Closing Down Failing Schools

Sandra Feldman, who this year became president of the American Federation of Teachers, succeeding the late Albert Shanker, gave her first speech to the union’s membership last week--and proposed that members help close and turn around failing schools, a controversial process known as “reconstitution.” In recent years, superintendents in San Francisco, New York and Philadelphia have changed principals and replaced faculties to give schools a fresh start. Schools in Denver, Chicago and Maryland also have been targeted. Until now, teachers unions have opposed such moves as unfair because teachers cannot control factors such as poverty and parental involvement. But Feldman noted that poor and middle-class children continue to attend schools that differ vastly in quality. That, and the enthusiasm of parents in cities such as Milwaukee and Cleveland, which offer vouchers to help children attend private schools, should be a call to action, she said.

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Let’s get out front and center on turning around or shutting down failing schools.

Put simply and starkly: I propose that we do not seek to defend or perpetuate failing schools to which we would not send our own children. [Such] schools must be turned around. As John Dewey, that brilliant educator and great AFT activist, put it, “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must be what the community wants for all of its children.”

We should advocate the closing and redesign of failing schools and negotiate it--for the sake of the parents who shouldn’t have to be torn between their commitment to their own children and to public education, for the sake of the public that is committed to public education but deeply troubled about its performance . . . for our own sakes and for our union.

We should do this because when states or superintendents do it unilaterally . . . they do it badly--rudely, crudely, getting rid of people instead of bad practices, stigmatizing educators who were trying for years in failing schools.

San Francisco is perhaps the cruelest example. School staff were handled brutally, let go without due process or transfer rights. Little if anything changed in the schools, except the staff and, in some instances, the student body, whose new makeup was guaranteed to show that some achievement would result from all this ugliness. But it didn’t work. And I’m gratified to say that after a tough fight . . . the superintendent and the union negotiated an agreement that protects the rights of all.

Philadelphia is another example of crude, rude, ineffective efforts at “reconstitution.” The word itself is ugly. [There] turning around failing schools was in the union contract--transferring teachers out was even in the contract, with a process and with dignity. But that’s not what the superintendent was interested in. Instead he unilaterally selected schools for closing and forceably transferred entire staffs--and then had security guards search some of them as they left to make sure that they didn’t take away school supplies, which actually they had never received!

As a local president . . . I have met for hours and hours with members who were hurt and angry, understandably so, because they’d never been given the chance to do the right thing. They’d never been given the leadership . . . the support, the tools and conditions and access to programs that would have, and could have made a difference. But the schools we “closed” and reopened [in New York] had been through many incarnations, so something had to be done.

One high school, for example, had had many incompetent principals for years. Discipline was never enforced. Violence was common. Many times there were assaults on teachers and students and student rioting. Working with parents and some of the faculty and an enlightened superintendent, we were able to close that school, and reopen it as four small, theme-based schools in the same building.

Today, children from the surrounding area whose parents had forsaken the school--and probably public education altogether--are sending their children, and the schools have a wait list for children and teachers. About half the original teachers stayed. The others took advantage of a dignified transfer program which allowed them to select schools they preferred and they too are teaching happily elsewhere.

I call on boards of education and school management to work with us to develop sensible criteria for identifying a failing school; to develop a process for providing help and support to save a school; and to make sure that at the point there is agreement that closing, redesigning and reopening is the only option left, that it is done in a professionally and educationally sound manner.