Like all states that were winners in the Race to the Top (RT3) competition, Georgia’s scope of work entails four “project” areas: (1) standards and assessment (2) data systems (3) great teachers and leaders and (4) turn around the lowest achieving schools.

In this post, I am going to look at the fourth goal of the Georgia’s RTT, how they plan to turn around low achieving schools.

According to the Georgia Race to the Top plan,

• Georgia identified 40 middle and high schools that are considered “persistently lowest-achieving” based on historical student achievement and student need. Each of these schools are in the process of implementing one of four school intervention models aimed at creating radical change throughout the school community.
• Through RT3, the State will:
  • Create a new office within the Georgia Department of Education focused exclusively on leading turnaround work for the persistently lowest-achieving schools.
  • Connect lowest achieving schools to additional support through partnerships with Communities in Schools of Georgia to aid in dropout prevention and Teach for America (TFA) & The New Teacher Project (TNTP) to aid in teacher pipeline development in hard-to-staff areas.

The plan is to work with LEA’s in Georgia with lowest-achieving schools by making the LEA’s sign a memorandum of agreement (MOU) that commits the LEA to carry out one of four reform models (by the way, if you think this reform, you might to stop reading now).  Here are the four reform models taken from the Georgia RT3 2012 report.

1. Turnaround Model–fire the principal, and rehire no more than 50 percent of the staff and give the principle “sufficient flexibility to improve student outcomes.
2. Restart Model–convert a school or close and reopen it under a charter school manager/operator (private) and hire new teachers and a principal.
3. School Closure–close the school and send the students to other schools located outside of their community to schools that are higher achieving.
4. Transformation Model–fire the principal, somehow increase teacher and school leader effectiveness, institute comprehensive instructional reforms, increase learning time, and give operational flexibility.

In Georgia, schools are rated as priority schools (lowest achieving), focus schools, and reward schools are those Title I schools that have a high percentage of low-income students.  The state released a list of 78 of the lowest-performing schools yesterday.  Not all of these schools are part of the RT3, but what is interesting is that in the RT3 report, there is no mention of poverty or low-income families in the part of the report that describes how the state will turn around the lowest-achieving schools.

The state has a few ideas to turn around school:

1.  Fire the principal and replace at least half the faculty.

2. Use the Trojan Horse to contract with Education Resource Strategies (ERS), a not-for-profit corporation in Boston explain to districts how to pay teachers and divide their resources.

3. Pay Teach for America $15,600,000 and The New Teacher Project  $9,168,395 to offer new recruits who are un-certified and lack teaching experience and put them in the lowest achieving schools.  The state also has made it possible for TFA and TNTP to be a certification providers through the Georgia Professional Standards Commission.

Of the $30,375,235 allocated for turning around the lowest achieving schools, only 18 percent is allotted to resource allocation support and the CIS Georgia-Performance Learning Center.  Eight-two percent is used to hire uncertified recruits from TFA and TNTP, who will be short time teachers.

Diane Ravitch and Paul Thomas offer convincing evidence that efforts that include firing principals, hiring inexperienced teachers, increasing time spent in school, and increasing the surveillance by testing and monitoring of students and teachers simply avoids the real issue of how poverty affects academic achievement.

First, Paul Thomas has written extensively about poverty and how it affects the lives of children and adults.  You can follow him on his website here.  On Truthout, he writes:

The lives of adults in the United States are more often than not the consequences of large and powerful social dynamics driven by poverty and privilege–and not by the character or tenacity of the individual.  That fact is the basis for the needed new ways of thinking about education posed above.

As Dr. Thomas suggests, new ways of thinking are required if, as he says, the U.S. can fulfill its promise of universal public education. The state of Georgia is failing in this regard especially when it is spending millions of dollars to privatize teacher education and the management of schools through charters.  The further we drift from a public education, paid for by the citizens of the state, the more dangerous it becomes to offer an education that is humanistic and enriching.

Diane Ravitch, in her new book, Reign of Error, provides evidence that poverty is highly correlated with low achievement.  As she points out, the corporate reformers (who have greatly influenced the RT3) claim poverty is an excuse for ineffective teaching and failing schools.  In their view, if you fire bad principals, and name the bad teachers, fire them, and replace them with bright, but uncertified and inexperienced TFA and TNTP recruits, we’ll solve the “achievement” and “gap” problem.

The authors and directors of the Georgia RT3 program need to think about what Ravitch says about poverty and achievement.  She says:

If no other nation has managed to eliminate the achievement gap between children of the haves and children of the have-nots, why expect that the United States can do it without a major investment in reducing the causes of low achievement, which exist before the first day of school? If nations that devote significant resources to ensuring that their children are healthy have not closed the gaps, why expect that the United States can do so without improving the material condition of children’s lives?

Other countries demonstrate that the gap can be narrowed, but narrowing it requires a willingness to protect children and families.

The reformers’ belief that fixing schools will fix poverty has no basis in reality, experience, or evidence. It delays the steps necessary to heal our society and help children. And at the same time, it castigates and demoralizes teachers for conditions they did not cause and do not control.  Ravitch, Diane (2013-09-17). Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools (Kindle Locations 2041-2048). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Georgia needs to “fess up” and admit that it is not taking seriously the causes of low achievement.  Hiring new teachers and paying firms to manage Georgia school district’s budgets is not at all related to improving school.