Closing Schools

I feel like this is the part of No Child Left Behind that people don't talk about enough. When schools fail to perform, they are closed down and students are sent to other schools. While it makes sense that poor performing schools shouldn’t just be allowed to continue operating as usual, closing them isn’t having any effect either. A friend in Syracuse told me about one of their schools that closed down. In response, the city essentially sent the kids to another school with a different name; it is still plagued with the same problems. It appears that the schools in the NYC are having the same problems.

The fact is, closing the school and opening it under a new name doesn’t change what is causing poor performance. What we need to do is decide that we are truly serious about changing education results in low income areas. While there has been a lot of lip service given to this, too many groups are actually standing in the way of meaningful reforms. To my mind, one of the best things we can do is to pay teachers a premium to teach in these areas. Data shows that low income areas on average have teachers with less experience.

This makes perfect sense economically; if you are paid the same whether you teach in a school with a challenging education environment or less of a challenging environment, more often than not you will choose the easier environment. I think NYC Department of Education is trying to do this though a new focus on weighted student funding. The unions are of course opposing this, which is really unfortunate because the unions are so strong they can kill almost any proposal or evolution. But make no mistake, we need to make this decision or else we cannot actually deal with the achievement gap. We need to say that we are willing to spend a lot more money in low performing areas, and that includes paying teachers more to teach there.