RESULTS AT ARENE DUNCAN’S FIRST CHICAGO TURNAROUND SCHOOL RAISE EFFICACY AND LEGAL QUESTIONS + smf’s 2¢
BY LIZ DWYER - EDUCATION AMBASSADOR FOR THE PEPSI REFRESH PROJECT IN GOOD EDUCATION| HTTP://BIT.LY/CQ1SUI
October 28, 2010 • 4:30 am PDT - Does Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's "turnaround" school-reform model work? News from one of Duncan's first turnaround schools, William T. Sherman Elementary in Chicago, is mixed. Yes, test scores are up, and that's a good thing for the 591-student elementary in the city's violence-plagued Englewood neighborhood. The bad news? It took five years to see results, and the scores still aren't as high as the average Chicago public school.
Duncan ordered a turnaround plan for Sherman back in 2006 when he was still Chicago's superintendent of schools. Sherman was the first campus placed under the jurisdiction of what was at the time a new non-profit turnaround organization, the Academy for Urban School Leadership. [Funding: Gates+Dell Foundations, New School Venture Fund |http://bit.ly/bYaeI8] As an AUSL turnaround school, Sherman gave students renovated facilities, a new curriculum, and an entirely new staff—new principals, new teachers, even new custodians.
A year after the turnaround, the Chicago parent organization Parents United for Responsible Education researched Sherman's data and found, "during its first turnaround year, Sherman had a 20 percent drop in enrollment, a 10 percent drop in the number of low-income children, a 17 percent increase in the mobility rate, a lower parent involvement rate and lower science test scores."
Even though more critics said AUSL's efforts were unproven, Duncan handed