Washington Post Report Highlights Problems with State Takeovers of Schools
Earlier this week the Washington Post‘s Lyndsey Layton reported on the wave of attempts by Republican governors to seize local schools and school districts and turn them over to new state-run governance structures dubbed “recovery” or “opportunity,” or “achievement” school districts: “Governors in Michigan, Arkansas, Nevada, Wisconsin, Georgia, Ohio and elsewhere—mostly Republican leaders who otherwise champion local control in their fights with the federal government—say they are intervening in cases of chronic academic or financial failure. They say they have a moral obligation to act when it is clear that local efforts haven’t led to improvement… Eleven states have passed or debated legislation to create state-run school districts in the past year… State takeovers were once a rarity, but they have become increasingly popular as the number of states controlled by Republicans doubled between 2010 and 2014.”
Layton cites a report from the Education Commission of the States, an organization that has historically leaned toward support of accountability-based school reform. The Education Commission of the States describes the state run “recovery” districts this way: “In recovery districts, SEAs (state education agencies) gain legal authority to take over their lowest-performing schools and assume the LEA (local education agency) functions for those schools. Schools in these districts are united not by geographic proximity, but rather by their status as underperformers. The belief is that by grouping schools in this way, states can more seamlessly implement comprehensive and aggressive reform strategies in schools facing similar challenges. Recovery districts tend to have a governance system in which ‘high-quality’ operators function in a charter-prevalent model. Schools that are not run by charter operators are run instead by the state board or recovery district authority.” Notice the Washington Post Report Highlights Problems with State Takeovers of Schools | janresseger: