John Fensterwald on The Educated Guess blogged about this Education Sector report written by Robert Manwaring. California Education Geeks will probably recognize that name. Robert worked for the LAO and for the Governor as an education policy expert. He has seen first hand how California has failed in its efforts to reform failing schools.

The report uses Markham Middle School in Los Angeles Unified as an example of failed reform efforts. In 1997, Markham was identified as a low performing school. Now 12 years later, after participation in every program for failing schools, over $3M in extra funding and many changes in leadership, the school's performance is as bad as ever with only 11 percent of students at grade level in English and 3 percent at grade level in Math. By any measure, this is a failing school.

After 11 years of continuous, often overlapping reforms, the expenditure of over $3 million dollars in extra funds, and the creation of enough school improvement plans to denude wide swaths of the nearby Angeles National Forest, Markham Middle School is still, educationally speaking, a wreck. Sixteen percent of teachers are working under an emergency credential, 30 percent of classes in core academic subjects are taught by teachers who are not “highly qualified” under NCLB, and many teachers are teaching English to the largely immigrant student population without proper training in teaching English language learners.

The lack of a stable, high-quality teaching force is one of the reasons academic results at Markham are poor and not improving. In 2005, only 12 percent of eighth- graders were proficient in English and 4 percent proficient in algebra. In 2009, those percentages had gone down slightly to 11 percent in English and 3 percent in algebra.

Nobody believes that it’s easy to turn schools like Markham around. But it’s clear that the policies of the last decade have not worked. In part, that’s because ultimate responsibility for improving Markham has been left with L.A. Unified, which has its own considerable problems to overcome. This is true for many low-performing schools, which are left reliant on districts for school improvement even when district-level neglect and mismanagement are key factors in the school’s low performance. One strategy for overcoming this problem is strengthening the state role in fixing poor-performing districts. But California again provides an example of how this task is often stymied by those who oppose any reform that threatens the jobs and authority of people within the education system.

As John Fensterwald suggested, Markham Middle is a poster child for why more of the same old reforms won't lead to any better results than we've seen at Markham. Throwing more money at schools to implement the "other major governance restructuring" option, which in most cases simply means more of the failed strategies that got them there in the first place with the effort led by district staff who allowed the school to fail originally.

The recent list of 188 "persistently lowest performing schools" is another example of how public school accountability is really just the appearance of accountability. When announced, the School Improvement Grant program said these schools would all need to select one of four turnaround strategies that involved things like school closure, firing the staff, etc. A few days later, CDE was forced to admit that if schools choose not to accept the money, there are no consequences for the schools or their district. The program lacks any enforcement provisions. It is a paper tiger.

The report includes a number of recommendations for the federal government, state government and local districts. One of the key recommendations for the federal government is:

Require states to approve any school restructuring plan for which a school district has chosen "other major restructuring" for one of its schools. While another restructuring open may be best for a school, states need to ensure that the school is taking actions that are likely to lead to dramatic improvement, and not just using the other major restructuring as a loophole.

For the states, his suggestions include:

Monitor school restructuring closely and step in when districts fail to implement meaningful reforms or allow low performance to persist over long periods of time.

Schools like Markham Middle are never going to improve unless there is real public school accountability. Since local districts and the state are unwilling and/or unable to implement real accountability, it seems our only hope is that the US Congress will reauthorize ESEA with some teeth and some carrots to encourage and force states to step up and become leaders in school reform rather than roadblocks that protect the status quo. The status quo serves the adults well, but it doesn't do much for our state's children.