Ever since President Bush enacted No Child Left Behind, the controversial education reform act of 2002, a dire fate was said to await failing schools. After six consecutive years of failing to achieve prescribed target scores on standardized tests--in our case, the Washington Assessment of Student Learning (WASL)--schools that receive federal Title I funds are required to be restructured, something generally understood as a cataclysmic event.
"My belief is that they would basically shut a school down, lay off the staff, and hire new staff," says Scott Anstett, an art teacher at Aki Kurose Middle School, one of two South Seattle schools which, according to federal guidelines, is supposed to restructure this year. The idea, says Jack Jennings, president of the nonprofit Center on Education Policy in Washington, D.C., is to "hold educators' feet to the fire and bring about major changes."
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Turns out restructuring needn't be so drastic. In fact, it can happen without most people realizing it.
Last month at a Seattle Public School Board meeting to discuss school closures, Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson put the African American Academy, the other school due for restructuring, on her list of closure recommendations (the board will vote on final recommendations on Jan. 29). But as for Aki Kurose, Carla Santorno, the district's chief academic officer, said that she believes improvements already made there "count" as restructuring. Santorno ticked off a list of changes, including the hiring of a new principal and the transition to an extended school day—changes much less dramatic than the wholesale replacement of teachers or the dissolution of the school as it is known.
"It was not the answer I was expecting," says board member Steve Sundquist. "I certainly know we have made a number of changes at Aki Kurose. I'm not sure whether it is all of what we need." Sundquist acknowledges, however, that what's already been done may satisfy the feds. "As I understand it, there's room [to] maneuver."
That's especially true since, as Melissa Westbrook, a long-time schools activist currently serving as PTSA co-president at Roosevelt High School, observes, "There's no enforcement."
Federal guidelines offer an ambiguous definition of restructuring. "There's a menu of options rather than a strict regimen," says Eric Earling, a regional representative for the U.S. Department of Education.
A couple of those options, namely conversion to a charter school or a state takeover, are impossible here due to state law. That leaves three other choices: replacing "all or more of the school staff, which may include the school principal"; entering "into a contract with a private entity...to operate the school" (although charters are out, districts can form partnerships with outside groups, as Federal Way did with the Technology Access Foundation, a Seattle nonprofit focused on helping minority students); or implementing "other major restructuring of the school's governance that is consistent with the principles of restructuring."
That last option, intended to give districts flexibility, is "open-ended," allows Earling.
"I guess that means they can do what they want to do," says Technology Access Foundation executive director Trish Dziko, who a couple of years ago proposed a partnership with Seattle to transform a struggling school. (The idea died amid community and bureaucratic opposition before being welcomed in Federal Way.) The open-ended option is the one most districts choose, according to a study of 42 restructured schools in six states released in September by the Center on Education Policy. Jennings says that No Child Left Behind "sounds tough, but leaves a loophole."
While the federal government claims it will withhold Title I funds from states if certain guidelines aren't met, that rarely happens, according to Earling. He says the feds leave it to states to implement the "nuts and bolts" of No Child Left Behind, and states leave it to school districts, at least as far as restructuring is concerned.
"Our office doesn't have the power to go in and demand school change," says Shirley Skidmore, spokesperson for Washington State's Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI).
Moreover, the feds don't take any punitive action at all toward schools that don't receive Title I funds, which are targeted for poor students. Schools not receiving these funds don't have to restructure, although they may be stigmatized by being put into what the feds designate as "Step 5" (each step indicates another year of failing scores, and Step 5 is the end of the road). Or they may not be; for example, it is not generally known that four non-federally-funded schools in Seattle are also at this final stage of failure, according to preliminary OSPI data: Ingraham and Franklin High Schools and Madison and Mercer Middle Schools.
Whether these four, or indeed all Step 5 schools, are in need of drastic change is a matter of debate. The feds demand that special-education students and English-language learners, as well as poor kids and minorities, achieve at the same level as all students. So a school can be doing well overall but still be considered to be failing if, say, its special-education students fall below a bar that is raised every year—the exact same bar used for students without learning disabilities.
