I thought that Chester E. Finn Jr.'s Declaring Educational Bankruptcy post in the National Review Online was an interesting perspective. He compares the inability of government to reform schools with efforts to reform GM, AIG and Chrysler through government sponsored bankruptcy.

Turning around bad schools is harder than turning around Chrysler, GM, or AIG — but our fearless new federal administration seems bent on doing this, too. Just listen to Education Secretary Arne Duncan on the topic of closing and “reconstituting” failed schools.

To be sure, schools are smaller than giant corporations, but they’re at least as burdened by employee contracts, long-term obligations, community roots, political entanglements, all manner of vendors and suppliers, and “shareholders” in the form of children and parents that depend on them. And because they are public agencies rather than private firms, there is nothing quite like “Chapter 11” through which they can be stripped of their debts and obligations, reorganized, and given a fresh start.

Duncan is bent on changing this. He has no power to do so directly but insists that he will persuade state and local school systems to close thousands of dreadful schools, sometimes termed “dropout factories,” starting with at least 250 in 2010 and rising to 1000 a year. (The U.S. has about 88,000 public schools, of which some 6000 have already been designated by the federal No Child Left Behind [NCLB] act as long-term failures in urgent need of “reconstitution.” Thousands more will soon join them.),

Chester goes on to point out that government has done a terrible job in actually reforming schools to date.

Yet our education system has proven as inept at intervening in failed schools as it is skilled at spotting them. Districts responsible under federal law for “reconstituting” them nearly always opt for the least intrusive option — changing the curriculum or perhaps replacing the principal rather than shutting them down and starting afresh. As CEO of the Chicago system for nine years, Duncan was an exception: He closed (and reopened) more than a dozen of his city’s most troubled schools. But even that rare achievement must be kept in perspective: Chicago has more than 600 schools of which the overwhelming majority have been found lacking under NCLB.

I've seen the same thing in my experience. School districts almost always select the "any other major restructuring" option for their Program Improvement Year 5 schools. Someone once asked me why there are no consequences beyond year 5. My guess is that is because the authors of NCLB actually expected that school districts would have made some changes to turn the school around by then. I don't think it occurred to them that schools would languish in program improvement without radical reforms forever.

Chester suggests that Secretary Duncan has three "levers" to get states and school districts to jump through his hoops: billions of stimulus dollars, the reauthorization of NCLB, and the bully pulpit to embarrass officials who don't play ball. He then goes on to suggest that while those are formidable levers, state and local officials have had direct authority to close schools and for the most part, haven't done so.

Finally, he identifies "five core problems" that explain why it is so hard to reform schools.

First, most teachers enjoy lifetime tenure under state law and seniority under local employment contracts. If Ms. Witherspoon loses her job at the Jefferson School due to its reconstitution, the district must find her another one, and if she doesn’t like it she has innumerable ways — and union help — to fuss. (In many cities, principals also have tenure.)

Second, parents and kids ordinarily love their schools — and their teachers — no matter what the test scores show, and will fight hard to preserve them pretty much unchanged.

Third, those kids do need to be educated somewhere. If a school is actually closed, even temporarily, they must be accommodated in another one, which brings to bear all manner of rules, court orders, transportation challenges, crowding issues, etc.

Fourth, turning around an individual school is a bit like curing athlete’s foot on a single toe. If the surrounding system isn’t also fixed — perverse incentives, dysfunctional culture, ill-chosen curriculum, bad personnel practices, etc. — the familiar fungus and itch will soon reappear on the healed digit.

Fifth, the agent-of-change is ordinarily the very same school system that let the school fail in the first place. Rarely does it possess the capacity to rectify its own mistakes.

Those are difficult issues to overcome. For the most part, where we've seen school reform in California it has been on a school-wide basis. A talented, motivated leader comes to a school and overcomes the odds, bureaucracy and inertia to make a difference for his/her students. Unfortunately, we've also frequently seen those exceptional leaders leave their schools in a few years either to take a larger role in their district to try to export their success or to get out of the situation because you can only beat your head against the wall so many times before it starts to hurt.

I hope Secretary Duncan will find the right combination of carrot and stick to get California's education bureaucracy to take accountability and reform seriously. Otherwise, we'll just have to continue to put our hopes on those passionate school leaders who change one school at a time.