When I posted last week, I thought that school turnarounds had about a 10-to-1 shot at success. However, a new study, released on Tuesday, December 14th, authored by David A. Stuit and published by Basis Policy Research and The Thomas Fordham Institute suggests that low-performing schools endure for many years despite a variety of change efforts and that the odds of a successful turnaround are closer to 100-to-1.

Here’s a sobering snapshot:

“72 percent of the original low-performing charter schools examined in this study were still operating, and still low-performing, five years later, compared with 80 percent of district schools. That means very few schools picked themselves up, rolled up their sleeves, and “turned around” their low achievement levels to above the state average. Bona fide turnarounds were rare: Just 1.4 percent of district schools and less than 1 percent of the charters earned that accolade.”

This begs three questions:

1. What worked in those one-in-a-hundred cases and how can it be applied in the other 99?

2. Why don’t federal and state turnaround grants require turnaround candidates to use approaches that have worked in other successful turnaround efforts?

3. If the charter sector is supposed to be more innovative, more responsive to choice and to change, and more competitive within the market for schooling options, why is turning around a charter even harder than turning around a traditional public school?

I would suggest that the answers to all four of these questions are the same: Very few people want to make the hard decisions or do the hard work that leads to school success. Clearly, some schools in this study were successful. So obviously, information exists about how to improve failed schools.

The problem, therefore, is not one of method but of madness—the madness that allows one group of people to justify avoiding the things they know must be done, and the madness that allows another group of people to fund their avoidance.

Anybody seen a school turnaround lately? Me neither. Turnarounds seem to exist in concept only, like those cool cars we see at car shows, the ones that don’t actually run but that make us feel good about the future.

With regard to turnarounds, it’s time to stop doing what makes us feel good about our future and start doing what kids need to feel good about theirs.

Targeting hundreds of the nation’s dropout factories for immediate assistance sounds like a great idea in theory. But in practice turning around any school is the longest of long shots—a successful high school turnaround is the unicorn of education reform.

High schools are hard to turnaround because the turning happens far too late. Focusing on high schools to stem the dropout problem seems like the right idea because that’s where the kids are dropping out from.

But by the time at-risk kids hit 9th grade, it’s too late to turn most of them around. Real high school turnarounds begin at kindergarten. Turning around the schools that feed the dropout factories is a more strategic and more responsible approach.

Déjà Vu All Over Again

We went through this argument almost a year ago in this forum. Turnarounds have about a one in ten chance of being successful—and that doesn’t count sustaining the gains after the turnaround period is over.

I’ll take a flyer on a 10-to-1 pony at the track if I’m feeling lucky and I can afford to lose the dough in exchange for a little “what if” excitement, but I won’t take that kind of selfish risk with children’s lives and the schools that anchor their communities. For some reason, however, long odds in the school yard make us feel good. Must be all that heroic reform we get excited about.

If this looks like a job for Superman, that’s probably because in most cases it is. But instead of waiting for him to show up, let’s begin looking honestly at the turnaround issue. Our first heroic task? Holding ourselves to a standard higher than that of merely increasing funding for struggling schools and seeking out minimalist approaches to meet the requirements of federal SIG options.

Easy Spend, Hard Call

It’s easy to support spending money on failing schools. It’s harder to decide how to spend it—and brutally hard to make the call on whether it should be spent at all.

We’ve learned to take an outcome-oriented approach to school spending these days. If we apply the same principle to turnarounds, we may start seeing the outcomes we want.

Why are turnarounds so hard? Many reasons. Perhaps the most significant impediment to success is built into the structure of school itself—the factory model of schooling and the passive conformist culture it inspires is highly resistant to change.

But there is one crucial piece of the puzzle that would guide us in making good decisions. If we could just get this one right, other elements might fall into place.

Begin with the End in Mind

Anybody know what a turnaround is? Any federal, state, or local document got a definition? Any think tank thunk one up yet?

Few turnaround projects I’m aware of begin with a concrete definition of what a turnaround is. This is probably why most turnarounds fail: we’re reluctant to commit to a definition of success.

A good turnaround definition would answer three questions: How long will it take for the school to reach average performance? For how long will the school be able to sustain average performance after the turnaround period is over and formal assistance is removed? How will we know there are structures in place to keep a successful turnaround school from becoming a “turn back” school and retreating to its original state?

The few folks I’ve talked to who really know a lot about turnarounds tend to favor definitions like this: “A turnaround can be said to have occurred when an unusually low-performing school reaches average state performance within three years, and then sustains that level of performance, matching state averages, for at least three years after formal turnaround assistance has been withdrawn.”

We can add to this six-year period an additional 3-4 years where we would want to see the school continuing to function at a high level, with effective infrastructure in place and true succession planning for important leadership roles, in order to be sure that a true turnaround, and not just a temporary turnaround, had occurred.

This means that turning around a school is probably a ten year project if we take it seriously.

When you look at a school turnaround as a 10-year venture, it looks a little different. It looks expensive, for one thing. But more important than that, it looks strategic. Few turnarounds amount to little more than mindless tactics—quick-fix programs, short-term disaster aversion schemes, and putting out fires. Rarely, does anyone involved consider the long term strategic requirements of getting a failed school upright and vertical and moving forward under its own power.

A Journey With No Destination

Without an endpoint for turnarounds, we have two problems: (1) Knowing when we’ve succeeded and can stop funding the turnaround effort; and (2) Knowing when we’ve failed and can begin a different approach.

Both of these ideas go directly to the bottom line, something few turnaround enthusiasts like to talk about. They also cry out for a strategic approach, another thing people don’t like to discuss.

Consider, for example, the Landover School in Prince George’s County Maryland. According to a newspaper article, “The school, which opened in 2002, has yet to make Adequate Yearly Progress, an annual state testing benchmark for reaching grade-level reading and math skills measured by the Maryland School Assessment. Gholson will annually receive $1.5 million in 10O3G federal grant money for three years to turn the school around.”

So that’s $4.5 million for the initial turnaround period. But what is the goal? “Turnaround” isn’t a goal, it’s a process. Much as I attempted to research the Landover example, I could find nothing credible about what they’re doing that is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, or time-bound—e.g. the “smart” stuff in a SMART goal. I’m sure Landover had to submit one heckuva a school improvement plan to get money like that. But what information suggests that this expenditure will lead to success?

What are the students supposed to get for $4.5 million and what are the odds that they’ll get it? And if, as the odds tell us, the school will not be successful, how many more times will be have to fund it at this level in order to achieve success?

Perhaps just asking these questions is enough to discourage the parties involved from answering it.

What’s the TCT?

Rather than simply declaring that we will turn around thousands of school by doling out millions of dollars and hoping something good happens, let’s begin to consider the problem rationally.

For this example, I’ll use a high school in my state. (The story you are about to hear is true. The names have been changed to protect the ignorant.)

Say we want to turn around High School “F”. HSF’s test scores have been stuck around 20% proficiency in most subjects. State average is around 70% and seems to be moving up about 3% a year. So, to reach state average in “turnaround time”, HSF will need to pick up 60 points in three years.

Is that 20 points a year? Nope. If we linearize goals like this, we’re doomed to failure because the last 20 points from 60 to 80 are significantly harder to gain than the first 20 points from 20-40. So we probably need to front load the work like this: 30-20-10.

Now ask yourself, what are the odds that a school with a track record of consistent failure making progress like this?

The implication of this question is that most turnarounds can be seen to be failing early on. Yet, because they are based on multi-year plans, and funded with multi-year grants, we continue down the garden path irrespective of what we are learning along the way.

So what do we do when the three-year turnaround plan fails? We have to come up with another plan. And if we keep using the same “plan and pay” approach, we keep running into the same long odds. This is where the TCT, or Total Cost of Turnaround, comes into play. What will it really cost to get Landover working? And can we be honest with ourselves about coming up with $15-$20 million over a 6-10 year period to make sure things work?

The Three R’s of School Turnarounds

The turnaround concept in education reform sounds valiant and exciting. But that’s how most fantasies seem. What’s a better, more adult solution? The three R’s: reorient, reorganize, and restart.

Failed schools fail for one main reason: they are not oriented toward high-quality instruction. There could be many reasons for this: an unsafe or disorderly environment, weak staff, weak leadership, an unwarranted emphasis on non-academic elements. But the reasons don’t matter; only reorientation matters.

In order to serve children well, schools must provide top notch teaching. This starts with high-quality instructional leadership, continues with improvement-oriented (not termination-oriented) performance evaluation and support, and sustains itself with the recruitment, retention, and training of talented teachers.

A school reoriented to focus on instruction will typically need to be reorganized in several ways. A new personnel structure will need to be put in place to support high quality teaching. A new schedule is also usually required. And in middle and high schools, new courses, and new course requirements, are vital parts of the school reorganization process.

Finally, we must consider a formal restart. Turnarounds don’t work. But restarts sometimes do. Even a project that begins as a turnaround can have a restart date, a point at which the processes of reorientation and reorganization have been completed, a point where school can start anew, with a blank slate and a fresh supply of chalk to write with.

Serious Business

It’s natural to look at turnarounds from a budgetary standpoint: so many dollars equals so many successful schools. But the data we have shows that this simplistic equation just doesn’t add up.

We know that pouring new wine into old bottles doesn’t change the taste. We know also that input-oriented approaches to school change typically result only in larger inputs.

Turnarounds are serious business, the toughest business in all of education. Until we begin to take them seriously—to plan them strategically, to commit to meaningful definitions of success, and to give the long term health of a school the full consideration it deserves—we are less likely to encounter serious successes than we are to confront serious failures.

It does not help the tens of thousands of students languishing in chronically underperforming schools to perpetuate the idea that we can’t break this cycle of failure because we are confused about which way to turn. The reality is that using research-based approaches can improve a school’s likelihood of success, but at the same time, local context matters. The existing research points us in the right direction for reform, but we do not have the airtight evidence we need to guarantee success. This is in part because there are so many factors that impact schools and because local buy-in is critical. Parents, students, administrators, and teachers must all be committed to the notion of high expectations for all students, regardless of the specifics of the reform. Collaboration among these groups, along with community organizations that provide supporting resources to students, is critical to changing expectations and ultimately results for our kids.

There’s no need to create a tension between approaches that involve the community in reclaiming one of its most vital institutions and reform models drawn at the federal and state levels. We know from the emerging research and our experience in the field that engaging families and community members is crucial to changing the culture of the school and expectations for its students. Teacher buy-in is also critical. We also know that in the most struggling schools students – and their families – have needs that affect their ability to succeed but cannot be addressed by the school alone. The current federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) models do not preclude active family and community engagement. The Transformation model specifically requires that districts create methods to foster ongoing engagement and the Turnaround model requires districts to provide the appropriate community oriented services to students.

The real issue is accountability. “Community response” or “local approach” cannot be code words for choosing the path of least resistance. Changing the trajectory of a school that has failed its students year after year is back-breaking work. District and school leadership cannot shy away from the dramatic – and often painful – reforms needed.

Money alone is not the answer to reviving our failing schools. But fully investing in the schools with the greatest needs shouldn’t be an automatic trigger for knee-jerk naysaying either. It takes resources – financial, human, technological - to effect dramatic change. We need to closely measure the return on our investment and collect data that allows us to gauge which interventions have the most impact.

We need to move ahead in our work to turnaround our failing schools while collecting the data that will enhance the field’s knowledge of the interventions that work in diverse settings to improve student achievement.

Turnarounds are a hot topic, and the Administration keeps fanning the flame with more and more money, even as the country slips further and further into debt.

Turnaround prescriptions aren’t working writ large, because too many formula choices are available, and it is human nature to opt for the easy way out. Even NCLB allowed schools to languish in mediocrity and failure for years before difficult choices had to be made.

What is necessary is a shock to the system of a failing school, a complete cultural realignment. Think of a failing school’s adult culture as rust on a car, unless you remove all of it, it will return to take over just as if nothing happened.

So you get rid of a few teachers, collaborate with existing staff to put a little more energy towards time on task in the classroom, or bring in some new tutors and a digital whiteboard for each. What does this accomplish? Look at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. Superintendent Fran Gallo was willing to make the hard choice to fire the entire staff after almost a decade of failure. In the end, a compromise was reached to retain the staff and bring in a new principal. And what has happened? A teacher absentee rate almost on par with that of the students and pushback at all levels from the staff and their union representation. In other words, same as it ever was.

Now look at one of DC’s most notorious schools – Anacostia High. It was designated for turnaround by Michelle Rhee, with outside management brought in to turn things around. Under the watch of Friendship Public Charter Schools, operators of successful schools in DC and Baltimore, Anacostia High, now the Academies at Anacostia, the staff was overhauled, attendance was higher, and the graduation rate jumped from 50 percent to 79 percent. In one school year.

Turnarounds can work, but only if the method utilized leads to, for all intents and purposes, a new school culture, not merely a fleeting new attitude.

No doubt major school improvement is difficult, and it is not common enough, but there is evidence that some approaches can and do work.

The Forum on Educational Accountability, which I chair and which develops the ideas initiated in the Joint Organizational Statement on NCLB (now signed by 151 national organizations), has called on Congress to take a very different approach: Require schools to focus on key areas known to be important for significant improvement, provide evidence on what they are doing and its success (using far more data than mere test scores), and let them do their jobs.

In the House hearing on this issue, Chairman Miller indicated support for this approach, and what I hear is that something on this order is under consideration in both Houses of Congress. Part of the reason is that Duncan’s prescriptions lack evidence they will succeed, part is that requirements such as replacing the principal are seen as functionally impossible in rural areas.

This approach says, use federal funds on improvement efforts known to work, but do so with local flexibility and responsibility. Unlike the failed experiment of subjecting students, teachers and schools to high-stakes, test-based accountability, the ideas developed in practice in various locales and circumstances have a reasonable chance to succeed.

Guest blog this week from California Teachers Association President David A. Sanchez:

Education reform works best when all stakeholders at the local level are working together with the resources they need to succeed. In California, the largest public education reform program of its kind, our state’s Quality Education Investment Act (QEIA) of 2006, is making sustained progress in helping at-risk students succeed. The initial findings for QEIA are in this new research, a 40-page report unveiled Nov. 30 at a symposium on QEIA with nearly 200 California teachers, education experts and lawmakers’ staff.

QEIA is teacher-driven reform that stresses cooperation and flexibility at the local level. The scope of this program is unprecedented. Over eight years, QEIA is investing $3 billion in nearly 500 low-performing schools, helping about a half-million at-risk students, many of whom are lower income and English Language Learners.

We believe local stakeholders must be engaged and empowered for reforms to work. QEIA and its emphasis on collaboration among educators, parents and principals is helping to make strong academic gains despite challenges from student poverty, diversity and language, the new CTA research shows. For the 2009-10 school year alone, QEIA schools, on average, experienced nearly 50 percent higher growth on the California Academic Performance Index (API) than similar, non-QEIA schools, a review of recent API growth shows. Also, QEIA is helping to close student achievement gaps. QEIA schools are making greater gains in API with African-American and Hispanic students, English Language Learners, and socioeconomically disadvantaged students than comparable lower-performing schools in our state.

It’s clear from this initial success that QEIA and its emphasis on proven reforms like smaller class sizes, additional counselors, better training for teachers and principals and a push for parental involvement is paying off for our most at-risk students. When schools are given the resources and assistance they need, and when teachers, administrators and parents work together, schools and students improve. Our lessons learned so far? Higher-achieving at-risk schools stress collaborative teams with teacher input as the key, and also use student data to focus professional development decisions. Teacher collaboration is key to developing better lesson plans, common assessments and student data analysis. This approach could be a model for other at-risk schools to learn from.

CTA has been deeply involved in working with QEIA schools, offering training to staff about the law and implementing school change. Learn more about QEIA – California’s best hope for its most at-risk students – on www.cta.org.

As education leaders and as caring adults for every child, we cannot continue to send generations of our kids to low-performing schools that will not prepare them for success in college and in life. It is why PTA members appreciate the U.S. Department of Education’s School Improvement Grant program, which provides some of the tools districts and parents need to turn dropout factories and low-performing schools into centers of learning and nurturing in our communities.

To accomplish these goals, it will take resources and the engagement of parents and communities, teachers and school leaders, better curriculum and safer school environments, in order to successfully transform low-performing schools.

We already have some best practices on what is needed to spur effective turnarounds courtesy of work by a University of Chicago team led by Anthony Bryk and John Easton (now the director of the Institute of Education Sciences). Their research reveals that turnaround efforts require work in five critical areas—family engagement, strong school leadership, curriculum alignment, school safety and teacher work orientation. Forty percent of schools that greatly improved reading scores successfully used parental engagement in their strategies, while 47 percent of schools boosting reading scores used strong teacher professional development and teaching staff collaboration.

Working on each of those areas will be challenging, but not difficult to do. Bolstering family engagement involves such key steps as welcoming all families into the school community; effective communication between parents and teachers; making parents true decision-makers in education; and collaborating with community members and leaders. Improving school safety also involves fully-engaging parents, caregivers and other adults in the community; when parents and other caring, trusted adults are in schools, kids feel as safe and welcomed as they do at home.

The good news is that Department of Education officials, through the School Improvement Grant program’s Transformative Model, allows districts to use this all-encompassing approach to turning our dropout factories in communities of learning. Through National PTA’s Urban Family Engagement Initiative (now in 12 cities) and our National Standards for Family-School Partnerships, we can help states, cities and school districts take critical steps towards improving schools for our kids.

Every child—no matter who they are or where they live—deserves great schools. There is no conundrum in school turnarounds; just the need to solve this critical problem with practical solutions.

Most turnaround schools are going to need some additional resources to reverse a cycle of failure, but providing that money without a district wide strategy will not yield sustainable results. One of the most important findings from our work in school districts is that some turnaround interventions are more powerful than others and that the most effective ones may not be the most expensive. They don’t all cost more money but they may require different resources.

To explore this, let’s compare three district efforts; New York City Chancellor’s School Initiative (1996-2003), the current Charlotte-Mecklenburg Strategic Staffing Initiative and a third district (who shall remain un-named for this blog) that created a “turnaround zone” with special status and resources. New York and Charlotte-Mecklenburg each experienced appreciable gains in student performance over the first one to three years of the programs. The third district’s efforts were unsuccessful and abandoned. Why?

In both of the successful programs, districts took specific actions to ensure that the right mix of staff talent and skills was present in each school before adding new resources on top. The New York and Charlotte programs replaced most or all of the principals in the target schools, both replaced underperforming teachers in the target schools and actively recruited high-performing teachers to replace them. These changes allowed the schools to quickly develop a culture of achievement and continuous improvement for both students and staff. New York City also invested to extend learning time and to provide additional tutoring for struggling students; critically, this was done after staffing changes.

Both districts were able to implement these interventions for a relatively modest investment. This is in part because they had some teacher support infrastructure in place before the programs were introduced; in Charlotte, they counseled out the replaced teachers and principals or moved them to other schools (in contrast to New York City, where they had to be absorbed into the excess pool). In New York City, even though the total per-school investment was quite high, the initiative to ensure strong leaders and teachers represented only an estimated $600,000 per school. Importantly, the cost of these interventions in both districts was modest because the critical changes made to personnel were not expensive, they were just difficult — politically, logistically, and emotionally. District leadership recognized that such bold moves were critical to putting these schools on the path to success.

In contrast, the third district invested $1,200,000 per school but did not replace the leadership or under-performing teachers. Over half the additional expense in the “turnaround zone” schools extended the school day by a full hour. This well-intentioned investment did not pay off because the district did not first invest in the critical areas of teacher and leader capacity.

As district leaders develop intervention strategies for turnaround schools, they need to identify the district support and level of funding required to implement those strategies successfully. Any form of support to schools, whether central office supervision, professional development, or increased time for collaboration, translates to dollars. In addition to providing each school the transition resources they need now, leaders must plan ahead for ongoing funding to sustain improvement.

For more information and guidance on district wide turnaround strategies, see our recently released guide, Turnaround Schools: District Strategies for Success and Sustainability.

It's simply idiotic to pour good money after bad as the CTA would have us do in the name of school turnarounds. No wonder California is broke. The problem is that mandates from Washington don't work very well, either, Arne Duncan's earnest efforts to the contrary notwithstanding. The quest for successful school turnarounds resembles the search for the Holy Grail--and is just about as hard to succeed with. A new Fordham study, out next week, further documents the scarcity of successful turnarounds, and Andy Smarick has written perceptively about this in Education Next. I think there are two main reasons for the failure. One is that a turnaround hinges at least as much on the individuals involved as on the recipe. Even more important, the things most apt to make a big difference in a failed school are legally or politically verboten in most places, things like replacing personnel, changing working conditions, replacing curriculum, altering the length of the instructional day. etc. So long as these kinds of changes are off limits, we won't see many successful turnaround efforts.

Through our Dropout Prevention and Grad Nation campaigns, America’s Promise Alliance has had the opportunity to partner with dozens of communities, organizations and school systems across America to work to end the epidemic of low graduation and high dropout rates. In our work, we have found that both universal and unique models of school turnaround can work if there is a defined strategy with clear focus on specific outcomes, development of staff toward achieving those outcomes, close monitoring of performance data, and the willingness to take risks to accomplish goals.

We saw evidence of this in our report Building a Grad Nation, which we released last week, which found the nation’s graduation rate actually rose from 72 percent in 2001 to 75 percent in 2008 and the number of “dropout factories” declined from an all-time high of 2,007 schools in 2002 to 1,746 in 2008. Overall, 29 states improved their graduation rates with Alabama, Tennessee, Richmond, IN and New York City doing especially well. In all four of those success stories, we found similar strategies: strong community engagement and local organization with additional support at the state and national levels. All approaches were guided by research, evidence-based strategies, and annual benchmarks to measure success and above all there was an environment of accountability that touched all the work.

We believe that in order for true turnaround to occur, however, change must come from the “inside out.” Through a structure of support, such as our Civic Marshall Plan (included in this recent report), which provides strategic development of human resources, expertise, and best practices consultation across the country; schools and communities everywhere can accelerate improvement and reform themselves. This kind of support develops the capacity and confidence of local organizations to carry out bold change. Locally-developed solutions that help systems to increase their own capacity for turning around their schools are the keys to lasting improvement.

While national models may help some systems to jump start their turnaround efforts, in the final analysis, what works in Baltimore may not work in Detroit, Miami, or Denver; but what works in one high school in Baltimore will, most likely, work in another high school in that same jurisdiction. Our goal is to help schools and communities organize their own resources and potential to develop effective, local reform models. Community-wide commitment to the turnaround work and community supports for the students and families (such as tutors, mentors, and job-shadowing) can make a huge and important difference regardless of the turnaround model and this cannot come soon enough. What we also found is that although we’ve made progress, if we are to achieve the President’s goal of 90 percent graduation by 2020 we have to do much more. In fact, we have to increase the progress we’ve seen over the last decade five-fold. A big task, but one I believe we can—and must—tackle.

Only from behind the haughty parapets of Washington, D.C., would anyone consider it “good news” that taxpayers of a bankrupt government are dropping heaps more of yet-to-be-printed money on 730 failing public schools.

It’s a bizarre stratagem, unashamedly rewarding failure with billions more of other peoples’ hard-earned cash. How otherwise sane people can actually expect the long-term outcome of this audacity to be anything but more failure is beyond the rest of us out here in the commonsense parts of the country.

This week’s hairsplitting banter is no doubt interesting for lots of government plotters and tank thinkers. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, the most central and essential element of the actual solution continues to be ignored.

As long as the power, importance and judgment of parents and families are absent from the debate, it doesn’t matter whether the federal government or the state governments gain a policy edge over the other. Pondering whether the feds or the states are more capable of turning around failed government-owned schools is like debating whether shoemakers or tailors would perform better heart surgeries.

Surely there are still at least a few left in Washington, D.C., who embrace the timeless American dictum that it is the right and responsibility of parents to direct the education and upbringing of their children. The great, contorted lengths to which the present administration roams to evade the obvious solution – parental school choice – is striking and impressive indeed.

Appointing more government workers to make all the decisions, responses and corrections that are ordinarily and efficiently perfected by a legitimate marketplace has never worked and never will – especially in the education industry. But for the comity of indulging the beside-the-point questions at hand, let’s quickly rejoin them in turn.

Q1) “…is there a point where money won’t bring about the real turnaround that’s needed?” A1) Yes. We’re long past it. When a parent’s ability to choose the best academic setting for his/her child was replaced by the idea of a government-owned, unionized, bureaucratized monopoly, the tables were decidedly turned against the prospect of achieving a generally well-education citizenry.

Q2) “Are the best solutions to failing schools based inside a local community?” A2) Yes, of course, but possibly not the way most contributors to this debate intend. If by “local community” we mean a family’s kitchen table – then heartily, “yes!” If the term “local community” has instead been, as I suspect, relegated to mean some local regiment of a burgeoning federal bureaucracy – which is what a local school board has essentially become – then sadly, “no.”

Q3) “…is there value in having broader dictated models like the ones laid out by the Education Department?” A3) Absolutely not. There are many pragmatic reasons dictates from the U.S. Department of Education do not, cannot, and will not work. Most relate directly to the agency’s incompetence and malfeasance. Despite the D.C., eye-rolling evinced every time it’s mentioned, the federal government has no Constitutional authority to dictate education models to the states.

They used to teach about this in public schools but, for whatever reason, they don’t anymore. You have to either teach your kids yourself at home or choose to send them to a private or charter school for them to learn about the Tenth Amendment and other old-fashioned ideas of freedom cooked up by the Founding Fathers.

It’s funny; no one in Washington is enthusiastic about putting up some cash for that. On second thought, no it isn’t.