The following is an excerpt from Will Marshall’s introductory remarks at the PPI Capital Forum – Turnaround Schools: Rising to the Challenge:

PPI has had a longstanding interest in school reform, going back to 1990, when we first started to agitate for this idea called charter schools even before the first school was opened in St. Paul, Minnesota. And throughout the years, we’ve worked on all kinds of reform issues. And we’re very happy today to talk about one that’s really heating up right now, this question of how you turn around low-performing schools in our cities and also in our rural communities.

Arne Duncan, our secretary of education, laid down a challenge last year with his Race to the Top fund. He challenged school leaders to turn around the 5,000 chronically underperforming schools in America and he’s made, I think, marvelous use of the bully pulpit of his job to leverage change around the country. It helps when you have $4 billion, too. That makes that bully pulpit all the more powerful. But really incredible changes in state legislatures and cities and contracts negotiated between school leaders and teachers’ unions, all before a whole lot of money has actually been spent, so it’s a heartening example of strong and bold political leadership.

And in the administration’s blueprint for reauthorizing ESEA, this turnaround challenge is embedded in that as well. Challenged states, states with lots of low-performing schools, are going to be required to turn around five percent of their lowest-performing schools, based on student achievement and growth and graduation rates, in order to qualify for grants from the federal government. So fortunately, in my view, we have a president and a secretary of education who are as serious as a heart attack about thoroughgoing school reform.

And we saw that in this case in Rhode Island, in Central Falls earlier this year, when the school authorities there, or the city, fired all the teachers in their local high school after they couldn’t come to an agreement about reforms there. And the president and the secretary of education, sort of, stood up for that, behind that decision. Now, they’ve since rehired the teachers because they’ve been able to work out a deal that will allow for reform to go forward there. But it was heartening to me that they didn’t flinch because this urgency is absolutely essential.

Closing the achievement gap in this country is proceeding at an agonizingly slow pace. It has been since the mid-’80s. And I think it’s really smart for our national leaders to target the worst-performing schools in the country. You know, of the bottom 5,000, 2,000 of those are responsible for 70 percent of all school dropouts, so it’s a good idea to focus on the ones that we really need to get on the triage table.

But obviously, there are some large and controversial questions about turnaround, which we want to explore today. I think there’s going to be ferocious political resistance if we start moving down this road. It’s going to make what’s gone before look like a picnic. You know, we’re talking about closing schools, the firing of many, and in some cases all, teachers in a school.

And obviously, there’s going to be blowback. Already, we’re seeing dissension on the Democratic side. This week, Rep. Judy Chu of California, a Democrat, came out with a report which is critical of the blueprint, calling it punitive. And then on the right, you have, on the conservative side, you have a lot of folks who believe it’s not punitive enough and who think that, really, the only remedy for failing schools is to close them down and reopen as charters, or maybe under private management.

So we’ve had high-profile defections from the reform camp, like Diane Ravitch, who we’ve worked with down the years. And in some respects, that’s puzzling to me, but so this question’s becoming increasingly fraught. Fortunately, we have a stellar group of folks here to talk about it today, to explore this issues….

First, let me just, you know, define the terms here because I think particularly for the non-experts, the laypeople, this whole turnaround issue’s sort of murky. What are we really talking about when we say turning around schools? Well, in the blueprint there are four models of intervention that school leaders must pursue to deal with low-performing schools, the bottom five percent. One is transformation, which entails firing principals and adopting research-based instruction and extended learning time – new governance models, structure.

The next is the redundantly named turnaround model, which entails the same things as transformation, except you can fire half of the school staff. The third model is the restart, to convert or to close down and reopen a school under a charter operator or another educational management organization. And the last and obviously most drastic is school closes and reopen – and sending kids to high-performing schools elsewhere in the district, if you can do that.

So our purpose here today is to explore the administration’s blueprint, to drill down on this question of what we know and don’t know about best practice and turnaround schools and to focus particularly on what turnaround means for Washington, D.C., which is why I’m so glad, thrilled to have Chancellor Michelle Rhee here today. Why focus on Washington? Well, one, we’re all here. This is where we work and play and I often think that Washington is an invisible city when it comes to the great national policy debates.

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We want a beachhead for innovation, but we’ve still got a long way to go. We’re still on the margins of a big public school enterprise with 50 million students. And frankly, the quality in the charter sector’s been really uneven and the scale of effort is just not sufficient to what we need. So as an authorizer, I can say that our challenge is the same one that you face, Chancellor, which is to reduce the number of low-performing schools and increase the number of high-performing ones. And it’s a hell of a lot harder to do than it sounds.

And the stakes are absolutely enormous. I’m not going to go over the stats, which probably everybody in this room knows, about the achievement gap. One number just did leap out at me. It was in the Brookings Institution’s “State of Metro America” report, which said that 85 percent of black and Latino adults in the United States lack a bachelor’s degree – 85 percent. What does that tell you? That tells you that our public schools are not preparing lots of folks for success – not preparing them for college, which is increasingly a minimum passport to career success.

That’s a huge problem. Nothing is more important, I think, in our country right now than solving it and getting school reform right. Obviously, it’s critical to our ability to compete and win globally. But even more, it’s critical to our ability to reverse the really disconcerting tendencies towards inequality, economic inequality, that have opened up in the last decade or so, and to redeem this country’s central political promise, which is equal opportunity.

For a full transcript of the event, click here (PDF). For the video, click here.

Photo credit: WzrdsRule