Furious times at Central Falls
Central Falls High School offers a cautionary tale for California as districts await notification of which 187 failing schools must be restructured.
Late last month, the superintendent of the small Rhode Island district fired all of Central Falls’ 93 staff members – 74 teachers, the principal, counselors and other employees – as the first step toward turning around the low-income, largely Hispanic school. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan praised Superintendent Frances Gallo’s courage, and President Obama on Monday condoned the mass firings as a necessary last resort. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten called it another example of scapegoating teachers. Author Diane Ravitch called the tactic “mean and punitive” – more evidence of No Child Left Behind gone wild.
What’s clear in this case is that the union and Gallo painted each other in a corner, forcing her to take a drastic step with low odds of helping students at Central Falls. And that’s a scenario that should be avoided in California.
Firing the principal and staff – with the possibility of rehiring no more than half – is one of four options that the Obama administration will permit for the 5,000 schools designated as the nation’s lowest performing schools. But it’s not the option that Gallo preferred, the Providence Journal reported. She wanted the transformation option, the one that most districts will choose, which permits an extended school day and other structural changes. The other two options – converting to a charter school and closing – didn’t apply, because Rhode Island has a very weak charter law, and Central Falls is the small city’s only high school.
Gallo approached the teachers union in November to talk about changes at the high school, but talks picked up in January, under 45-day timetable ordered by the state education commissioner. Gallo set six conditions – all reasonable – for the staff at Central Falls: adding 25 minutes to the school day, offering before and after school tutoring on a rotating basis, eating lunch with students once a week, agreeing to more rigorous evaluations, holding weekly after-school planning sessions and attending two weeks of professional development in the summer. And she has stated that she offered all of them job security .
After the union balked over pay – she offered to pay for summer training but not much more – Gallo turned to the other option: staff replacement.
Some of the teachers’ reactions – beside predictable anger and upset– were confusing. They said they already stayed hours after school to help students and that the union had requested a better evaluation process a year ago. But they didn’t want conditions imposed on them. Weingarten called for mediation.
Central Falls is a depressed city with a high unemployment rate. Many of the students are kids of poverty struggling to learn English. They face hardships; their teachers face obstacles to connect with them. But the graduation rate at Central Falls High is 48 percent; the proficiency in math is 7 percent. Those numbers have stagnated for years; they must not be rationalized away.
The turnaround option is disruptive. There are few examples where firing the staff turns around a low-performing school. It’s dispiriting to the school and the community and unfair to committed teachers swept up in the undertow; Gallo will struggle to find qualified teachers by the fall.
But at the same time, an extensive study by the Center on Education Policy (“Improving Low-Performing Schools: Lessons from Five Years of Studying School Restructuring Under No Child Left Behind”) concluded that few schools have been successfully turned around without replacing some of the staff (page 9). Gallo should never have offered job protection to every teacher.
In cases of perpetually failing schools, some changes should be non-negotiable; some terms of the contract should be waived, not mediated. A school needs to be shaken up when teachers are focused on lunchtime pay, not the dropout rate.
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This is an ugly situation. I predict its the first step towards letting parents to the dirty work
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Ravitch’s point is that these flamboyant shakeups don’t work, as experience clearly shows. Veteran Washington Post education reporter Valerie Strauss (now apparently writing as a freelancer, speaking of employment shakeups) has some wise commentary:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/28/AR2010022802815.html?hpid=sec-education
… Strauss: “There is no evidence that wholesale changes at schools make a difference at schools, though it has been tried repeatedly in districts around the country — even in Duncan’s Chicago public schools, which he ran for years before leading the Education Department.
Duncan tried a lot of things during his more than seven years as Chicago schools chief: shutting down schools, hiring experts in turning around schools and firing a lot of people. The results? To put it nicely, there was no Chicago miracle. Some schools improved, others didn’t.” … And more Strauss: “Now, all they have to do is find 93 excellent professionals to take their places. Recruiting the best educators should be easy, especially when you can offer them life in a very poor town and a job with no security.”
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I think your closing sentence is inflammatory and not grounded in the facts.
Where was it explicitly stated that Central Falls teachers were “focused on lunchtime pay, not the dropout rate”?
Why would you assume that a concern with negotiated quality of life issues in the workplace precludes any focus on the dropout rate?
Diane Ravitch is right: we cannot simply fire our way to school improvement. And commentary like this sentence (which masquerades as reportage) is not a helpful contribution to the conversation.
You are usually so diligent, John, that it’s hard to understand where this lapse is coming from.
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This situation in Rhode Island is just wrong. Duncan and Obama are out of line with RTTT, it’s just another top down initiative, like NCLB. Neither Duncan or Obama has a clue about what schools or teachers need or want, especially since neither of them have ever been a teacher, let alone in a low performing school. I support Obama, but he is out of his element on this subject.
If you want schools to work in this country, then teachers and other employees have to stop being treated as second class citizens. You want to recruit and retain the best and brightest, then lets put our money where our mouth is and provide all the resources needed and provide the salaries that we attract this country’s best and brightest.
Local control with full local funding is what is also needed. Let the professionals make the decisions together with their constituents.
Where is the collaboration in any of this? Sounds like a decision made at the top by a desperate Superintendent. Shutting down the school, firing everyone is going to be far more destructive to the community, the teachers and other staff,and of course the students.
How will employees ever be able to have a level of trust, when they know the Superintendent and Board can and will hold this over their heads.
Building and establishing relationships with students and their families and local businesses takes years and it was destroyed in one extream action.
If the Superintendent couldn’t work it out then they this is the person who should be fired, because good leadership will find a way to work it out. The problem is a larger reflection of our society and is reflected in our current government and it’s lack of collaboration.
Sorry, but the world is not top hierarchy, we are not all in the military. If you want to solve a problem, there needs to be an inclusive process, which of course takes time. It takes trust, buy-in is needed from all the stakeholder, the willingness to give and take or compromise, and wise, visionary leadership.
Sorry but this situation appears to lack any leadership from the District, and of course let’s blame the teachers and their union because it’s of course all their fault for trying to protect their members.
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What is our own history with turnarounds in Silicon Valley? How many of each type of transformation have we conducted and what have the results been? I can’t think of a single charter conversion resulting from low-performance, but I may be wrong. I think folks are right to be cynical about these type of significant changes to schools, but our response should be to try them, measure them and figure out how to do it better. With an increasingly informed parent community in San Jose, the one thing we know is that there won’t be a lot of patience for persistently low-performing schools. Let’s get ahead of the game and figure out what works best.
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