Obama to fix failing schools?

President Obama is planning to use a special $5 billion federal school turnaround program to prod local officials to reshape—and in some cases close and reopen—failing schools. The changes could consist of replacing teachers and principals or turning schools into charter school programs.

The goal is to take the nation's 5,000 lowest-performing schools—the bottom 5 percent—and transform 1,000 of them per year, over the next five years, into robust institutions of learning, Education Secretary Arne Duncan recently said. He was speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington, a leading education think tank. Department of Education officials say that closing and reopening schools is not the purpose of the intervention, but it may be deemed necessary for some schools, especially "dropout factories" where 2 in 5 kids don't make it to graduation.

Obama's focus on failing schools comes on the heels of a historic injection of federal education funding courtesy of his economic stimulus package, which doubles what the education budget had been under President Bush.

The 5,000 schools that will be targeted for the makeover will be determined by the states and local districts based on criteria they set themselves under the guidance of the federal Education Department. The criteria might include dropout rates, test scores, and the number of graduates going on to attend college. In determining which schools are "the most in need of help," the Department of Education says that local and state officials should take student achievement growth into account and should consider intervention for only the lowest-performing schools that are not making progress....

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