Waco Looks Inward to Turn Around Troubled Schools

It’s now a familiar story: low-performing schools, nearly 100 percent poor kids of color, are given a stark set of choices by the state education agency, first through No Child Left Behind and now through the Every Child Succeeds Act (ESSA)—close, reconstitute with new staff, or cede control to non-district charter operators. The affected communities are often deeply opposed to the loss of their school but see little choice other than an external charter operator.

Do these options for failing schools produce better results? So far, there are no clear wins. What the research does say is that no strategy, whether implemented in cities as diverse as Baltimore, Denver, Oakland, New York, or New Orleans, provides any guarantee of success, and that each response faces the common trials of political conflict, administrative inertia, lack of qualified teachers and principals, finite funding streams and, of course, the complex web of challenges that kids living in poverty bring with them to school each day.