The NCLB restruct-a-tron: does the law's great big machine for overhauling schools produce anything worthwhile?

Schools that fail to make Adequate Yearly Progress for six consecutive years are subject to the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind. The restructuring options prescribed by law include strong measures, such as turning failing schools into charter schools or allowing the state to take them over. But some of the options amount to little more than revising the administrative staff. Sara Mead examines the sparsely populated restructuring landscape and reports that most locales are opting for the easy way out. Nelson Smith explains why, if failing district schools are to reopen and become successful charter schools, they need first to close.

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Easy Way Out

"Restructured" usually means little has changed

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The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2001 brought new urgency to the task of turning around low-performing schools. Under the law, states must evaluate schools according to the standard of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP). Schools that do not meet AYP are identified as needing improvement and subject to a series of escalating interventions. These interventions begin with school choice and supplemental tutoring for students in the low-performing school. They culminate in possible closure, state takeover, privatization, or conversion to a charter school--controversial consequences highlighted in newspaper articles about the law.

While many schools have been identified as needing improvement under NCLB, only a small percentage have failed to make progress for long enough--six years--to be subject to restructuring, the most serious consequence for schools under the law (see Figure 1). In the 2005-06 school year--the fourth year since passage of NCLB--there were some 1,750 schools in 42 states in NCLB restructuring. That number is expected to grow dramatically over the next few years. As schools move along the school improvement timeline and standards rise toward the goal of having all students proficient, states and school districts face questions about how aggressively to act when schools persistently fail to perform.

The Roots of NCLB

The No Child Left Behind Act was not the first federal legislation that sought to catalyze change in chronically low-performing schools. It builds on school improvement provisions in its predecessor, the Improving America's Schools Act of 1994 (IASA), which first required states and school districts to identify schools in need of school improvement. Schools that continued to perform poorly were identified for corrective action, a more aggressive intervention. Later Clinton initiatives targeted federal resources to improve low-performing schools.

IASA's school improvement measures proved disappointing to many reformers. By 2001, it was increasingly clear that many schools were stagnating on school improvement and corrective action lists with little change. In fact, some did not even know they were on the lists at all.

The authors of the No Child Left Behind Act wanted to force districts and states to take more aggressive steps to improve low-performing schools. They added a third layer of consequences--restructuring--for schools that continue to perform poorly even after several years of school improvement and corrective action. After a school fails to make AYP for five consecutive years, it must develop a restructuring plan, which goes into action if the school fails to make AYP for a sixth consecutive year. NCLB provides several options for schools in restructuring:

* Close and reopen as a charter school

* Replace relevant school staff

* Turn the school's governance over to the state

* Contract with a private management company to operate the school

* Any other major restructuring of the school's governance designed to produce major reform.

The Early Record

Because it takes five years for a school to get to restructuring, few schools faced this consequence in the years immediately following NCLB's passage. Many states that had established accountability systems under IASA already had schools in improvement or correction when NCLB passed. Some of these schools have since become subject to restructuring. California and Michigan, for example, have been dealing with school restructuring under NCLB for multiple years.

Results have varied widely. The Center for Education Policy has closely studied the restructuring efforts in Michigan and California. Of 133 Michigan schools in restructuring in 2004-05, 113 were able to make AYP that school year. Of these, 26 made AYP for a second consecutive year, moving out of restructuring and resetting the clock for school improvement. While these results seem impressive, they must be taken with a substantial grain of salt. Michigan made changes to its accountability plan that year, which made it easier for schools to make AYP. California, by contrast, increased its AYP targets for the 2005-06 school year. The number of California schools in restructuring grew from 271 in the 2004-05 school year to 404 in 2005-06.

Taking the Easy Way Out?

During the 2004-05 school year, 13 states had schools in restructuring: Alabama, California, Colorado, Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, Michigan, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee. Instead of takeovers, closures, and other dire options mentioned in press coverage of the law, most states and school districts have chosen less aggressive interventions.

According to analyses by the Education Commission of the States (ECS) and the Center for Education Policy, the most popular restructuring option chosen by schools, across all these states, was "any other major restructuring." The only other option taken by a significant number of schools was to replace or remove staff, which most schools did in a limited way--in many cases simply replacing the principal--rather than undertaking the broader staff reconstitution NCLB suggests. The most drastic restructuring options--conversion to a charter school, state takeover, or contracting with a private management company to operate the school--were used by few schools, and not at all in many states.

It is not surprising that many schools chose to develop their own options rather than select from the restructuring options NCLB offers. Some of these are quite controversial and potentially painful for schools and their employees. Many of the activities undertaken by schools under the guise of "other major restructuring," however, seem far less aggressive than what the law's authors probably had in mind (see Figure 2). The state of Michigan allows schools to meet NCLB's restructuring requirements by hiring a state-trained "coach" to advise the school's staff and implement improvement plans. While this approach seems to help some Michigan schools, it hardly makes major changes to a school's governance or carries serious consequences for its employees. In fact, the coaching strategy sounds strikingly similar to the less intrusive options offered to schools in the corrective action stage that precedes restructuring. A number of schools appear to have responded with whole-school reform models or a new curriculum--also options for schools in corrective action. An ECS report notes in some cases that "corrective measures end up serving as the restructuring plan."

For example, two chronically low-performing K-5 elementary schools in Harrison, Michigan, were targeted for NCLB restructuring. The district's response was to reconfigure the grades. One school now serves all the district's kindergarten and 1st graders, and the other is divided into two "schools within a school" that serve students in grades 2-3 and 4-5. The district created grade-level teacher teams in each school and hired a coach to provide professional development to teachers. It appointed a governance committee of community members and outside educators to advise the principal.

Willow Run Middle School, also in Michigan, responded to the restructuring mandate by moving to a new building, replacing the principal and some staff, and implementing a comprehensive school-reform model.

Clearly many school and district leaders would rather not undertake governance changes that could spark controversy or have negative consequences for them. But in truth, these are not always real options. States including California, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, and Nebraska have ruled out state takeovers for schools in restructuring, because either state law does not permit it or the state department of education lacks the capacity to manage a significant number of schools. Charter conversion is not an option in the 11 states that lack charter laws, nor is it a practical possibility for more than a few schools in the several states with caps on the number of charters available (see "The Cure," what next, Fall 2006).

Political realities can also take restructuring options off the table. In spring 2006, Maryland state superintendent of public instruction Nancy Grasmick sought to take over 11 chronically low-performing Baltimore schools that were subject to restructuring and convert them to charters or contract their management with private companies. Maryland would have been the first state in the country to take over schools for NCLB restructuring, but Grasmick's efforts met with intense political opposition from Baltimore's mayor and other political leaders, and the state legislature passed a bill blocking the takeover. The response surprised state board of education member David Tufaro: "We did not envision the level of hostility to the point of obscuring the facts about the abysmal state of these 11 schools."

Dramatic Intervention Isn't Always the Best Course

Are state, district, and school-level policymakers and educators generally avoiding the hard steps needed to improve chronically low-performing schools? Certainly, the history of school accountability and efforts to improve low-performing schools under IASA would justify such suspicions, and some examples of what schools are doing in response to NCLB restructuring sound very feeble.

But there are some legitimate reasons for schools to stop short of NCLB's more punitive restructuring options. For some schools, less aggressive restructuring steps maybe appropriate and may improve student achievement. Some schools that fail to make AYP for years are not performing poorly across the board. NCLB holds schools accountable for performance of subgroups--major racial and ethnic groups, students with disabilities, and English-language learners. Interventions targeting parts of the education program may be more appropriate than full-scale restructuring. In addition, schools are in corrective action for only a year before they must begin planning for restructuring. Continuing corrective action reforms may be better than replacing them with another set of reforms so quickly.

Nor does converting a school to a charter guarantee better performance. Overall, charter school performance is undercut, nationally and in many states, by a subset of low-performing charters that face the threat of NCLB restructuring themselves. Funding inequities for charter schools that persist in many states also mean that schools may have fewer resources after converting to charter status than before--hardly a circumstance conducive to improvement. Some national charter-school leaders fear that school districts may view charter conversion as an easy way to remove low-performing schools from their books without taking the responsibility to actually improve them. Such conversions could lower average charter-school test scores and become a black eye for the charter movement.

The probability of this threat materializing is decidedly slim, as schools and districts hardly seem eager to choose charter conversion. Michigan has a robust charter sector and 5 percent of its students in charters, but not a single Michigan school in restructuring has converted to a charter. Only 2 percent of the 271 California schools in restructuring have done so. Colorado passed much-noted legislation requiring any school that receives three consecutive "unsatisfactory" ratings under the state accountability system to convert to a charter. The criteria for schools to receive an "unsatisfactory" rating are different from AYP, so schools in restructuring are not necessarily rated "unsatisfactory." The charter conversion option was not applied to any of the schools that the state had in restructuring under NCLB in 2004-05. Denver's Cole Middle School reopened as a charter in fall 2005, too recently to judge the results.

So far, no states have taken over schools as part of NCLB restructuring, and the number of charter conversions or privatizations is still quite small. Separate from NCLB, however, many states and cities have undertaken high-profile and often controversial initiatives to take over, reconstitute, or turn around low-performing schools. The record of these efforts is decidedly mixed and hardly encouraging. In a 2003 study for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Ronald C. Brady surveyed school turnaround efforts implemented by states and districts and did not find any intervention approaches with success rates of more than 50 percent. Further, the political drama that surrounds takeovers, privatization, and similar efforts can itself become an obstacle to improving student achievement.

There is an odd tension running through many of NCLB's accountability provisions between creating serious consequences that hold educators and schools accountable and the law's goal of improving student achievement. These goals are not always aligned. Clearly, there are circumstances in which reconstitution or new governance will be essential to extricate a school mired in dysfunction and allow its employees to work effectively to improve student learning. But when, for example, a school is failing to make AYP only for some subgroups, targeted interventions may serve children's interests better than closing or reconstituting the school. State and local leaders need some flexibility to make the right choice. Instead of focusing on the severity of the strategies applied to schools in restructuring, a more significant question is whether they are aligned with the areas in which the school needs to improve and implemented well.

Looking Ahead

As the number of schools subject to restructuring increases, so will pressures on states and school districts to look for easy ways out. All of the restructuring options NCLB offers can be implemented in ways that circumvent the law's intent. Whether countervailing forces--federal pressure, political pressure from organized parent groups, or conscientious officials committed to the law's goals--are strong enough to force states and districts to implement meaningful turnaround efforts remains to be seen, but the evidence so far is not encouraging.

There are also important questions about NCLB itself and the limits of federal legislation to compel states and school districts to undertake significant reforms. Under NCLB, school improvement and corrective action provisions were strengthened, and restructuring provisions added, to compel states, districts, and schools to intensify efforts to turn around low-performing schools. This has clearly been successful on some counts--at least schools now know if they are on school improvement or corrective action lists.

But is the law compelling states and districts to fundamentally overhaul chronically failing schools? That's unclear. The quality of schools in restructuring varies greatly. The same flexibility that allows states and school districts to use less-punitive restructuring approaches when they are appropriate could also allow them to avoid applying tough consequences to schools that really do merit them. Is it even possible for federal policies to compel state and local officials to make controversial and painful reforms? Are there new levers with which federal officials can better encourage states and districts to make difficult choices? Can NCLB's accountability mechanisms be made more precise, so that they would compel significant reconstitution in chronically dysfunctional schools without catching in the net schools that, while in need of improvement, do not require dramatic reconstitution? Or will NCLB's restructuring provisions provide another example of the futility of intergovernmental accountability? These questions should be at the heart of debate over NCLB's upcoming reauthorization, and their importance will only intensify as the number of schools in restructuring grows in the coming years.

Sara Mead is senior policy analyst with Education Sector.

BY SARA MEAD

Slow Changes (Figure 1)

In the 2005-06 school year, in only 16 states were 2 percent or more of
schools in restructuring.

SOURCES: Department of Education; National Center for Education
Statistics, "Digest of Education Statistics, 2005"

The Path of Least Resistance (Figure 2)

Of the 533 schools restructured in Michigan and California, the vast
majority took advantage of the vague "any other" option available under
No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

NCLB Restructuring Strategies in Michigan and California

                                          Percentage of Schools Using
                                          Strategy
                                          Michigan  California

State takeover                             0         0
Reopen as a charter school                 2         0
No plan                                   13         0
Contract with an outside organization to  14        20
operate the school
Replace ineffective staff                 28        61
Any other major reform                    76        93

Note: Michigan data are from 2004-05, and California data are from 2005-
06. Percentages do not add to 100 percent because schools were allowed
to employ more than one option.
SOURCES: Center on Education Policy, "Wrestling the Devil in the
Details: An Early Look at Restructuring in California," February 2006;
Center on Education Policy, "Hope but No Miracle Cures: Michigan's Early
Restructuring Lessons," November 2005

Note: Table made from bar graph.

Charters as a Solution?

So far, states and districts have opted for anything but

The restructuring provisions in No Child Left Behind (NCLB) are a Rorschach test for charter supporters. To the Market Optimists, the six brief paragraphs of NCLB Section 1116 look like the greatest growth opportunity ever. "Reopening the school as a public charter school" is Option #1 on the list of NCLB's restructuring alternatives. All those dysfunctional schools, "needing improvement" for years, all prior remedies exhausted--where else would parents turn but to charter schools?

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The Glass-Half-Empty crowd has worried deeply, fearing that under the guise of restructuring, district officials would take their worst-performing schools and slap a charter label on them. Think about it: You're a superintendent with some pretty good schools and a dozen lousy ones. Invoke NCLB, charter them out, and in one fell swoop you have moved the bottom feeders from the district column to the charter column. Your district scores skyrocket, and all those that failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) ... well, you know, they're charter schools.

A third faction, let's call them the Prudent Expansionists, have thought it just dandy that NCLB would invite bad schools to close and reopen as good ones, but doubt that the charter sector has the capacity to restructure vast swaths of failing public schools. Despite the increasingly impressive performance of many charter schools nationally and some stunning charter-driven turnarounds at Sacramento High in California and other sites, the Prudent Expansionists doubt that charter folks know any more than traditional educators do about turning around failing schools en masse.

As luck would have it, these theories have not gotten much of a test drive in the past five years. The vast flowering of NCLB charters is still sitting there in the subjunctive case. With so many schools in need of improvement and so many parents demanding more public school options, how is this possible?

One explanation is that states have driven some statistical Mack trucks through NCLB's precise-sounding text. Schools don't qualify for mandatory restructuring until they fail to make AYP, the state-determined proficiency target, for five consecutive years. All schools must reach the 100 percent proficiency mark by 2014, but can do so by an assortment of trajectories. Most states chose a very long takeoff, with the bar staying low for the first six or eight years, followed by a sharp upward thrust, with breathtaking gains required after that. (Some cynics thought the timetables were designed to defer the day of reckoning until current officeholders had retired, or until the law itself was gutted or repealed.) In any case, state accountability plans have delayed any spike in NCLB-driven restructuring that might have generated demand for charters.

... And the Last Shall Be First

Maybe there's some naivete in the act as well. NCLB made the bold assumption that states and districts would voluntarily turn over the reins to charter operators. The authors of the legislation must have thought, with so many sticks beating on the backs of schools (test-disaster headlines, parents leaving in droves), the carrot of fundamental change would be irresistible. And it might have been--if it weren't for Option #5.

Scroll down, past all those tough, unrelenting sanctions, and Option #5 says, Whew! You can also try "Any other major restructuring of the school's governance arrangement that makes fundamental reforms."

Game over. As researcher Rebecca Dibiase reported in a September 2005 review for the Education Commission of the States, "Most school plans call for activities that fall under 'any other major restructuring of the school's governance arrangement,' or Option #5 in the legislation.... This option covers an array of activities, such as modifying curriculum, altering the school's management structure or choosing a school reform model."

Sure, the reforms must be "fundamental," but once any other appears, you know that "fundamental" will start to include things like creating a parent advisory committee or freshening the place up with a really nice coat of paint.

Paths of Least Resistance

So far, states are enthusiastically ignoring the opportunity for fundamental reform. According to two recent reports by the U.S. Department of Education, the early returns on NCLB restructuring are none too promising. A study of Title I accountability shows that as of 2004, only 1 of 12 states with Title I schools identified for restructuring reopened a school as a public charter: 1 turned over operations to the state, 2 states replaced school staff, and 8 took no action.

A separate report on implementation of Title I up to 2005 found similarly slim effect, with by far the most common "restructuring" action being hiring a new principal. Indeed, some 24 percent of the 1,065 Title I schools identified for restructuring replaced the principal. (Hold the applause. Researchers noted that "this may partly reflect normal principal turnover....")

Leaders in only one state have stepped boldly forward and included chartering among sanctions for low-performing schools. Maryland's state superintendent of schools, Nancy Grasmick, proposed the takeover of 11 Baltimore schools, all of which had sat on the state's watch list for at least a decade. Some would have been chartered; others would have been operated by a third party with charterlike autonomy. The proposal kicked up howls of protest from Baltimore politicos, who wrapped themselves in the mantle of local control. By far the best commentary on this spectacle was provided by my colleague at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, Andy Smarick, in a biting April 2006 Baltimore Sun op-ed: "If the city's leadership has the right answers, it has the opportunity to prove it by turning around its 43 other failing schools."

Traditional districts may have even less incentive than states to embrace chartering. The numbers suggest that chartering is an unwelcome responsibility for many. According to a Thomas B. Fordham Institute study, roughly 90 percent of authorizers are districts, but districts oversee only 52 percent of charter schools. Most do one or two charters and never develop the skills and attitudes of first-rate authorizers.

Exceptions to the Rule

There are some important exceptions. Chicago Public Schools has authorized a cluster of remarkably high-performing charter schools. Through its Renaissance 2010 program, the city is methodically closing its lowest-performing schools and then reopening them as charters, contract schools, or Performance Schools, which are highly autonomous but run by the district. The two processes--close and reopen--are quite separate. To ensure a supply of new school options, the city conducts an RFP process rather than trying to convert existing public schools.

Other good examples of using the charter option for district-wide sponsored restructuring are regrettably scarce. Under the leadership of former superintendent Alan Bersin (now California's secretary of education), San Diego witnessed a real blood-'n'-guts struggle for three schools to reopen as charters after they were among eight identified for NCLB restructuring. The effort drew fierce opposition; the next school-board election produced an anti-charter majority and cost Bersin his job. Ironically, it was the school communities themselves--parents and kids--who fought hardest to get the three charter petitions approved, and in the end the new school board relented.

Sadly, the best current illustration of all-out charter-led restucturing has little to do with NCLB. The New Orleans school system was closed, in toto overnight, by Hurricane Katrina. Local and state leaders, prompted by generous federal funding, used the charter law and gubernatorial orders to start reopening schools with dramatically higher standards for teacher hiring, freedom from the famously dysfunctional central office, and a determination to end the ugly local tradition of have/have-not public schools.

It's important to note that in these cases, we're not talking about charter "conversion." In fact, that term doesn't appear in NCLB.

This is more than semantics. In a charter conversion, the reform impetus is internal to the school community. A majority (or supermajority) of teachers and/or parents, fed up with low achievement and system hassles, files a petition for a charter conversion. The charter is granted, and this same group, unshackled, gets to try all sorts of innovations. But when no one inside the building is asking for a change, and when the insiders may in fact be the problem, the option to reopen as a charter is something else altogether: the kids and parents stay, but a new team, with wholly new assumptions, expectations, and powers, takes command.

State laws often bog charter conversions down with excess baggage, such as keeping the school under the district's collective bargaining agreement, or requiring that it have a higher percentage of certified teachers than other charters. If the point of restructuring is a fresh start, a blank slate, a New Deal--well, that ain't it.

Making the Case for Charters

It's a mathematical certainty that in the next year or two, massive numbers of schools will start populating the Year Five column. Now is the time to help district and state leaders understand why a charter-based new-schools policy is a sound response to NCLB sanctions.

Good conceptual groundwork has already been laid by Ted Kolderie, Joe Graba, and their colleagues at Education/Evolving, who argue convincingly that "we can't get the schools we need just by changing the schools we have." And NACSA, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, has embarked on a Starting Fresh campaign, urging districts and states to opt for close/reopen rather than retread.

But the case must be empirical, too; why else should state and city leaders even think about replacing worn-out district schools with new charter schools? Happily, there is increasingly impressive achievement being reported for charters that have been welcoming hordes of families fleeing dysfunctional, unrestructured urban schools in Washington, D.C., Buffalo, New York City, and elsewhere. It is performance, not just promises, that is causing leaders like New York City's Joel Klein to make charter schools a vanguard for broader system reform.

The Feds

Think tanks and lobbying groups are already buzzing about what they want in the reauthorization of NCLB, nominally due in 2007. But word in the congressional cloakrooms is that the big bill might wait until after the next presidential election. Between now and 2009 we may be stuck with that "any other" language, which means that regulation, guidance, and jawboning are needed to make restructuring happen on a faster track for the kids who need it most.

Education secretary Margaret Spellings and her crew play the pivotal role here. Spellings is showing commendable backbone on choice, warning states that they can lose Title I megabucks if they fail to provide students with escape options from failing schools. She should do the same on restructuring.

Specifically, the Department of Education (DOE) should wallop states that play games while kids remain trapped in lousy schools. DOE should issue firm guidance that states must not evade clear congressional intent by allowing weak-kneed responses to chronic school failure. States needn't mandate the charter route, although it provides the best hope of truly starting fresh. But they do need to galvanize fundamental change.

My own hunch is that whether federally urged or not, whether formally embraced by district and state officials or not, fundamental change is coming to underperforming schools and systems. As long as charter schools aren't kept from opening or expanding because of arbitrary state caps, parents will continue flocking to them. The charter market share in big cities will continue growing. NCLB gives traditional systems a way to jump-start reform by capitalizing on this powerful trend. If they ignore the opportunity but continue to lose customers, they invite a far less orderly kind of restructuring.

Nelson Smith is president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

BY NELSON SMITH

RELATED ARTICLE: A Lesson in Restructuring: Try Something Different

Margaret Fortune gained renown as founding superintendent of St. Hope Public Schools, a California charter district that emerged from the closure of Sacramento High School. When she became director of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's Initiative to Turn Around Failing Schools, the first thing she did was to look at how the state had traditionally dealt with failing schools. California's state education department had a long-standing program called Immediate Intervention/Underperforming Schools. What did she find? Over the course of eight years, the department had used the same strategy for every turnaround attempt: send in more resources and a state technical-assistance team. Fortune understood that a big part of her job was to get local and state officials to try something--anything--different.