My very first school district is in the news yet again, and this time their troubles may usher in some bad legislative choices by the state of New Hampshire.
I started out life in Claremont, New Hampshire. The first school I ever attended (Maple Avenue School) is still there and still operating (sadly, North Street School and Bluff Elementary are not). I can still vaguely remember the layout of the playground where I ran around with my friend, fellow country kid Becky Dole, and my first crush, Lanissa Sipitakowski. After third grade, my father's employers sent us to Pennsylvania, and I have almost never made it back to Claremont. Strolling through Google maps, it looks like our old house on the River Road might be gone. The Livingston farm right next door became factory buildings years ago.
But I still notice when Claremont makes it into the news.
In the 90s, Claremont was the face of two major lawsuits, among the first to bring the state to task for inadequately funding school districts (you can read about it in Andru Volinsky's book, The Last Bake Sale).
Claremont is in the news again, and it's related to funding, again. It appears that all sorts of accounting screw-ups resulted in a district that believed it was financially healthy, but instead is in a real big empty hole. A deficit of millions of dollars. A deficit so problematic that the district had to get a $4 million loan from the Claremont Savings Bank to insure they could open the schools last fall. The superintendent and business manager have both terminated their employment with the district.
This is a good example of how some huge school district messes can be the result of local issues and not state policy ideas. But this crisis has opened the door to a state policy idea, and it's a particularly bad one.
A last-minute amendment to a bill in the legislature would give New Hampshire the option of a state takeover of troubled school districts.
This is not a new idea. It has been tried before-- that's how we know it's a bad idea.
Ohio has tried state takeover and it has not gone well (Failure Exhibit A is, oddly enough, the first district that ever hired me to teach) because, among other things, bringing hire guns from outside the district to deal with its issues while simultaneously trying to learn what they are-- not a great plan. In fact, Lorain had local-style financial and accounting problems similar to Claremont's, and the guy who was brought in to fix them was a pretty complete disaster.
Or we could look at Tennessee's Achievement School District, a bold school takeover plan that was supposed to take schools at the very bottom of the ratings and catapult them to the top-ish. It failed. It failed a lot, through several leaders and over the course of several years.
School takeovers mostly fail, and they mostly for a set of reasons, most of all because they assume that the state can find somebody who knows how to run a struggling school district and is, for some reason, available to hire.
Many of them also fail because their actual goal is not to fix the district, but to dismantle it and charterize the scraps, sometimes because of a childlike belief in the imaginary awesomeness of charters and sometimes because of a grown-up belief in the real power of collecting piles of taxpayer money.
The New Hampshire bill has its own interesting twists. New Hampshire already has a bill that says the state can revoke a charter school's charter or put the school in probation if the school commits any of several listed Naughty Things. So the argument for the new public school law is that public schools should be under the same sort of watch.
The stated goal is to get audits done and audit results public. However, the proposed amendment is extremely broad. A school district can be put on probation "if the school fails “generally accepted standards” for fiscal management; if it violates state or federal law; if the school materially violates a state administrative rule or standard; if the school does not file an annual report of its finances; if the school does not follow other state or federal reporting requirements; and if the school “fails to remedy” the causes of its probation."
Right there in the middle of the list you find that violating a state board administrative rule or standard could trigger probation, which is wide enough to drive a small planet through, Basically, the state board would be free to go after pretty much any district it was in the mood to take over.
If the school fails probation, they get a state-appointed administrator-- a school district tsar with the combined powers of a superintendent and a school board. The very first power listed by the bill is the power to
Override any decisions of the school district's board or the school district superintendent, or both, concerning the management and operation of the school district, and initiate and make decisions concerning the management and operation of the school district
This kind of super-CEO is what Ohio tried, and the question becomes where the heck do you find someone with this massive assortment of powers and competencies who is not already in a perfectly good job? It's an impossible job, a job that requires someone to be the best super-superintendent ever under the worst possible conditions. I suspect the assumption is that the school district is in trouble because it's being run by bozos, so any reasonably competent bozo can fix it or any barely functional charter can replace it, which mostly tells me that the bozos involved in this particular show are the ones writing laws.
The other problem with school takeover pans is that they never, ever include a part where some collection of wise people look at the troubled district and try to figure out what the problem is and what resources could be best used to fix it. This is the test-and-punish part of No Child left Behind and Race To The Top writ large-- look for a quick and easy way to determine a school is "failing," then target it not for special assistance, but for dismantling, defunding, and/or privatizing.
We could argue all day about the ethics of the takeover approach, but we can skip all that because it's like arguing whether or not it's a good idea to get spiders out of your house by setting fire to building-- it just doesn't work. Here's hoping New Hampshire doesn't turn itself into one more disproving ground for this failed policy.
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