School Turnaround

Talk about shaking things up! Last week, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Board of Education approved a radical and positively groundbreaking school control resolution. Two hundred existing public schools, and 51 new ones, could be turned over to outside operators. While Superintendent Ramon Cortines spends the next 60 days working on the plan, potential bidders are chomping at the bit to get their hands on one or more of the schools that will soon be up for grabs.

Ever watch people sizing up merchandise before an auction, ogling their favorite pieces and imagining what it would be like to own them? That’s the impression I got while reading an article in today’s Los Angeles Times describing various charter school operators who have their sights set on specific schools. More

Ever since President Obama announced his plans to devote $100 billion to education, I’ve been following the trail of stimulus dollars, as best I could, from a distance. For instance, I’ve read (and posted) about:  millions of education dollars being misused by several state governors for other purposes;  a $5 billion federal school turnaround initiative; and the $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund. But when I try to zoom in further, moving from a national and state level down to the level of specific districts and schools, the money trail becomes more difficult to follow. I often wonder: What are some of the concrete ways these dollars are being used to help particular students in particular schools?

Thanks to an article in today’s Providence Journal,  I’ve been able to find out. More

Just listened to a story on NPR about a different approach to turning around failing schools.

The subject of school transformations has been in the news lately since President Obama recently announced his plan to devote $5 billion to fund a federal school turnaround program which would close 5,000 of the nation’s lowest performing schools in the next five years and reopen them with new teachers and principals.

But one not-for-profit organization, called Turnaround, claims there’s a better way. More

Last week I wrote about President Obama’s plan to 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. I also drew your attention to a terrific New Yorker article about Steve Barr, a revolutionary school transformer who heads the charter-school-management organization Green Dot Public Schools, and seems to be Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s pick for overseeing as many school takeovers/transformations as possible.

What I didn’t mention is that unlike other large charter organizations, Barr’s is the only one in the country that welcomes unionized teachers and offers them a collectively bargained contract. In his words: I don't see how you tip a system with a hundred per cent unionized labor without unionized labor. More