In 2009, the Obama administration saw a chance to tackle a problem that had bedeviled educators for decades.

“Our goal is to turn around the 5,000 lowest-performing schools over the next five years, as part of our overall strategy for dramatically reducing the dropout rate, improving high school graduation rates and increasing the number of students who graduate prepared for success in college and the workplace,” said Arne Duncan, the administration’s new secretary of education in August of that year.


The administration pumped $3 billion of economic stimulus money into the School Improvement Grants program. Six years later, the program has failed to produce the dramatic results the administration had hoped to achieve. About two thirds of SIG schools nationwide made modest or no gains — not much different from similarly bad schools that got no money at all. About a third of the schools actually got worse.

Even Duncan acknowledges the progress has been “incremental.”

School turnaround is “hard, but it’s not rocket science,” said Sarah Yatsko, a senior research analyst at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “We know a lot about what an effective turnaround strategy looks like.”

But then why has the SIG program, created in 2007 under President George W. Bush, produced such uneven results at a total cost of about $7 billion?

A comparison by POLITICO of two troubled high schools — one in Miami and one in Chicago — both of which received millions in SIG funds, both of which followed a similar turnaround strategy, reveals that education officials at the federal, state and local levels paid too little attention to a key variable for success. One school made impressive gains, rebounding in three years from an “F” rating to a “B.” At the other, less than 10 percent of juniors are proficient at reading, math and science — the same level as before the grant.

The difference between the schools was in their readiness to make use of the sudden infusion of money. In Miami, school district officials had prepared for the grants. They had the support of teachers, unions and parents. In Chicago, where teachers fought the program and officials changed almost yearly, schools churned through millions of dollars but didn’t budge the needle.

Now, the Department of Education is preparing for another multi-million grant competition. But interviews by POLITICO with nearly two dozen analysts, teachers, administrators and policymakers, who have studied the performance of SIG schools, raise questions about whether any of the changes ordered by the Department of Education or Congress will actually yield better results for the money spent.

“Reviewers need to spend more time focusing on who’s ready and who isn’t,” Yatsko said. “One thing that people have glommed on to is that the program offered a tremendous amount of money and a lot of it was wasted."

READY IN MIAMI

When Duncan made his pronouncement, Alberto Carvalho had been the superintendent of the Miami-Dade public schools for about a year. It was “a dark time for Miami schools,” Carvalho told POLITICO. The state of Florida was threatening to shut down a number of them. Huge achievement gaps divided poor, black and Hispanic children and their more affluent, white peers.

But Carvalho, 51, had an advantage going in. He knew what didn’t work.

As a deputy to former Miami Superintendent Rudy Crew, Carvalho had his hand on federal funding for the district’s failing schools and he had seen up close the implementation of Crew’s School Improvement Zone plan. That initiative had mixed results, which critics attributed to its lack of focus on developing effective teachers and administrators.

In his new job, Carvalho went looking for expertise and he hired Nikolai Vitti, Florida’s deputy chancellor of school improvement, to head Miami’s Education Transformation Office. Vitti drew on lessons he learned at the state level while Carvalho, who had to weather a mini-scandal over a romantic affair with a local reporter, deftly cleared political barriers, securing buy-in from the school board and the community.

When the $43 million in SIG money arrived in 2010, Carvalho and Vitti knew that improving personnel in the failing schools would be the key to their success. That meant moving weak teachers out and replacing them with stronger teachers from high-performing schools.

In order to do that, the district and the United Teachers of Dade signed a memorandum of understanding to help ease teachers through the changes. The union took pains to ensure that transferred teachers were happy with their new placements. For example, some were moved to better schools closer to home, cutting down commutes.

Miami Edison Senior High School was one of the 19 schools in the Miami-Dade district that got SIG money in the first round of grants. Located in Miami’s impoverished Little Haiti neighborhood, it was known as a dropout factory — less than half of students graduated during the 2007-08 school year. A year later, just 12 percent of students were reading at or above grade level.

Counterclockwise: Miami Edison Senior High School, located in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood; Samuel Prunier helps Travis Alexander, 17, with an Algebra 2 problem at Miami Edison High School; Nikolai Vitti, now superintendent of the Duval County (Fla.) public schools, helped ensure federal money was used effectively in Miami-Dade. | Max Reed and Andrew Stanfill photos for Politico

After years of failure, the state ordered Edison to hire a new principal, who started in 2009. Then, with the help of nearly $1.5 million over three years in federal grant money, officials changed out more than half of the school staff. The district brought in Teach for America recruits and held teacher recruitment fairs. Top teachers who volunteered to work at Edison were given financial incentives, like signing bonuses and extra pay for boosting student test scores.

The strategy worked.

Over the three-year period, test scores went up and students made significant learning gains. Nearly three-quarters earned a diploma the first year after the grant ran out.

“When you feel empowered to do your job, who wouldn’t get results?” said Dannielle Boyer, a former teacher at Miami Edison. Boyer volunteered to transfer to another SIG school, North Miami Senior High School, so she could work with the school’s Haitian students. She also received a stipend.

The results were similar across the district. In 2013, at the end of the first round of grants, the number of Miami schools receiving a “D” or “F” grade was cut in half — from 19 schools to nine. Test scores went up. And the district cut the number of days spent on out-of-school and in-school suspensions by a quarter.

Carvalho tried to ensure the gains would last through a strong succession of leaders.

Vitti left during the 2012-13 school year, the last year of Edison's SIG grant, to be superintendent of schools in Jacksonville, Florida. Miami Edison Principal Pablo Ortiz, who saw results at his school under SIG, took Vitti’s place in the district office. And the district, which had been grooming education leaders for tough jobs, picked Trynegwa K. Diggs as Edison’s new principal.

Diggs, 42, had worked in struggling schools. She shadowed a model principal at another SIG-grant school. A common thread runs through all struggling schools, she said, but each one is “extremely unique.”

Despite its gains, Edison still struggles with proficiency rates, particularly in reading. Before the grant, just 12 percent of students were reading at grade level or better. The year after the grant, the percentage of students nearly doubled to 23 percent, but that’s still very low.

“Some students have no knowledge of the English language,” Diggs said, referring to the quarter of the school's 800 students who are Haitian. “Some had no formal education in Haiti, but you’re still responsible for making sure that they graduate.”

The teachers are used to visiting students’ homes, particularly when Haitian parents aren’t involved in their child’s education. Even physical education teacher Nehemy Cher-frere makes home visits.

“I tell the parents, ‘You’re not in Haiti now, you need to come to the school and talk to the teachers,’” he said. “You have to be a teacher, a father figure and a friend.”

RESISTANT IN CHICAGO

If leadership was key to Miami’s readiness, the revolving door at Chicago Public Schools has been that district’s undoing. Six different interim and permanent leaders have occupied the top office since Arne Duncan left in 2009 when Obama asked him to come to Washington. One of them, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, pleaded guilty in October to wire fraud for steering multimillion-dollar no-bid contracts to a former employer.

“Before I was here, there was CEO Paul Vallas for about seven years. I did about 7½, so you had two CEOs over 15 years. You had some stability,” Duncan said in April. “And that kind of lack of continuity, that lack of stability ... this is what makes me sad.”

A powerful and combative teachers’ union in Chicago added to the challenge.

Timothy Meegan, a high school civics teacher and union delegate who ran for alderman, said teachers at his school circulated petitions to keep the grant money out because they heard “horror stories” from other schools. Principals and administrators were “secretive” about the grant process, Meegan said. Unlike teachers in Miami, teachers in Chicago didn’t feel involved and felt that they were losing control over their classrooms as the emphasis shifted to testing.

“Sometimes these interventions only reach in, break everything up and leave it again,” said Mary Ann Pitcher co-director of the Network for College Success, which has partnered with SIG schools in Chicago. “All of that trauma and transition hinders and prevents progress.”

All of these factors were on display at Christian Fenger Academy, located in one of the poorest and most violent neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side. The high school had been on probation for more than a dozen years for poor student performance. Teacher turnover was high and instruction was suffering. In 2009, the beating death of a 16-year-old student captured on a 2-minute video rocked the school and the community.

Counterclockwise: Chicago police watch students outside Christian Fenger Academy in 2009 shortly after the beating death of a 16-year-old; Liz Dozier, former principal of Fenger, was once labeled “America’s toughest principal;” Barbara Byrd-Bennett, former CEO of Chicago public schools, pleaded guilty in October to steering a no-bid contract worth more than $20 million to a former employer. | AP Images

Like Edison in Miami, Fenger replaced the principal and overhauled the staff. But the similar strategy produced very different results. Last year, just 5 percent of Fenger’s juniors met or exceeded state standards in reading, math and English — compared with the district average of 33 percent. Only about half of the students graduated within five years. Less than half enrolled in college.

Liz Dozier, 37, arrived at Fenger to take the principal’s job in 2009. The school had about 1,200 students at the time. But new charter schools opened and families sought suburban or out-of-state schools. During the last school year, Fenger’s enrollment had plummeted to about 270 students, nearly all black and from low-income families.

Dozier, along with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, starred in CNN's "Chicagoland," a 2014 documentary that demonstrated problems at Fenger continued unabated after the SIG money ran out. “Test scores have always been a struggle,” Dozier told POLITICO, but the school is better off because of the grant. More freshmen are now on track to graduate high school and more students are graduating on time, she said.

The story was more or less the same at all four of the Chicago schools that received the funds in 2010: test scores in reading on the state’s Prairie State Achievement Examination declined over the course of the three-year grant. After the grant ran out, the percentage of students reading at or above grade level still hovered around 10 percent.

What really hampered the turnaround effort, Dozier said, was not the turmoil in the district office or pushback from the union, it was the short life of the grant. As students left, so did staff, draining away institutional knowledge about the school’s improvement efforts, she said. Dozier left Fenger in July, for reasons she won't divulge.

In addition, violence, unemployment, the economic well-being of the community “all ripple into how and whether kids are able to learn,” Dozier added. “The school faces some really unique issues,” she said. “The challenge hasn’t changed because unfortunately, the kids who enter our school still have needs, social-emotional needs.”

Progress in Chicago has been minimal because “these schools are constantly being tinkered with,” said Meegan, the civics teacher and alderman candidate. “There’s no stability, there are no resources ... those schools have always had trouble and they always will until poverty is addressed.”

But some say leaning on poverty and other social ills is not an acceptable excuse.

Andy Smarick, a partner at Bellwether Education Partners, said, “The excuse that poverty is going to stop us from providing a good education to kids is the kind of excuse that makes adults feel good.”

“If they think that poor kids are never going to learn, then why did we just spend $7 billion?”

LEARNING FROM MISTAKES

The Obama administration was flying blind at the onset of the stimulus funding, said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools.

“They didn’t have a whole lot of SIG evaluation data to go on,” Casserly said, a program supporter. “But at this point, I would hope that they’ve learned a lot about what produces results and what doesn’t.”

But the results are in, and it’s not clear that schools are being held to the standard set by Miami.

“We’ve seen some schools and districts that have been very committed to implementation and they’ve made double digit gains,” said Ann Whalen, a senior adviser to Duncan who oversees School Improvement Grants. “And we’ve seen others take this opportunity and continue doing what they’ve done before.”

Duncan told reporters in October that the SIG program hasn't been perfect. But it's more about "challenging folks to think about — is the right idea to start a new school? Is the right idea longer instructional time? Is the right idea more social workers and counselors? Is the right idea more parental engagement?

"It was appropriate for us not just to talk about it, but to put huge resources, very significant resources behind this," Duncan said. "And I can tell you, just anecdotally, that I’ve been to I would say potentially dozens of schools that have been transformed. And to see in two or three years the difference there — none of them are perfect, none are where they want to be — but it’s unbelievably motivating. Same buildings, same neighborhoods, same socio-economic challenges, same everything, just different expectations and different results."

That said, the agency should continue to make sure schools are prepared, Whalen, his deputy, said.

But it has always been up to states to consider school and district readiness, among other factors, she said. The goal of the program was to give states and districts an incentive to help local leaders implement rigorous reform.

“We’re trying to make sure that we don’t overreach,” Whalen said. “We’re not going to tell [states] how to run their process.”

But that hasn’t stopped Congress from tinkering with the rules for the SIG program. Congressionally-ordered changes to the program took effect this year, with the goal of giving schools more flexibility to divert from the four approved turnaround models — becoming a charter; closing the school and sending students elsewhere; changing the principal and half the staff; or only changing the principal and overhauling teacher evaluations. (Three-quarters of schools chose the fourth option, considered by far the least disruptive.) Many consider the models too restrictive and say they aren't grounded in good research. The new changes expand the number of intervention models to seven.

The changes also allow schools and districts to spend a full year on planning and preparation, which will help with readiness, Whalen said. They lengthen the grant period from three years to five years to help schools avoid backsliding when the money runs out.

In September, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan speaks alongside President Barack Obama at a town hall style meeting at North High School in Des Moines, Iowa. Duncan, who Obama brought to Washington from Chicago, made turning around failing schools a priority of the administration. | Getty

Many worry that additional flexibility is the last thing states need.

“It’s remarkable to me that people bought into the view that the problem with the program is that it was too constraining,” Smarick said. “Why do failing districts and failing schools need more leeway to make these decisions?”

Whalen said flexibility is a “double-edged sword,” providing “opportunities for people to be less rigorous or more innovative.”

“We’re constantly trying to help build the capacity for people on the ground making these decisions to make better decisions to support kids,” she said. “But nothing is going to be fixed solely from D.C.”

Several studies have shown that states often lack the resources and expertise to adequately turn around low-performing schools. More than three-quarters of states surveyed said they lacked expertise for supporting school turnaround in 2012, according to a report released by the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance earlier this year. Eighty percent of states said the same in 2013.

“Study after study has shown that our state departments of education are under-resourced and do not have the capacity to do what we ask of them,” said Maria Ferguson of the Center on Education Policy.

But if the grant application process focused less on compliance and more on readiness at every level of government — ensuring that schools and districts have the right leaders, expertise, vision and buy-in from teachers and the community — then experts and turnaround leaders say the program might have generated better results.

“I wonder if the government could set higher bars around the aligning of the stars that need to happen,” said Yatsko of the Center on Reinventing Public Education. “It wouldn’t be too hard to look at an application and determine readiness, making sure that all the elements are in place.”

Nathan Gibbs-Bowling, recently named one of America’s top teachers, has watched the SIG grants play out in his Tacoma, Washington, school district. He said if the states and feds focus on one readiness factor, it should be leadership.

“If I was designing the program, I’d be investigating what’s on the ground in schools and districts to make sure that’s in place,” he said. “If the feds are going to keep giving out grants this large, it makes sense to create leadership teams that have to go in and take a look at this.”

“But I don’t think states or feds are willing to do that kind of granular investigation,” he added.

Whether the changes to the program lead to better results — and whether the Obama administration has learned its lessons — remains to be seen.

And the School Improvement Grants program may soon disappear. Congress is close to reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, and both the House and Senate version of the bill would do away with the SIG program. There would still be money to fix the lowest-performing schools — the federal government just wouldn’t have a say in how to do it.

Regardless, the “federal government needs to be held accountable for spending billions of dollars on a program that all the experience told us wouldn’t produce the changes that they said it would,” Smarick said. “That’s something they’re going to have to explain.”

