“Journey for Justice?” Oh, please. A little investigative journalism is in order here.

This is a group that has crusaded for medical marijuana, the right for renters who can’t pay to be left alone, free healthcare, and just about every other fringe cause that requires no obligation on the part of the individual, with all the obligation on the part of taxpayers and governments. This splinter group has never been involved in education, and its cause is not their cause, but the cause of those who engaged them in rallying around school closures -- none other than the Save Our Schools Coalition (SOSC).

SOSC IS Parents Across America IS Journey for Justice. That’s just a few more of their many alliances.

The cries of “justice now” for schools are not a result of the civic engagement and knowledge by those involved in these groups. They are fueled and inspired by labor unions and other bedrock educational establishment groups, whose work is solely devoted to creating roadblocks to any reforms or programs that upset their control of traditional public school alliances, structures and government entities.

These are the same people who protested outside of Eva Moskowitz’s exceptional charter schools when they sought expansion. These are the people who created a firestorm over the film Won’t Back Down because it was a film that might actually make ordinary people take notice of the plight of children AND teachers stuck in failing schools. These are the people running around trying to create conspiracies out of corporate interests in education. Their cause may look organic and grassroots, but it is nothing of the sort. Lawmakers and the public should not be fooled by this Astroturf movement.

If it’s not about killing any testing, and any choice, it’s now about keeping open bad schools. It is a movement constructed by the unions, which fund Save our Schools Coalition, and clad in civil rights language, to suggest there is something more to this than self-interest.

To ask the question about closing schools, as if this were a movement based on reason and fact, is an affront to the seriousness of the issue. From Arne Duncan to Howard Fuller to this writer and millions in between there is near universal agreement that no child should be forced to attend a failing school for even an hour, let alone a day or a year.

If there are people who think it’s awful to close those schools, then give those children vouchers to leave and appease us all!

It is important to note that schools often play different roles in disadvantaged communities than they do in communities of means. In disadvantaged communities, schools can represent a vibrant hub, a place not only where kids learn, but also feel safe, eat well and where parents are able maintain a sense of community, improve their own education, or gain citizenship.

So it is not a stretch to understand the actions of those participating in “Journey for Justice” in 18 cities. They see things in a way many of us cannot and do not. For them, school closures do represent a civil rights issue, because for generations students in these failing schools have had their civil rights violated.

However, in this case, the larger issue is that that these students are trapped in failing schools, and we have not provided the kind of leadership to change that on a large scale. One way to mitigate having to close schools is to address school transformation, systematically through a feeder pattern strategy. Districts that have successfully avoid the closure route while turning around low performing schools have found a way to align teaching and learning and socio-emotional connections between elementary, middle, and high schools through aligned, targeted system of supports and interventions.

A feeder pattern approach takes into account continuous improvement of all schools (including the vulnerable schools on the cusp of the lowest five percent list) in a feeder pattern not just those that are deemed the lowest performing schools to create a comprehensive system of interventions, recognitions, and aligned supports. This system will target resources strategically to improve the lowest performing schools as well as prevent the next tier of schools from falling farther behind.

Mass Insight Education, a Boston based non-profit, through its School Turnaround Group employs a feeder pattern strategy in its Partnership Zone work. This work is ongoing in many areas but most prominently through in Delaware. The Delaware Department of Education wrote the use of partnership zone, a focused feeder pattern strategy, into its Race to the Top application.

At KnowledgeWorks, our subsidiary EDWorks, has had success working with school districts (including Saginaw Public Schools) that approach improvement this way. This includes professional development and leadership development, scheduling flexibility, and extended day programs. In Saginaw, for example, the district offers Before the Bell and After the Bell programs in elementary schools so that students can arrive as early as 7 a.m. or as late as 6:30 p.m., at a minimal cost.

EDWorks is also working with the Alabama Department of Education and Birmingham City Schools to develop an approach to avoid school closures as well as develop an aligned, focused school improvement strategy. The Alabama Department is focused on feeder patterns as being their “strategy” of choice for addressing its deficit areas in districts and improving its low performing schools.

Current law and funding (think Title I and SIG) push states and districts into looking at systemic problems through a school-by-school lens. This needs to change. There is some flexibility available to states to address district level, feeder pattern-level work. For example, New Jersey is requiring LEAs with SIG schools to implement district wide policies and programs to improve performance at SIG schools within their boundaries. States should be more implicit in future SIG applications about the role of districts in supporting low-performing schools. Priority should be given to LEAs with a proven strategy for transforming the role of the district to support aggressive and sustainable student achievement.

Sadly, some schools will still need to be closed. It makes little sense to keep schools open where populations are severely shrinking or where the cost of long-term maintenance is prohibitive or where students civil rights are being violated buy not receiving the education they deserve. However, we must be smarter on the front end to keep improving schools and keeping them open in communities that need them the most.

Once we understand the interconnectedness between schools and communities and the indisputable causes of academic results, we will quickly end the reckless and unfounded school turnaround and closure policies of the last decade. We will understand that the best path for addressing the educational crisis in disadvantaged communities is through collaboration among parents, teachers and administrators, combined with financial investment.

At one level, I applaud Sec. Duncan and others who have focused attention on what is now known as “school turnaround.” Just as when former President George W. Bush called our attention to the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations,’ we need a sense of urgency about the unjust fate of so many of our children.

But as we saw with Bush’s NCLB, recognizing a problem is a very different thing than sensibly addressing that problem. And in truth these two problems—school-turnaround and ‘soft bigotry’—are really one and the same. Children learn when they have opportunities to learn, and denying those opportunities devastates the learning.

Opportunity gaps between racial groups or between rich and poor inevitably result in corresponding achievement gaps. This is obvious, yet our politicians seem determined to ignore it. They look at the achievement gaps and instead of saying, “Let’s address the opportunity gaps,” they say, “Let’s demand accountability” or “Let’s close the school” or “Let’s try dramatic reorganizing.”

This is nonsense. It’s harmful to the impacted communities. And it’s keeping us from addressing the real problems.

What do rich opportunities to learn look like? In truth, they begin with resources that have no direct connection to schools: things like safe neighborhoods, available health care, and employment opportunities for parents. Without those things, children start out at a real disadvantage. But rich opportunities are also provided though high-quality early-childhood education, through engaging and supported diverse schools, through enrichment opportunities after school and over the summer, through discipline policies that aim to keep children in school, through universal acceleration as opposed to stratified curriculum tracking, through investment in teachers who are provided with school-based induction programs and given professional opportunities to grow, through reasonable class sizes, through building on the inherent strengths of English learners, and through funding systems that provide more resources—not less—to children with the greatest needs.

Such supportive policies that are based on research evidence concerning best practices and are clearly connected to increased opportunities to learn are the only pathway to equitable school improvement (or equity school turnaround, if you wish). Working with school communities to provide such increased opportunities is very different than imposing constant churn on those communities—closing schools, bringing in outside charter school operators, firing teachers and principals. Such churn creates instability in places that can least afford it.

Let me end by quoting Dr. Michelle Renée of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, who is co-author with Berkeley Prof. Tina Trujillo of an NEPC brief on democratic school turnaround approaches (a brief I very highly recommend): “Low-performing schools are placed in a terrible situation. In order to get the needed federal resources in the middle of this fiscal crisis, they must implement strategies that are more likely to cause upheaval than to help. When a school is in crisis, it is damaging to remove the people who are committed to helping children learn.” Renée further explains that because of this and other problems, “the current approaches to school turnaround are almost always ineffective, weakening school systems, causing staff upheaval, crushing morale, and leaving the schools with poor student performance.”

Congratulations to the national ‘Journey for Justice’ alliance for calling attention to these issues, and congratulations to Sec. Duncan for sitting down with the group. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step” (Lao Tzu).

Closing a school is an action that indicates that things are so bad that they are irreparable. Nothing and no one in the school is worth saving. I closed many schools during my twenty-seven years as a superintendent but it was always for economic reasons. Buildings were half empty and consolidation was called for. Even so, I bear the scars from those school closing fights as parents fought hard to maintain their neighborhood school open. Everyone agreed that cost-effectiveness was a necessity, but close their school, not mine. The neighborhood school concept is strong in our country and parents do not want their children bused across town when there is a perfectly good school building within walking distance. The fight to keep a school open becomes more intense when you remove economics from the picture.

When you look at the annual Gallup poll of parent’s attitude towards schools, the school where their children attend always gets the highest ratings. The school may be dysfunctional and not doing the best job for the children that attend it, but it is their school and they want it to stay open.

Educators have a responsibility to the children they serve and to their parents to do everything they can to salvage the school in the community it serves. There are many examples of turnaround efforts that prove that a school can be salvaged by the right leadership, a committed staff and the necessary resources. A dysfunctional school is an adult problem and no the fault of the children or their parents. Closing a school for low performance is a problem, not a solution.

The following was posted on Education Gadfly last week:

Secretary Duncan and his team were mobbed the other day by agitated parents and kids protesting the closing of public schools around the land. Though Uncle Sam has no real control over this, it's true that Duncan came to Washington promising to close (or overhaul) a thousand schools a year and, more recently, has been pressing for radical action in the lowest-performing 5 percent—i.e., about 5000 schools. Actual data in this realm are scarce, but NCES reports roughly a thousand closings a year among “regular” public schools (meaning that, in one sense, Duncan's promise is being kept, though not by him), as well as who knows how many charter and private schools that bite the dust. But even if the total is closer to 2000, in a country with 100,000 schools that's just 2 percent a year. Moreover, schools keep opening, too, hundreds of them every year in every sector.

Nobody likes to close schools. Secretary Duncan remarked to the crowd, “I don't know any educator who wakes up in the morning and says, ‘I want to close schools.’” And it’s self-evident that nobody likes to have his or her own school closed. It's traumatic for families, teachers, students, neighborhoods, communities, even entire villages and towns.

But there are three big reasons why schools close and will continue to close—while others open.

First and most obviously, big demographic shifts. Some communities (mainly in the sunbelt and exurbia) are growing like topsy with thousands more kids who need to be accommodated in schools—and other places are losing population at a rapid rate. (In 2010, Cleveland had shrunk back down to its 1920 size. Don't even ask about Detroit.) This causes all manner of institutions to falter, to close, to be needed and to open, not just schools (think grocery stores, movie theaters, fast-food emporia, playgrounds, libraries…).

Second, particularly in an era of school choice, scads of families voluntarily exit bad schools in search of better ones. Sometimes they move home and hearth, sometimes they stay put in their house or apartment but send their kids to different schools. Charters are often the chosen alternative—suburbs, for those who can afford it. In some places, youngsters can access vouchers and thereby make their way into private schools, too. And new and growing forms of education delivery—technology above all, but also home schooling, early college options, and more—mean that families have learning opportunities separate and apart from their traditional neighborhood schools. If enough avail themselves of those alternative opportunities, especially if the neighborhood school is bad (in any of a dozen ways, including safety, physical plant, etc.), there won't be enough kids left to justify keeping it open. It's simply unviable to continue operating schools that few kids attend.

Third, today's focus on results-based education, combined with plenty more data on school performance in an era of educational accountability, means that reform-minded education leaders are getting bolder about closing bad schools—and sometimes (but not always) opening new ones in the same building. We know from ample research that bad schools will otherwise tend to stay bad.

None of this eases the pain. And it's a sad fact that the schools that do get closed almost always have some kids attending them—and these kids, too often, are the least fortunate youngsters of all, boys and girls whose families lack the means, the concern, or the savvy to access better options for their sons and daughters than the neighborhood school whose continued existence cannot be justified on any other grounds.

The most important event related to school closings last week was not Journey for Justice, it was the Center for Research on Education Outcomes’ (CREDO) study of “Charter School Growth and Replication.” Among the study’s findings:

• “It is possible to organize a [new charter] school to be excellent on Day One. … The attributes of a school – urban, high poverty or high minority – have no relation to the performance of the school.”
• “The initial signals of [new school] performance are predictive of later performance. … 89 percent of low performing schools remain low performing.”
• “Substantial improvement over time is largely absent from middle schools, multi-level schools and high schools. Only elementary schools show an upward pattern of growth if they start out in the lower two quintiles.”

While the study focused on charter schools, low-performing traditional public schools are even less likely to improve because they have even less flexibility to try new approaches.

The CREDO study is confirming what we have seen with our eyes in so many urban schools: decade after decade of high dropout rates and low academic achievement. In these schools, the only moral course of action is to start over. End the failed culture of the existing school and replace it with a new, successful school.

Tragically, ad hoc groups like the Journey for Justice shout for more of the same failure of years gone by. It is the poverty and crime associated with decades of failed schools that are the real civil rights violation.