Must have been asleep at the switch last week. How else to explain missing the news that Chicago is planning to fire hundreds of teachers and close eight chronically lousy schools—two high schools and the elementary schools that feed into them. A followup story in today’s Tribune puts the stunningly ambitious plan in perspective. “No one knows if turnarounds work,” Andrew Calkins of the Mass Insight Education and Research Institute tells the paper. “We spent two years looking at turnarounds and could not find a single example of turnaround work that was successful and sustained and done on scale, not just one school.”
Indeed, Chicago’s effort, which may be up for approval by the Board of Ed as soon as next month, is apparently unprecedented. “If they are taking chronically under-performing schools and working in a coordinated, clustered way, then that puts them on the cutting edge,” Calkins tells the Tribune. “And it only makes sense. Unless you can do the work they are doing in reinventing the whole system, you haven’t solved the problem.”
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