The grants that failed schools
Another well-intended education program, another letdown. In the last hours of the Obama administration, the U.S. Department of Education released a report showing that billions of dollars in grants to low-performing schools hadn’t made a measurable difference for students.
The 2017 report wasn’t the first to find that School Improvement Grants weren’t bringing the expected changes, but it was the most definitive. “There were no significant impacts … on math or reading test scores, high school graduation, or college enrollment of students,” the 419-page report concluded.
The $7 billion program, begun under the George W. Bush administration and expanded under President Obama, sought to help turn around the 5,000 lowest-performing schools in the country. The Obama administration made the grants more prescriptive, requiring winning districts to make one of four changes at the low-performing schools, such as replacing much of the staff or converting a traditional public school to a charter school. In addition, schools were required to overhaul teacher evaluations, lengthen instructional time and introduce more technology. Not only did the program never come close to expectations, the recent report found, but there’s no strong evidence that the educational practices it promoted are effective.
The School Improvement Grant program disappeared along with the No Child Left Behind Act in 2016. And there are other funds that schools can use for turnarounds that are not subject to the same restrictions. But the failure of yet another education program has lessons that the next secretary of Education (who we hope is not Betsy DeVos, who displays an abysmal lack of knowledge about schools) should heed.
The educational reform landscape is littered with theories about how to improve low-performing schools. The Finnish model. The South Korean model. Money with more restrictions. Money with fewer restrictions.
The answers are seldom so simple. Even charter schools, which have given parents real choices in L.A., have often underperformed. The nation needs education leaders who think big but move forward with caution, starting with pilot programs, nurturing the careful growth of successful ideas and continuously monitoring and correcting.
That wasn’t the style of former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, whose brash confidence in his own school philosophies too often pushed schools into dead ends and required frustrating changes of direction. Implementing change with prudence and requiring evidence of success doesn’t seem like the style of the Trump administration, either. But it should try learning from the billions of dollars Duncan wasted.