Reply to Does anyone send the children to Jefferson-Houston in Alexandria?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Lady, school officials cannot undo used and years of generational poverty. That is what it is. believe it or not every city in this country has a JH. There's only so much "city adults" can do about that. [/quote]

+1.  If a child has been ignored or screamed and cussed at since babyhood, a new school building is not going to fix that neglect and abuse.  It is so sad.[/quote]

Indeed given the literature on how "turnaround schools" fail their kids in the vast majority of times, many experts advise closing the school and starting fresh (see below.) I don't recall this option ever being publicly discussed by the board (please correct me if wrong on this.)

If Jefferson Houston and re-districting doesn't work out to the positive, ACPS has made one expensive blunder. 
[i]
"The Turnaround Fallacy" -Stop trying to fix failing schools. Close them and start fresh.[/i]
By Andy Smarick 
Education Next WINTER 2010 / VOL. 10, NO. 1

"...[b]A Body at Rest Stays at Rest[/b]

[b]Looking back on the history of school turnaround efforts, the first and most important lesson is the “Law of Incessant Inertia.” Once persistently low performing, the majority of schools will remain low performing despite being acted upon in innumerable ways.[/b]

Examples abound: In the first year of California’s Academic Performance Index, the state targeted its lowest-performing 20 percent of schools for intervention. After three years, only 11 percent of the elementary schools in this category (109 of 968) were able to make “exemplary progress.” Only 1 of the 394 middle and high schools in this category reached this mark. Just one-quarter of the schools were even able to accomplish a lesser goal: meeting school wide and subgroup growth targets each year.

In 2008, 52 Ohio schools were forced to restructure because of persistent failure. Even after several years of significant attention, fewer than one in three had been able to reach established academic goals, and less than half showed any student performance gains. The Columbus Dispatch concluded, “Few of them have improved significantly even after years of effort and millions in tax dollars.”

These state anecdotes align with national data on schools undergoing NCLB-mandated restructuring, the law’s most serious intervention, which follows five or more years of failing to meet minimum achievement targets. Of the schools required to restructure in 2004–05, only 19 percent were able to exit improvement status two years later.

A 2008 Center on Education Policy (CEP) study investigated the results of restructuring in five states. In California, Maryland, and Ohio, only 14, 12, and 9 percent of schools in restructuring, respectively, made adequate yearly progress (AYP) as defined by NCLB the following year. And we must consider carefully whether merely making AYP should constitute success at all: in California, for example, a school can meet its performance target if slightly more than one-third of its students reach proficiency in English language arts and math. Though the CEP study found that improvement rates in Michigan and Georgia were considerably higher, Michigan changed its accountability system during this period, and both states set their AYP bars especially low.

Though alarming, the poor record for school turnarounds in recent years should come as no surprise. A study published in 2005 by the Education Commission of the States (ECS) on state takeovers of schools and districts noted that the takeovers “have yet to produce dramatic consistent increases in student performance,” and that the impact on learning “falls short of expectations.”

Reflecting on the wide array of efforts to improve failing schools, one set of analysts concluded, “Turnaround efforts have for the most part resulted in only marginal improvements…. Promising practices have failed to work at scale when imported to troubled schools.”...

http://educationnext.org/the-turnaround-fallacy/[/quote]

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