The Indianapolis Star (Indianapolis, IN)
June 12, 2011
Headline: A tug of war to control the turnaround

By Scott Elliot

Hanno Becker took to the microphone in Arlington Community High School's crowded auditorium earlier this month to tell his superintendent and the state's top education officials it's not hard to see what needs to change at the school.

"The biggest problem I see here at Arlington is a serious lack of discipline inside the classroom and outside the classroom," said Becker, a first-year teacher at the school. "There is a complete lack of consistency in terms of doling out consequences."

But if it's easy to identify problems in a school such as Arlington, it's harder to know how to fix them -- or even who should do the fixing.

Over the next year, Indiana will see at least some schools, for the first time, taken over by the state with the goal of improving student performance on the standardized ISTEP test.

A battle has ensued over who should manage those turnaround efforts in Indianapolis, where seven of the 18 schools facing state takeover -- including Arlington -- are located. Eugene White, superintendent of Indianapolis Public Schools, thinks he should.

And last week, Mayor Greg Ballard threw his hat in the ring, saying he will petition the state Board of Education for the right to oversee turnaround efforts at any Indianapolis schools taken over by the state.

Ballard, whose office has a robust charter school sponsoring operation, envisions a similar system for turnaround schools -- in which he is the final judge of their success or failure.

But Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett already is negotiating with what the state calls "turnaround school operators" to partly privatize the management of the failing schools.

Indiana will release its latest ISTEP results next month, and the Board of Education can take control of any school that fails to show progress for a sixth straight year. The IPS schools -- Donnan Middle School, and Arlington, Howe, Manual, Broad Ripple, Northwest and Washington high schools will hit that threshold unless student test scores show strong gains.

For schools that remain on probation, Bennett and the board will take control unless the schools persuade them they can make significant progress on their own.

"Let's be blunt," Bennett said. "These are minimum standards. You can't point to the results in year six as anything other than unacceptable."

The board is planning two August meetings to rule on the fate of all the schools. Those headed for takeover will be matched with an outside organization, which will begin working with the schools' administrators and teachers in the fall for a "transition" year. Next summer, the board will make a final decision about whether to move forward with a full takeover.

If that happens, Bennett will turn the failing schools -- and the money to run them -- over to the outside organizations.

About 12 organizations responded to the state's call to lead turnaround efforts, and five finalists are being considered.

Board officials have said they do not intend to name the finalists until after contracts are signed in August. Bennett said they include both Indiana-based and national organizations.

Fees still are being negotiated. White said there is no reason to think those outside groups will have any better answers. Making a school work, he said, is about finding the right leaders, teachers, programs and community connections. And that, he said, is hard work.

"If you go outside, there are no guarantees," White said. "We know what will work. We've done it before. But finding the right combinations isn't easy."

With its seven schools on the list, IPS has the most to lose. The financial impact alone would be at least $55 million, or about a sixth of the district's $303 million annual budget.

Showing results

EdisonLearning is one of the organizations bidding for the turnaround work. Michael Serpe, spokesman for the New York-based company, confirmed Edison is negotiating a contract with Indiana.

The company has worked for a decade with Perry Township, where it runs Rosa Parks and Jeremiah Gray elementary schools. Under that contract, the company receives $6,690 per student to cover the costs of operating the school and their fees. With 1,245 students at the two schools, Edison makes a profit of about $200,000 annually.

Both schools have seen steady test gains. At Rosa Parks, 89 percent of students passed English and math on ISTEP last year, up from 45 percent in 2003, the year the school was established. At Jeremiah Gray, 80 percent passed both parts last year, up from 68 percent in 2003.

In March, both were named four-star schools for being ranked in the top 25 percent of schools for ISTEP scores and achieving "adequate yearly progress" under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Edison is best known as one of earliest and biggest chains of charter schools, but Serpe said the company has shifted its focus in recent years.

"Our growth is so much more in the turnaround area," he said. "We've taken what we learned in charter schools. It's easily transferable to school improvement and school turnaround efforts."

A variety of organizations -- from companies that write textbooks and create standardized tests to nonprofit research groups -- have launched school turnaround divisions in the past three years, fueled in part by a federal push to overhaul 5,000 low-scoring schools by offering grant money.

"The overall education industry has changed so dramatically," Serpe said. "In many respects, we are responding to what the market is looking for."

Alex Molnar, director of the National Education Policy Center in Colorado, said No Child Left Behind prefers outside organizations for intervention in failing schools, which has rapidly expanded privatization in education over the past decade. Molnar has helped produce an annual report for 12 years analyzing trends in school privatization.

"There isn't any question about it," he said. "School turnaround services by for-profit vendors of every description is a venue for corporate profit-making."

Although there is a strong push for outside organizations, Molnar said there is almost no independent research on their effectiveness. Generally, states rely on the companies' self-produced studies to track performance.

"Give me the evidence they've succeeded," he said. "That ought to be simple, right? Where is the objective evidence that they have succeeded? How is it qualitatively different from what is being done in many public schools all over this country?"

What the community wants

At community meetings this month in Indianapolis, students, parents, teachers and neighbors strongly opposed state takeover. Most speakers favored allowing White to continue his own reform plans under way at each school.

Shelby Dartis, the valedictorian of this year's Arlington senior class, said one of the school's problems is too much change -- new programs, new leaders and new ideas meant Arlington constantly zigzagged from one direction to another. In her four years, the school had six principals.

"During my years at Arlington," she said, "I've seen every change imaginable."

But in the last year, she said, instruction and safety has improved. She supports sticking with White's reform plan.

"It gives parents and community leaders the chance to continue to make a difference," Dartis said.

That theme has been consistent across school meetings held so far, not only in Indianapolis but also in South Bend, and it frustrates state officials.

"We do not have people's attention on the true academic performance of these schools," Board of Education member Dan Elsener said at a meeting earlier this month. "They seemed to be oblivious that many children cannot pass a test in these schools. It's more comfortable if we all just say it's OK, but the fact is we have a lot of young people who don't have a very bright future."

Despite the heavy push to reform low-scoring schools, there is considerable debate about the best approach to doing so, even within the school reform movement.

Turnaround typically involves an overhaul of the school -- replacing administrators and most teachers while installing new curriculum and management approaches.

Andy Smarick, who was a Department of Education official under President George W. Bush, called for an end to turnarounds in articles for Education Next, a school reform publication.

Smarick argued that low-scoring schools should be closed, noting the widespread failure of turnaround schools to make significant test gains. In one 2008 study of turnaround efforts in California, Maryland and Ohio, he noted that, respectively, only 14 percent, 12 percent and 9 percent of turnaround schools made adequate yearly progress on test scores the next year under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Bryan Hassel, who co-directs the North Carolina-based school reform consulting firm Public Impact, said despite that track record, turnarounds can work when they are done right.

"Turning around organizations is hard," he said, "but it's something that can be done and is done in other sectors -- business, nonprofits and even some other government sectors."

New organizations, such as charter schools, he argued, have an equally low success rate. And the other option -- closing schools -- only works if there is a quality alternative.

Although some reformers suggest turning bottom-dwelling schools into charter schools, Hassel said the track record of charter schools nationally suggests adding a lot of new charter schools quickly would result in creating as many -- or more -- bad schools as good.

"There are 5,000 charter schools in the country but only a few hundred great ones," he said. "We don't have nearly enough new school startups to replace all the failing schools in the country by a long shot. We need both a turnaround strategy and a new school strategy."