Special Report
Federal

Obama Wants to Turn Around 5,000 Failing Schools

By The Associated Press — May 11, 2009 2 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

President Barack Obama intends to use $5 billion to prod local officials to close failing schools and reopen them with new teachers and principals.

The goal is to turn around 5,000 failing schools in the next five years, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday.

The plan is to beef up funding for the federal school turnaround program, created by the No Child Left Behind law, which gets about $500 million a year. The stimulus legislation boosted funding to $3.5 billion. Obama’s budget would add another $1.5 billion by shifting dollars away from traditional formula programs.

Obama doesn’t have authority to close and reopen schools himself. That power rests with local school districts and states. But he has an incentive in the economic stimulus law, which requires states to help failing schools improve.

Duncan said that might mean firing an entire staff and bringing in a new one, replacing a principal or turning a school over to a charter school operator. The point, he said, is to take bold action in persistently low-achieving schools.

“Our students have one chance — one chance — to get a quality education,” Duncan said in a speech Monday to the Brookings Institution think tank.

“If we turn around just the bottom 1 percent, the bottom thousand schools per year for the next five years, we could really move the needle, lift the bottom and change the lives of tens of millions of underserved children,” Duncan said.

In particular, the administration wants to fix middle schools and high schools, focusing on “dropout factories” where two in five kids don’t make it to graduation.

Duncan, a former Chicago schools chief, has plenty of experience with school turnarounds. Chicago targeted several public schools for turnaround, eight of them last year, while Duncan was still in charge. It’s too soon to know how the eight fared.

The plan to focus on failing schools is part of an effort by Obama to fundamentally change the perception of what works in education. It comes as the administration prepares to rewrite President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind education law.

The president already has channeled an unprecedented amount of money into the traditional federal funding for elementary, middle and high schools in his economic stimulus law.

But Obama also plans big boosts for newer and, some argue, untested ideas, plowing more dollars into school turnarounds as well as merit pay for teachers.

“Here’s a chance to do something dramatically different,” Duncan told The Associated Press after his speech. “I don’t want to lose that opportunity.”

Combined with the budget plan released last week, Obama may have as much as $5 billion to facilitate school turnarounds, which could translate to $1 million for every school targeted for turnaround.

Related Tags:

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Events

This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Reading & Literacy Webinar
The Future of the Science of Reading
Join us for a discussion on the future of the Science of Reading and how to support every student’s path to literacy.
Content provided by HMH
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
College & Workforce Readiness Webinar
From Classrooms to Careers: How Schools and Districts Can Prepare Students for a Changing Workforce
Real careers start in school. Learn how Alton High built student-centered, job-aligned pathways.
Content provided by TNTP
Mathematics K-12 Essentials Forum Helping Students Succeed in Math

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Federal Trump Admin. Says Undocumented Students Can't Attend Head Start, Early College
The administration issued notices saying undocumented immigrants don't qualify for Head Start and some Education Department programs.
7 min read
Children play during aftercare for the Head Start program at Easterseals South Florida, an organization that gets about a third of its funding from the federal government, on Jan. 29, 2025, in Miami.
Children play during aftercare for the Head Start program at Easterseals South Florida, an organization that gets about a third of its funding from the federal government, on Jan. 29, 2025, in Miami. The Trump administration said Thursday that undocumented children are ineligible for Head Start and a number of other federally funded programs that the administration is classifying as similar to welfare benefits.
Rebecca Blackwell/AP
Federal How Medicaid, SNAP Changes in Trump's Big Budget Bill Could Affect Schools
The bill will stress a major funding stream schools rely on, leading to ripple effects that make it harder for schools to offer free meals.
6 min read
President Donald Trump signs his signature bill of tax breaks and spending cuts at the White House on July 4, 2025, in Washington.
President Donald Trump signs his signature bill of tax breaks and spending cuts at the White House on July 4, 2025, in Washington. The bill cuts federal spending for Medicaid and food stamps—cuts that stand to affect students and trickle down to schools.
Evan Vucci/AP
Federal Opinion A D.C. Insider Explains What’s Changed in Education Policy
The biggest thing that people don’t understand about federal education policy? How much the details really matter.
7 min read
The United States Capitol building as a bookcase filled with red, white, and blue policy books in a Washington DC landscape.
Luca D'Urbino for Education Week
Federal What Superintendents Think About a Steady Clip of Federal K-12 Changes
A state superintendent and two district leaders shared their thoughts on the latest changes coming from Washington.
4 min read
From left, Quentin J. Lee, superintendent of Talladega City Schools, Keith Konyk, superintendent of Elizabeth Forward School District, and Eric Mackey, Alabama's state superintendent of education, discuss the latest K-12 policy changes at the ISTELive 25 + ASCD Annual Conference 25 on July 2, 2025.
From left, Quentin J. Lee, superintendent of Talladega City Schools in Alabama; Keith Konyk, superintendent of Elizabeth Forward School District in Pennsylvania; and Eric Mackey, Alabama's state superintendent of education, discuss the latest K-12 policy changes at the ISTELive 25 + ASCD Annual Conference 25 on July 2, 2025.
Kaylee Domzalski/Education Week