Education Next – Nelson Smith
“Recovery, Achievement, Opportunity, Transformation: these are the titles and aspirations of statewide “turnaround” school districts whose mission is to take over failing public schools and move them quickly to an acceptable range of performance. For all their complexity and variation, turnaround districts have two things in common: One, they give impatient state policymakers a potentially powerful new tool for dealing with perennial school dysfunction. Two, they put existing districts on notice that the revered notion of “local control” must give way if it fails to deliver results for students stuck in lousy schools. As of mid-2015, there are three such districts up and running: the Louisiana Recovery School District (RSD), created in 2003 but expanded dramatically in 2005 to encompass nearly all schools in New Orleans; the Tennessee Achievement School District (ASD), created in 2012; and Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority (EAA), also created in 2012. While not spreading like wildfire, the idea of turnaround districts has caught the imagination of leaders in a growing list of states. The governors of Georgia, Nevada, and Texas have laid the groundwork for new statewide zones. Policymakers in Mississippi, Wisconsin, Utah, Arkansas, and Missouri have pushed proposals forward with varying levels of success. The notion has recently resurfaced in South Carolina. Variations on the theme keep popping up, either as half-measures in states such as Delaware and Connecticut, or in state-led receivership schemes that stop short of creating an actual “district.” These exist already in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania; at the insistence of Governor Andrew Cuomo, a more locally-centered version of that authority was granted in the New York State budget approved in April 2015.”(more)