Improving urban schools is slow, laborious work, like turning around the proverbial supertanker. But last week brought heartening evidence that Washington, D.C.’s schools have a competent skipper at the helm.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reported that the District’s traditional public schools boosted fourth-grade reading scores faster than any of the 18 urban school districts taking its test. Those scores rose six points over the past two years, while eighth-grade reading scores increased by four points. These gains have been widely hailed as proof – even by erstwhile skeptics — that D.C. School Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s controversial efforts to boost student performance are beginning to get traction.

They are also good news for Mayor Adrian Fenty, who took over the schools three years ago and brought Rhee in to shake things up. Fenty is locked in a tough reelection fight with D.C. City Council Chairman Vincent Gray, who has sought to capitalize on a local backlash against the Fenty-Rhee reforms.

These changes, however, are likely to look like child’s play compared to the challenge Rhee faces now. She and other school leaders are under mounting pressure from the No Child Left Behind law and the Obama administration to turn around the city’s worst-performing schools. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has challenged struggling districts to turn around the nation’s 5,000 lowest-performing schools, and he’s dangling big carrots as an inducement.

What exactly does ”turning around” schools mean? In order for districts to get the federal money, they must choose one of four strategies to improve their worst schools: turnaround, restart, closure or transformation. Under turnaround and transformation, districts must fire principals, reform instruction and expand learning time. Turnaround also requires that they fire 50 percent of teachers in failing schools. Closure entails shutting such schools down and sending students to better schools in the district. Restart means closing the schools and reopening them as public charter schools or under another type of education management organization.

Why such drastic measures? Because a quarter-century of national attention on such schools, including big increases in funding, haven’t made much of a dent in the large achievement and graduation gaps between suburban, largely white students and urban minorities. Despite the gains in D.C. students’ NAEP scores, for example, the District still ranks well below the average of all U.S. schools, as well as schools in comparable large cities. Says Rhee, with characteristic bluntness, “We still have a ridiculously long way to go.”

It’s not that there haven’t been plenty of individual success stories, especially in the charter school sector which now includes more than 1.5 million students. The big question now is how to scale up the number of high-performing schools available to low-income kids, while dealing with chronic underachievers.

Progressive school reformers, led by President Obama and Duncan, have grown impatient with the agonizingly slow pace of improvement in poor urban and rural areas. With its $3.5 billion Race to the Top Fund, the administration is offering districts incentives to speed things up.

But not all Democrats are ready for more radical, and disruptive, change. Rep. Judy Chu of California last week released a report criticizing school turnaround approaches as unduly drastic and rigid. She won backing from the big teachers’ unions, including Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Skepticism about turnarounds isn’t confined to Democrats, either. Andy Smarick of the American Enterprise Institute believes that efforts to raise the bar for low-performing public schools almost always fail. The more realistic solution, in his view, is to shut them down and replace them with new and better ones, including charters.

But other reformers point to encouraging signs of successful turnarounds in places like Los Angeles, New York and Philadelphia. A key obstacle to success, they say, are district bureaucracies and collective bargaining agreements that undercut the autonomy of school leaders and prevent them from firing bad teachers, extending school days and assessing teachers on the basis of growth in student performance.

PPI will illuminate the pros and cons of school turnarounds in a Capital Forum this Wednesday in Washington. It will feature Chancellor Rhee, Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO), and several prominent turnaround experts and critics. The event will be webcast on ProgressiveFix.com starting at 11:30 a.m.

With Rhee driving change in traditional schools, and one of the nation’s largest public charter sectors, Washington is on the front lines of the school reform debate. Stay tuned for the coming battle over turnarounds.

Photo credit: The National Academy of Sciences