The town of Moore, south of Oklahoma City, is in the heart of Tornado Alley. Its residents are familiar with the storms and the damage they can cause. But nothing could prepare residents for two major tornados that hit the town in 14 years: the first in May of 1999; the second, this past Monday.

The May 3, 1999, tornado killed 36 people. In mid-afternoon on Monday, May 20, another tornado killed 24 people and destroyed 13,000 structures, including the district headquarters of the Moore Public Schools and two of its elementary school buildings. At Plaza Towers Elementary School, where teachers herded student into hallways and bathrooms, seven children died.

Right after the most recent storm, the Oklahoma State School Boards Association (OSSBA) began accepting gifts of school supplies at its Oklahoma City headquarters, as well as monetary gifts for the stricken district, said Jeff B. Mills, a former superintendent and OSSBA’s executive director. Mills spoke with ASBJ Senior Editor Lawrence Hardy on May 22, two days after the most recent storm hit.

How is OSSBA helping?

[We’re] just trying to be a resource for them. Many of their phone lines and cell phone services are down. They can’t get their e-mail, either. Just offering support, prayers — anything they need.

How is the district coping?

Their administration building was destroyed. Their records, fortunately, are off site; but when you’ve got your computer down, you feel helpless. But if you have your whole administration building down, it’s very difficult. It’s definitely a struggle. They’re trying to move on. They’re going to go ahead with their graduation this weekend. And they’ll deal with the losses that they have and start rebuilding.

What’s been the response to the drop off site for school supplies?

There’s been an unbelievable outpouring. We’ve got a truck coming from Nebraska tomorrow. We’ve got a couple of trailers that have been loaded up down around Florida coming this way, and just from all over the country. People just are hurting for Moore and wanting to do something, and we wanted to make sure we were able be an outlet for them.

We’re working with Feed the Children here in Oklahoma City to help distribute immediate needs like water and Gatorade bottles, diapers, hand sanitizers, gloves — those types of things we get in. But the school supplies we’ll store for the district and then hold back until they’re ready to receive them, because the last thing they need is us showing up with a truckload of pens and pencils right now. But they’ll need them in the fall.

Have you been to Moore since the tornado?

No. You can’t unless you’re a state official or a first responder — or actually live there.

As a former Oklahoma superintendent, have you ever dealt with anything like this?

No, I never did. Of course we had storm issues — we always do in Oklahoma. Nothing like this. When it hit [Moore] in ’99, the schools weren’t in session; they were already out for the day. It destroyed some schools, and they had to be rebuilt. Basically, [the most recent storm] traveled the same path. The big thing that’s happened in Moore since ’99 is just a huge growth spurt, not only in housing but in retail. The area that it came through, it followed that same path — there’s been a lot of lot of expansion in retail, highway frontage, building activity that is basically gone.

What are some of the challenges facing school board member in the coming months?

I think just the overwhelming idea that, “I’ve got to deal with all of this.” It’s not just one area, one issue. And then the things that will linger once the kids come back and classmates are gone or staff members are gone. They’ll be, I’m sure, a lot of counseling hours, and then just rebuilding. It’ll be a challenge, but they are a very strong board. The members are very dedicated and focused on what they need for the children.

How will the state respond in the long term?

We’ve faced things like this before in Oklahoma, just like other states deal with tragedy.  And we’ve always come out of it in a positive way. We’ll rebuild and start over. People are very resilient here, and they’re going to focus on what they can do for their kids. And we’re going to be there to support the schools and their board, and anything we can do to make that happen we’re going to do.

For information on how to contribute to OSSBA’s efforts for Moore, go here.

ASBJ has compiled an anthology of articles on disaster recovery for school districts, available in hard copy or as a downloadable PDF. Purchasing information is available here.

Two district officials who already have endured the first round of scheduled cuts shared their experiences in a teleconference organized by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) and the National Association of Federally Impacted Schools (NAFIS).

NSBA is continuing to lobby Congress through its grassroots network to stop or mitigate sequestration, the automatic, across-the-board cuts that took place when Congress failed to pass a budget in March.

“We urge Congress to develop a plan that not only protects education as a civil right but also as a national security interest,” said NSBA President David A. Pickler, who added that while “federal dollars are going away, the mandates remain.”

Pickler, a member of the Shelby County school board in Memphis, said his district plans to lay off instructional coaches, who work with struggling learners and help prepare students for tests, and behavioral interventionists, who help students with significant behavioral issues.

Impact Aid, the fund that reimburses school districts that lose tax revenue because of federally controlled land, was the only major K-12 program that saw immediate budget cuts; other K-12 programs will be pared down about 5 percent beginning Oct. 1 and will see scheduled decreases over the next 10 years. Some Impact Aid districts have had to cut academic programs, teachers, and paraprofessionals in the middle of the school year.

Karen Gray, the president of the Silver Valley Unified School District’s board, said the district’s preschool that serves many special-needs children had seen the brunt of this year’s cuts. The Yermo, Calif., school district includes a military base, and educating students whose parents are deployed creates additional challenges, Gray noted.

“Our board and staff continuously adjust our finances,” she said. The district has avoided teacher layoffs so far by eliminating jobs through attrition.

Roy Nelson, a school board member in the Red Lake Independent School District in Red Lake, Minn., said his district had eliminated seven teacher jobs and three paraprofessional jobs and scaled back elementary music and tutoring programs.

Parents, though, are concerned about school safety given last year’s shootings in Connecticut and a shooting in 2005 that killed seven students at a Red Lake high school, Nelson said. But the district cannot afford to hire more security guards.

More than 700 school boards have passed resolutions asking Congress to pass a budget that fully funds K-12 education programs. Go to NSBA’s Stop Sequestration webpage for more information and sample resolutions.

June 11, 2013 1-2:15 p.m. EDT

Types of OCR Investigations and Their Outcomes

Leza Conliffe, NSBA Senior Staff Attorney and former practitioner in Northern Virginia as well as OCR, discusses the characteristics of different types of investigations OCR conducts. Leza will review the myriad contexts in which these investigations can occur, what these investigations look like in real time in terms of staff and district operations, and the ways OCR complaints are brought to closure.

June 18, 2013 1-2:15 p.m. EDT

Nuts & Bolts of an OCR Investigation: From Initial Notice to Closure Letter

On the final webinar on OCR investigations, NSBA Senior Staff Attorney Leza Conlife takes us through an OCR investigation step-by-step from the time the school district receives the complaint to when OCR closes the case. During this conversation, we will discuss preparing the initial response to the complaint; handling OCR document requests, site visits, and OCR interviews with staff and students; negotiating resolution agreements, and addressing various situations that develop along the way.

To register, go to https://secure.nsba.org/register/webinar. If you have questions regarding your registration, please contact Lyndsay Andrews at 703-838-6738 or landrews@nsba.org.

Purchase archived webinars, including the very popular Affordable Care Act: Its Major Components and What They Mean for School Districts, and Investigating and Responding to Complaints of Bullying, at http://allendsmeet.com/cosa/.

“School boards are committed to safely accommodating students with disabilities in athletic programs, ” said NSBA Executive Director Thomas J. Gentzel. “We encourage the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to work with us to find mutually workable, realistic, and practical solutions to implement existing laws.”

NSBA asks OCR to clarify several areas in the “Dear Colleague” letter that suggest the agency is taking a more expansive view of it authority to enforce Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, including its guidance on individual student assessments for sports. NSBA also urges OCR to clarify that it is not adding new requirements nor establishing a new enforcement standard.

“The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights should clarify that its ‘guidance’ is merely a menu of suggested options for school districts and not the statement of new requirements subject to federal enforcement,” said NSBA’s General Counsel Francisco M. Negrón, Jr. “Recent similar guidance has resulted in confusion in the courts about applicable legal standards.”

This expansion of executive authority under the guise of agency guidance is one concern cited by NSBA in its support of the “Local School Boards Governance and Flexibility Act,”(HR 1386). That bill aims to ensure the Department of Education’s actions are consistent with federal law and are educationally, operationally, and financially supportable at the local level. To prevent regulatory overreach into local school board matters, the bill would also require the Department of Education to follow specific steps before promulgating , rules, grant requirements, guidance documents, and other regulatory materials.

Those statements are true, most of the time. But for our online readers of ASBJ, we offer something for nothing in the form of bonus articles found only on our website. This week, the superintendent of Caroline County Public Schools in Bowling Green, Va., Gregory N. Killough details how one of his elementary schools made educational lemonade out of lemons in the form of renovation construction.

The Junior Foreman program involved second-graders, hard hats, blueprints, and forklifts. Read the article to find out how the program worked.

And while you’re on ASBJ.com, remember to take this month’s Adviser poll and check out our archive of other bonus articles designed to help school board members do their jobs.

To donate, go to OSSBA’s website to view a list of needed items or to make a contribution online.

The website notes, “When members of our OSSBA family are hurting, we are all hurting. We would like to offer an opportunity for those wishing to give to have an outlet to do so.”

At least 24 people, including 10 children and infants, were killed, according to the Washington Post. Seven of those children were inside an elementary school.

David A. Pickler

David A. Pickler, President of the National School Boards Association (NSBA) and member of Tennessee’s Shelby County Board of Education, was featured in The Washington Post’s Answer Sheet today discussing the failures of school voucher schemes and the impact of the recent Louisiana Supreme Court ruling deeming their state’s school voucher program unconstitutional.

Pickler noted:

Imagine a state outsourcing the education of its disadvantaged children to dozens of private entities, asking for only minimal updates on the students’ learning and their financial management of taxpayers’ dollars.

This happened in Louisiana last year, when Gov. Bobby Jindal and his allies in the state legislature rammed through a school voucher bill that diminished communities’ schools and their students by siphoning off public funds to private, parochial, and for-profit enterprises.

But the Louisiana Supreme Court recently took a strong stand for public education across the country when it deemed the funding for that plan unconstitutional in a 6-1 ruling.

Read Pickler’s complete commentary on The Washington Post’s website.

No human enterprise is perfect, and we all are capable of improving. That’s especially true when an institution faces continuing challenges and new demands. Such is the case with public education, which has undergone many

Thomas J. Gentzel

transformations since it was established — from its early agrarian roots, through the Industrial Revolution, two world wars, the cold war, and the Technology Revolution.

We often forget that during most of our nation’s history, public schools were expected to provide basic instruction to all students while preparing some to move on to higher education and the professions. This system of sorting worked well when family-supporting jobs in factories and mills were plentiful. Today, lower skill jobs are hard to find, let alone capable of sustaining a middle class existence.

Now, public schools are expected to do something never asked of them before: educate all students to a very high level. This, of course, is a good and necessary development if our nation is to remain competitive in the global marketplace. Remarkably, America’s public education system has responded to these heightened expectations in ways that once would have seemed nearly impossible. Our commitment to educating every child is unparalleled, as is our effort to help each one reach his or her potential. No other country in the world even pretends to do what Americans demand of our education system. Perhaps not surprisingly, we spend more time focusing on what remains to be done and less on what already has been accomplished. That’s not altogether a bad thing, since it has the effect of pushing educators to continue to improve. Yet, it has had some serious negative consequences, too.

Some critics of public education have relentlessly assailed the institution for failing to educate all children at the levels now expected. Here, we must pause to acknowledge that, despite dramatic gains in student achievement we have witnessed in most places, some schools have not performed nearly as well as they should. These pockets of deficiency are a source of real concern, since they often exist in communities with the greatest challenges, generally. This is a major problem; in fact, it is one that must be addressed in order to ensure all children are prepared to become contributing members of society.

We should have a candid conversation about how to address these issues, and we must work to ensure that every public school in America, regardless of zip code, is an excellent school. We should do these things but, instead, in the current education policy debate, children in these struggling schools have become pawns in a larger effort coordinated by some well-funded interests with an agenda of their own. Many of these “reformers” have pushed hard – and, often, effectively – for solutions that are either untested or have demonstrated only limited success.

How else to explain the drive to create as many charter schools as possible, despite clear evidence that most do not outperform traditional public schools (and in fact, many fare much worse)? Although advocates of tuition vouchers and tax credits argue these measures could provide options for children “trapped” in poorly performing schools, they acknowledge their proposals would help only a small percentage of such students, and they have virtually nothing to say about what should be done for the many who would remain in those schools.

I believe some proponents of the school choice agenda are sincere in their belief that competition will help all schools to be better. Unfortunately, those people are not driving this debate. To be blunt, certain interests that stand to make a lot of money are the ones most actively promoting the privatization agenda. If they were sincerely interested in ensuring that every child in America had access to a great public school where they live, they would be supporting early childhood education, mentoring programs for new teachers, and other investments that have been demonstrated to be effective. That they so steadfastly refuse to do so speaks volumes about what they really want – and that has a lot more to do with them and their own bottom lines than it does with children receiving a great education.

2013-2014 President David A. Pickler:

Our new President, Pickler, discussed the “New NSBA” to create “the most relevant and responsive organization possible as we advocate in Washington, D.C., in state capitols across this country, and in service of our state association members.” Pickler noted that the NSBA Board of Directors has focused significant energies over the past few years to reform, restructure, and create a stronger national organization for school boards.

2012-2013 President C. Ed Massey:

Adaptive leadership was the theme of Massey’s presidency this year, and in his final address as President of NSBA, he reflected on the changes this leadership has brought about. Massey discussed his travels during his presidency; he made it to 26 states and two countries – Finland and Estonia. In those places, he said, he met many people “with a passion for public education and the interest of children.” And while Finland may top the U.S. education system in some ways, “they can’t match us in creativity,” he said.

Executive Director Thomas J. Gentzel:

Gentzel discussed the “New NSBA” and plans for NSBA to have a more assertive role in advocating for local school board governance, noting that state and federal officials are increasingly encroaching upon decisions best left to local school leaders. Gentzel unveiled NSBA’s new logo launching this summer.

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Success for All

American School Board Journal offers a bonus, too – online articles on topics that help school board members and other school leaders do their jobs.

You can read these articles on our website even if you are not a subscriber to ASBJ.

You’ll find a treasure trove of information on school governance available online only. We’ve just posted “Educational Ecosystems: Identifying the Next Generation of Superintendents,” by Brian A. Sheehan, an instructional leader with Massachusetts’ Malden Public Schools.

In candid interviews, five Massachusetts superintendents talk to Sheehan about how well they were prepared – or not prepared – for their current jobs as school leaders. Their remarks will give you insight into how to hire and manage your superintendent, as well as some of the challenges facing the profession.

In “Teachers are more than tests,” he reflects on his past teachers and how teachers now must look for ways to teach skills beyond the rote memorization needed for some standardized tests.

Neil Putnam

Putnam writes: “Today, as a parent and a school board member, I have developed a respect for educators. As a parent, I appreciate what they are doing to prepare my children for their futures, and I visit with other parents who concur with my appreciation. As a board member, particularly being involved in state and federal education policy, I am concerned about some of the fixation on test scores as the sole measurement of the quality of teaching. I would contend a more subjective measurement should be whether students leave the classroom more curious, creative, cooperative, collaborative, and have the character and citizenship to participate in society.”

Read more in The Daily Republic.

In an amicus brief, NSBA and the Colorado Association of School Boards are asking the High Court to review Jefferson County School District R-1 v. Elizabeth E.,  a case from the U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, and clarify the limits of the tuition reimbursement provision of the nation’s main special education law, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).

“School districts are dedicated to educating children with disabilities, but federal law should recognize that they are not designed or funded to function as medical care providers,” said NSBA Executive Director Thomas J. Gentzel. “Districts should not be required to pay for expensive health services that are needed primarily for medical treatment of mental health issues, not educational needs, because those would be beyond the scope and intent of IDEA.”

The case involves Elizabeth E., a student in Jefferson County, Colo., who was diagnosed with several mental health conditions. Until the eighth grade, she attended a private school, for which the Jefferson County Public Schools agreed to pay half the tuition. When Elizabeth’s behavioral disabilities began escalating, her parents unilaterally placed her in a residential treatment center out of state and sought reimbursement from the school district.

The U.S. Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the parents were entitled to reimbursement under IDEA. The appeals court reached its decision by creating an entirely new standard that added more turmoil to an area of law in which other courts have already devised several conflicting standards, leaving no clear guidance for school districts.

“We urge the High Court to reverse the Tenth Circuit’s ruling which would require public schools to bear mental health care costs under the IDEA in a manner unintended by Congress,” said Francisco M. Negrón, Jr., NSBA’s General Counsel. “The high costs associated with such an interpretation of the IDEA could ultimately undermine the ability of public schools to provide educational services for all children.”

Learn more about the case in NSBA’s Legal Clips.

Before becoming Executive Director of NMSBA, Guillen was a school board member for more than ten years on the
Española Public Schools Board of Directors and was the 2004-2006 Chair of NHC and an ex-officio member of the NSBA Board of Directors during his time as NHC Chair.

The NHC works to promote and advance equal educational opportunities for Hispanic children. NHC members are actively engaged in a national dialogue on educational problems, issues and concerns in conjunction with NSBA and other national organizations committed to the continued growth and development of minority youth.

The one-year-old program has diverted taxpayers’ money from public schools to private individuals and schools that are not subject to academic, operational, and accountability standards.

Working with the Louisiana School Boards Association (LSBA), NSBA pushed to overturn the law through an amicus brief in Louisiana Federation of Teachers v. State of Louisiana. That lawsuit challenged the constitutionality of several measures adopted by the Louisiana legislature, including the ploy to give vouchers to students in low-performing schools. The NSBA brief noted that the voucher scheme further aggravates the plight of academically challenged schools by taking away much-needed funds from low-performing public schools, thus perpetuating its own survival.

“These kinds of gimmicks undermine our country’s longstanding commitment to public education and steal resources from public school students,” said NSBA Executive Director Thomas J. Gentzel. “These are not grassroots efforts being proposed by residents who are concerned about the education and future of the state’s most vulnerable children, these are the products of out-of-state special-interest groups looking for profits.”

Under the provisions of the voucher law, Louisiana gives public funds to private schools, including religious schools, as “scholarships” to cover the tuition and fees of students whose parents choose to remove their children from public schools deemed “failing.” However, the plan goes so far as to allow parents to use vouchers for their children as early as kindergarten, even if the child never attended a public school or the school is highly ranked.

“We are pleased that the Louisiana Supreme Court has reaffirmed a basic tenet of the state Constitution: that taxpayer money should go to public schools that are open to all students,” said LSBA Executive Director Scott Richard. “We hope all state residents can understand the dangerous precedent that a voucher program has set and how such a program undermines our local community schools. LSBA will continue to work towards its mission of service, support and leadership for local school boards and to ensure a quality public education for all students.”

NSBA opposes private school vouchers and tuition tax subsidies, which have continuously failed to improve student achievement. NSBA is committed to defeating legislation and initiatives that unconstitutionally divert taxpayers’ funds from public schools to private and religious institutions that can exclude students for any reason.

“NSBA stands for strong public school system for all students. Vouchers undermine that fundamental principle and, as the court concluded, violate constitutional principles, too,” said NSBA President David A. Pickler.

The groups were founded to help school board members focus on narrowing the achievement gap and identifying promising practices that will improve achievement for all students, as well as address the particular challenges facing minority students.

“NSBA’s caucuses serve an important role in furthering our mission for equity and excellence for all students,” said NSBA Executive Director Thomas J. Gentzel.

Following are the names of the individuals elected to new leadership roles within each caucus.

National Black Caucus of School Board Members:

• The NBC selected Tawana Lynn Keels, President of the Princeton City (Ohio) School’s Board of Education, as Chair. In 1996 she was the first African-American woman to be elected to the Princeton school board, and later was the first selected as Vice President and President of the board. Keels is also a member of the Board of Directors of Great Oaks Institute of Technology and Career Development, and she was the 2009 President of the Ohio School Boards Association.

• Ellis A. Alexander of Hahnville, La., was elected to serve as Chair-Elect. He has been a member of Louisiana’s St. Charles Parish Public Schools board for the past seven years.

• Emma D. Turner of Spring Valley, Calif., was elected to serve as Secretary-Treasurer. She is a member of La Mesa-Spring Valley School District board in California.

• David Evans of Arizona’s Chandler Unified School District was elected as NBC’s Pacific Region director.

National Hispanic Caucus of School Board Members:

• Guillermo Z. López of Lansing, Mich., will continue to serve as Chair of the NHC. López is the President of the Lansing School District’s Board of Education. He was first elected to the board in 2001. He also works as an Equal Opportunity Specialist for the City of Lansing in the Human Relations and Community Services Department.

• Lillian Tafoya of Bakersfield, Calif. will serve as Chair-elect. Tafoya has served on the Bakersfield City School District Board of Education for 17 years. She is a former school administrator who was named Principal of the Year by the Association of California School Administrators in 1993.

• Lydia Hernandez of Phoenix, Ariz., will serve as secretary.

• Ruth Cruz-Roldan of Harrisburg, Pa., was elected to Northeast Region Director and Denise García of Phoenix, Ariz., was elected to Western Region Director.

National Caucus of American Indian and Alaska Native School Board Members:

• Roy Nelson, Treasurer of the Red Lake School District Independent School District #83 in Red Lake, Minn., was elected as NCAIAN Chair. Nelson also is a member of the Red Lake Bank of Ojibwe Indians.

• Sara Mae Williams, the board clerk for the Baboquivari Unified School District #40 in Sells, Ariz., was elected to serve as Chair-elect.

• Bob Cassa, President of the San Carlos Unified School District in San Carlos, Ariz., was elected as Secretary-Treasurer.

• The NCAIAN also elected Matthew J. Martinez of New Mexico’s Ohkay Ownegh School Board as its Western Region Director, Russell Havens of Louisiana’s Beauregard Parish Schools as its Southern Region Director, and Katrina Talkalai of Arizona’s San Carlos Unified School District as its Pacific Region Director.

The U.S. Senate passed its version of the legislation on May 8. The bill is sponsored by Senator Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), and would require online retailers to collect and remit sales and use taxes to states and local governments, commensurate to brick-and-mortar businesses. Overall, S. 743 seeks to level the playing field between online retailers and local “Main Street” retailers, thereby establishing a level of parity and addressing erosion of local and state tax systems.

The bipartisan bill would allow states and local governments to collect an estimated $23 billion per year that could be used to address budget shortfalls in education and other priorities. S. 743 would exclude small online retailers with annual revenues less than $1 million.

Under the legislation, each state that is a part of the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement would be authorized to collect remote sales and use taxes. Likewise, states that are not a member under the Agreement could collect remote sales and use taxes, provided they implement simplification requirements such as establishing a single entity responsible for tax administration, return processing and audits and establishing a uniform sales and use tax base among a state and its local taxing jurisdictions.

Introduced by Rep. Aaron Schock (R-lll.) on March 21, the bill had as original co-sponsors Reps. Schock, Rodney Davis of Illinois, Ron Kind of Wisconsin, Patrick Meehan of Pennsylvania, and David Valadao of California. Since then, 11 more members of the U.S. House of Representatives have signed on: Reps. Lou Barletta (PA), Jo Bonner (AL), Kevin Cramer (ND), Jim Gerlach (PA), Bob Gibbs (OH), Adam Kinzinger (IL), Cynthia Lummis (WY), Kenny Marchant (TX), Mick Mulvaney (SC), Stevan Pearce (NM.), Ted Poe (TX), and Marlin Stutzman (IN).

School board members are encouraged to contact their House members to become co-sponsors. Increased focus is now being directed to urge senators to introduce a companion bill in the U.S. Senate, and school board members also are encouraged to contact their senators and urge them to sponsor similar legislation.

Also in the May issue, we are featuring two school boards in our Agents of Change series. A Tennessee leadership team shows that stability doesn’t mean defending the status quo, and an Illinois board and superintendent team was able to avoid drastic cuts and layoffs through a innovative solution.

While you’re at asbj.com, vote in this month’s Adviser question on the home page and check out the 2013 Magna Award winners at www.asbj.com/magna.

The National School Boards Association’s (NSBA) Center for Public Education (CPE)  finds that while there have been some successes there’s not much evidence yet that many of these strategies will work on a larger scale.

The report, “Which Way Up?  What research says about school turnaround strategies,” reviews numerous methods of school improvement to determine which, if any, hold the most promise, but finds that in most cases it’s too early to tell.

“With the significant federal investment and mandated models to ‘turnaround’ low-performing schools, we have limited research to date on the effectiveness of these strategies and little guidance on what actually works,” said NSBA Executive Director Thomas J. Gentzel.  “We know that school improvement funding is extremely important, but it should encourage innovation, instead of mandating unnecessary federal restrictions.”

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law has placed a larger focus on turnaround strategies by identifying schools with low performance and sizable achievement gaps. The main federal turnaround program, the School Improvement Grant (SIG), targets schools in the bottom 5 percent nationwide with four models of reform ranging from replacing staff to shutting down a school. These strategies are echoed in the federal Race to the Top grants and so-called Parent Trigger laws being introduced in a handful of states.

One federal study showed that two-thirds of SIG grant recipients posted gains with the infusion of federal funds, but because the report was based on only one year’s data, it was too early to draw conclusions.

“The focus on the nation’s lowest performing schools is vitally important so we can make sure all students have the benefit of a solid public education,” said Patte Barth, CPE’s Director. “In these efforts, education policymakers need to balance the need for evidence-based strategies while tapping the potential for local innovation, especially in cases like turnaround strategies where the data is limited.”

In examining research on the impact of school closure, restart, transformation, and turnaround models, the report concludes:

• Research is limited. There is some evidence of success, primarily for schools undertaking more dramatic turnaround reforms, but data collected over a longer period of time is needed.
• The vast majority of SIG schools — about three-quarters are choosing the “transformation model” which provides the most flexibility for local planners.
• Replacing a majority of teachers—required in the turnaround model—presents challenges for some schools. Rural schools are particularly challenged to find enough teachers to meet the replacement requirements.
• Rural schools also face difficulties with the restart model since they have limited access to private management organizations. The closure model also may not be feasible if they have no other schools in which to send students. Even in urban areas, a closure model seems to be promising only when students can transfer to schools with higher achievement rates.
• Replacing a principal may show promise, as some studies indicate principals are second only to teachers in their impact on student learning.  But the strategy is new and again, the data is limited.

NSBA has repeatedly voiced concerns about the U.S. Department of Education’s mandates and overreach, which hinder school officials’ abilities to address their unique local needs. In response to NSBA concerns, the Local School Board Governance and Flexibility Act (HR 1386) has been introduced and now has 15 cosponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill would ensure that the agency engages local school boards much more to preclude federal requirements that are ineffective and beyond local school district capacity.