A look at how a "turnaround" team treats the teachers in the school they are "turning around."

[madfloridian]

In President Obama's Blueprint for Reform of public schools, there are four options for schools that don't pass the high-stakes tests. Here are the school turnaround options listed in that plan.

*Turnaround: The school’s principal and all of its teachers are fired. A new principal may rehire up to 50 percent of the former teachers and must then implement Department-outlined strategies to improve student academic and graduation rates.

*Restart: The district must either convert the school to a charter, or close it and reopen it under outside management--a charter operator, charter management organization or education management organization.

*School Closure: Schools may be closed, with students being transferred to “other, higher achieving schools.”

*Transformation: This model requires that the school principal be replaced (if s/he has been at the school longer than two years) and that schools must choose from an department-determined set of strategies. But under the SIG program, school districts with more than nine targeted schools can only use this model for no more than half.
Obama's school turnaround policy.

There seems to be a lot of thoughtlessness, even cruelty, involved in the process. This takeover by a turnaround team is one of the options of Race to the Top. Sometimes it is done whether the school chooses to or not. Fire the faculty, make them reapply, but do it in a way that tells them they are goners. These are not bad teachers, they are teachers in a school that is targeted for turnaround by the reformers.

Teachers who care are losing their careers unexpectedly and without due consideration because of Arne's education reform.

Two looks at the Marshall High "turnaround"

The first is from Ben Joravsky at the Reader:

It's curious, this double standard we have when it comes to cracking down on low-scoring schools. The man in charge of the system retires with, among other things, a well-paid, do-little position at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Meanwhile, the teacher on the front line winds up on the dole...

The second is from Matt Farmer at Huffington:

Huberman gutted Marshall last year as part of another high-stakes CPS "turnaround." After firing the old guard, CPS officials hand-picked the school's new faculty to ensure that this "turnaround" will be more successful than Arne Duncan's "transformation" of Marshall back in 2007-08.

Looks like a 2nd turnaround is in sight.

Anthony Skokna.. "They just didn't know what else to do with me."


Picture courtesy of Chicago Reader. "Anthony Skokna: "They just didn't know what else to do with me."

In contrast, consider the case of Anthony Skokna, 56, who was unceremoniously dumped from his job as a history teacher at Marshall High School, just about two years shy of claiming any of his pension. He's been applying for jobs all over town, but no one will hire him, most likely because he's too old.

..."He said he had an inkling of the direction things were going when the turnaround team brought prospective teachers to his classroom to give them a tryout. "They'd come in and say, 'Could you leave so we can use your class?'" he recalls. "It was a little awkward."

So he'd go to the hallway or the library. A couple of times a member of the turnaround team asked him to come back to the classroom. "They'd say, 'Could you please help us settle your class?'—the kids were being a little disruptive for the tryout teacher," says Skokna. "Think about it from the kids' perspective. Some of the kids told me, 'We don't have to listen to you—you're getting fired anyway.' And other kids would tell the turnaround people, 'Why are you bringing in this new teacher? Mr. Skokna is our teacher.'"

By the end of last school year, he hadn't received any word about whether he'd be brought back. So he called the central office. "I wound up talking to someone who says, 'Oh, you didn't get a call?' I said no. And they said, 'You should have. But you're not coming back.'" And that's how he learned that, after 18 years on the job, his days at Marshall were over.

They used his classroom to audition prospective new teachers. They did not even tell him he was fired. After 18 years.

That's cruel. It's heartless.

More from the Huffington Post:

Another Marshall Plan

I decided to get to the bottom of things by checking in with Shantrell Sutton, who is currently a senior at Marshall. Sutton is a member of the National Honor Society, and she's been accepted to DePaul University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and several other colleges. She, too, had been one of Skokna's students.

Sutton told me she "felt horrible" when she heard Skokna was fired, explaining that "a lot of us kids trusted him." She said Skokna had "a special way of teaching" and "he loved us -- you can tell." Sutton hopes that Skokna will find a way to come to her graduation. "He was (at Marshall) a long time," she said. "He's family."

When I sat down with Skokna last week to talk with him over pizza about his former students and his years at Marshall, it didn't take me long to understand what Pondexter and Sutton saw in him. The man was passionate about his students. He misses them. He misses teaching.

Huberman gutted Marshall last year as part of another high-stakes CPS "turnaround." After firing the old guard, CPS officials hand-picked the school's new faculty to ensure that this "turnaround" will be more successful than Arne Duncan's "transformation" of Marshall back in 2007-08. And although this "turnaround" faculty has yet to complete its first year, it already appears there will be more blood-letting at the school in the days ahead.

Gary Rubenstein's TFA blog presents some statistics in real time about Marshall's principal and her old school.

A new miracle school in Chicago

Take the recent article about the turnaround school in Chicago called Marshall High School, recently reported about in The Chicago Tribune. We learn that the principal just finished her first year there after a successful four year turnaround of another Chicago High School, Harper High School. The article reports that the principal did have to get rid of 161 students as part of her way of accomplishing that turnaround.

But when I researched the school report cards from 2007 to 2010 for Harper High, I learned a few unusual things:

For one, the enrollment in that school went from 1301 in 2007 to only 771 in 2010. That’s a 40% attrition.

Then when I checked the test scores, I saw that they barely changed

Teachers are fearful, they are afraid of losing their jobs. Teachers who don't deserve to feel that way are still in the line of fire.

It may be called "reform", but it is really not that at all. It's the creeping culture of the corporate world moving in to make profit.