Lessons For Failing Schools

In a New York Times article,"Lessons for Failing Schools", the author states that the $100 billion education stimulus package gives Education Secretary Arne Duncan unprecedented leverage to energize the languishing school reform effort, (published on July 5, 2009). The author believes that Duncan should focus his efforts on the relatively small number of schools that produce so many of the nation’s dropouts. In this case, his audience may be teachers or adults with children who attend low-rated schools. The author states that Duncan can use his burgeoning discretionary budget to reward states that take the initiative in this area, but Congress could push the reform effort further and faster by granting the education department’s request for two changes in federal education law. The first would be to come up with new federal school improvement money and require the states to focus 40 percent of it on the lowest-performing middle and high schools. The second change would allow the secretary to directly finance charter-school operators that have already produced high-quality schools. I also agree with the author in which the secretary should target the small number of schools that produce most of the number of dropouts in the nation because the nation can no longer tolerate schools that have trapped generations of students at the margins of society and locked them out of the new economy.