Since President Obama’s announcement that a $100 billion chunk of stimulus money would be devoted to education, I’ve been following said money in an attempt to find out exactly where it’s going, how it’s being used, and what impact it’s having on our schools. (Read Parts I, II, and III here, here, and here.)

So here’s the latest development:  In his speech yesterday to the Brookings Institution think tank, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that President Obama will use $5 billion to fund a federal school turnaround program with the intention of closing 5,000 failing schools in the next five years and reopening them with new teachers and principals. (Quick math: That’s $1 million per school.) The administration plans to focus on turning around middle and high schools known as “dropout factories” where at least 40% of students don’t graduate.

Says Duncan: “Our students have one chance — one chance — to get a quality education…If we turn around just the bottom 1 percent, the bottom thousand schools per year for the next five years, we could really move the needle, lift the bottom and change the lives of tens of millions of undeserved children.”

Sounds bold, sounds radical, sounds good to me! Where this really gets interesting is when you get down to the nuts and bolts of the turnaround process. According to Duncan, schools can either replace most or all of their staff, only replace the principal, or even turn over to a charter school operator. What each district chooses to do will depend on local union contracts.

As the Boston Globe reports, when eight failing schools were targeted for turnaround last year in Chicago, some newly-fired teachers reapplied to the new schools and were rehired, while others lost their jobs.

According to the New York Times, teachers in NYC who lost their jobs ended up in a reserve pool where they continued to get paid while working as substitute teachers and waiting to be rehired.  In fact, the principals of NYC schools were just ordered to fill next year’s open teaching slots with internal candidates only including those in the reserve pool. (Does this mean that schools targeted for turnaround in NYC under Duncan’s plan would move newly fired teachers into the reserve pool only to be rehired by other schools? And that the new teachers brought in to turn around the previously failing school would be those who were fired from other failing schools?)

In my opinion, the key here is if you’re going to turn around a school, especially one of the lowest performing schools in the country, you’d better make sure there are people in charge who know exactly what they’re doing. I mean people with actual experience in this area and a proven track record of being able to rehabilitate failing schools. I’m talking about people like Steve Barr.

The New Yorker just featured a must-read profile of revolutionary school transformer Steve Barr.  When Barr asked the Los Angeles Unified School District to give his charter-school-management organization, Green Dot Public Schools, control of Alain Leroy Locke High School (whose dropout rate was a staggering 75%), the district refused. So under Barr’s leadership, Green Dot seized the high school and reopened it as six newly transformed Green Dot schools.

In March, Barr flew to D.C. to speak to Arne Duncan, who spoke about committing several billion dollars to a Lock-type takeover and transformation of many of the lowest-performing schools across the country. Duncan said he would favor districts that agreed to partner with groups like Green Dot, and asked Barr if he could do five schools in L.A. next year, and even expand beyond L.A. (While Duncan didn’t mention Green Dot’s name publicly yet, apparently he had them in mind yesterday when he talked about failing schools turning themselves over to charter school operators.  I wonder if he has any other similar groups in mind.)

I’ll be the first to admit that President Obama and Arne Duncan’s plan is an ambitious one. Five thousand is a lot of schools. But every single student in this country deserves a fair shot at a quality education. My hope is that there will be enough people like Steve Barr to head up the takeover and transformation of multiple schools and help turn this plan into a reality.

Photo: Tracy O’s flickr photostream/Creative Commons