markham still had to meet each program’s separate planning requirements.

Then, in 2005, the IIUPS program began to be phased out because external evaluations showed it to be ineffective. In 2006, California replaced it with a new initiative called the High Priority School Program (HPSP), which targeted the bottom 10 percent of schools in the state. Markham qualified, and the extra funding was bumped up to $400 per pupil. In exchange, the school was required to develop yet another school improvement plan, one that included all 22 IIUPS elements plus four more brand-new HPSP elements, including a requirement to participate in state-endorsed training programs for teachers and principals, conduct an academic program survey, and create a district/school liaison team.

Students at Markham continued to fail state tests in large numbers. This resulted in the school being identified for corrective action and then restructuring under the separate NCLB accountability system. This created various new obligations for Markham, including, inevitably, more plans.

In 2006, the state of California settled a school funding lawsuit that had been filed by the California Teachers Association. The settlement called for a new program to help low-performing schools: Quality Education Investment Act (QEIA). To the surprise of no one, Markham Middle qualified. Funding was increased to $900 per pupil, swelling Markham’s failure-based cash flow to roughly $1.4 million dollars per year. In exchange for QEIA money, Markham was required to write another plan, ensure that all teachers were “highly qualified” and that the school had a similar level of teaching experience asthe district overall, and reduce student-to-teacher ratios below 25-to-1 in core classes. As of the 2008–09 school year, Markham had reduced class sizes to 25-to-1, but almost half of the school’s teachers were first- or second-year teachers resulting in the school not meeting the seniority and qualified requirements. It still receives the full amount of QEIA funds.

After 11 years of continuous, often overlapping reforms, the expenditure of over $3 million dollars in extra funds, and the creation of enough school improvement plans to denude wide swaths of the nearby Angeles National Forest, Markham Middle School is still, educationally speaking, a wreck. Sixteen percent of teachers are working under an emergency credential, 30 percent of classes in core academic subjects are taught by teachers who are not “highly qualified” under NCLB, and many teachers are teaching English to the largely immigrant student population without proper training in teaching English language learners.

This illustrates a couple of important things. First, a lot of the controversy surrounding NCLB and school accountability has centered on how to identify low-performing schools. Accountability opponents often cite the limited scope and inaccuracy of once-a-year standardized tests in reading and math. These measures provide an incomplete and not wholly reliable picture of school performance, they say, and thus undermine accountability itself.

But this is only true insofar as the limited vision provided by that snapshot differs substantially from the complete picture. Note that, over the course of more than a decade, Markham Middle School was evaluated under a whole series of accountability regimes, pre- and post-NCLB. Different academic standards and tests were employed. Different accountability systems were used to interpret the results of those tests. They all reached exactly the same conclusion: Markham Middle is chronically low-performing.  In order to reach the “restructuring” stage of NCLB, you have to miss AYP for six consecutive years. Has anyone ever found an example of a single school where most of the students couldn’t pass basic skills tests in reading and math for six consecutive years yet was actually, by the preponderance of any evidence one cares to choose, a good school? I don’t think so. If you take a snapshot of a tiny patch of the Sahara Desert, there’s a small likelihood that you’ll see an oasis. But most of the pictures most of the time will show sand. It’s not really difficult to identify very bad schools.

Which means the real challenge is what to do about them. Secretary of Education Duncan has made this a centerpiece of his agenda. There’s been a fair amount of pushback on the spotty track record of “turnaround” strategies. And it’s true, closing schools down and reopening better ones is hard to pull off. But I think the critics have perhaps given insufficient consideration to the evidentiary record associated with the “leave the same people in charge of managing and teaching in the same school while requiring the production of an endless series of ’school improvement plans’ coupled with escalating amounts of good money thrown after bad” strategy, which is weak to say the least.

That said, school turnaround can certainly be botched completely, as has unfortunately been the case with Markham:

Markham Middle has already implemented the school turnaround model, and because of the timing of implementation and the district’s hiring practices, the reform is not going very well. On May 27, 2008, L.A. Unified transferred management responsibility for 11 schools including Markham to the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, an organization created by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to take over and turn around a cluster of the district’s lowest-performing schools. (The Partnership resulted after the mayor’s failed attempt to take control of the entire district.) The Partnership had about three months to take over management of these schools (effectively a medium-sized school district serving 18,000) and start running them. The Partnership made a fresh start, letting all of the existing staff go and then rehiring school staff at the 11 campuses. For the first time in Markham’s decade-plus of school reform, there was a dramatic change in the people on the campus.

But the Partnership got a late start in the hiring process, a major disadvantage in hiring quality applicants for many urban school districts and for L.A. Unified in particular. At Markham, almost half of the new hires were first- and second-year teachers, and many of them were under-qualified.

Then California’s budget woes made things worse. By March of the first year of operation, these first- and second-year teachers, the principal, and others at the school had been given pink slips along with almost 9,000 employees in the L.A. Unified School District due to lack of funds. In its deal with the school district, the Partnership had to agree that the teachers at these schools would be district employees and subject to the district’s collective bargaining agreement and teacher policies. Thus, teachers at Markham were subject to the district’s seniority policies when it came time for layoffs. Since the teachers at Markham were mostly new, they were the first ones the district would let go. Almost half of the layoffs were rescinded by the time L.A. Unified adopted a final budget in the summer of 2009, but for Markham, these cuts resulted in almost half of the school’s teaching staff being let go.

The Partnership was also required to pick from the district’s surplus teacher pool (senior teachers who were not wanted by other school principals) when backfilling vacancies. Many of those teachers did not want to teach in troubled schools like Markham, and the school has had difficulty finding candidates that will work in this potentially dangerous environment. As of November 2009, almost three months into the school year, the school still had six teaching positions unfilled. And by March 2010 over halfway through the year, 20 percent of the classes were taught by long-term substitutes because the school was not able to hire permanent staff.  Markham’s test scores declined in 2008–09, and given the continued staffing difficulties, the prospects for 2009–10 do not look good. Because of these events, the American Civil Liberties Union recently sued Los Angeles Unified on behalf of students at Markham and two other schools in the district at which more than half of the schools’ teachers were laid off in last year’s budget cuts. The goal of the suit is to protect these three schools (and presumably other similar schools that predominately serve low-income students) from further layoffs as Los Angeles begins to make its next round of layoffs, issuing pink slips to 2,300 teachers recently.

In other words, implementing school turnaround in the context of various criminally stupid human resource policies probably won’t work as well as it should.

Tagged as: low performing schools, Markham Middle School, school turnaround