If we can close Lehman Brothers, why can’t we close a failing school? A recent NY Times article School Reform Efforts details the difficulty Secretary of Education Duncan faced when he headed the Chicago schools:

“Closing a school is the most difficult task any superintendent or school board can attempt, and not many succeed,” said Terry Mazany, who watched Mr. Duncan’s school makeovers as chief executive at the Chicago Community Trust. “But it’s not impossible, and it’s the right thing to do.”Mr. Duncan wants to see 250 schools closed and reconstituted next year. That would mean dismissing thousands of teachers next spring, hiring replacements and opening newly reconstituted schools in fall 2010. Formal closure is necessary for chronically failing schools, Mr. Duncan said, to reset the learning environment more dramatically than simply tweaking the curriculum and retraining the old staff.

President Obama is looking at the possibility of closing failing schools. Obama School Closure Plan The plan put forth by Secretary Duncan is to “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….” What could possibility stand in the way of educating kids, one might ask?

One answer to the question of why we can’t close failing schools is by looking at two schools on the West Coast. One School is in a poor district and another is in a very affluent district. Helms Middle School is located in the West Contra Costa Unified School District in northern California. Its students are poor and many of them do not have English as their first language. The interview with Helm’s principal highlights some of the school’s challenges. Helms School Harriet Mc Clean states her assessment of the problem with addressing failing schools.  “But there are so many factors that you have to take into consideration. It's not just an education problem, it's not just a taxation problem or a political problem or a social problem, it's everything.” Just up the coast in the affluent communities of Mercer Island and Bellevue, Washington the communities are able to address the lack of state resources by fundraising, something the parents at Helms don’t have the ability to do. Bellevue Schools Foundation

Urging supporters to get out their credit cards and open their wallets, the Bellevue Schools Foundation became the latest foundation to try to ease a tight budget with an extra shot of private contributions.Foundation trustee Bill Pollard asked the 1,200 attendees lunching Thursday at the city's Meydenbauer Center to double their giving, which was half a million dollars last year. Realistically however, the foundation had hoped to raise half a million and it exceeded that, raising $564,150….Nonprofit-school foundations have long existed as a way to raise private funds to fill holes in school budgets, but this year, because the state Legislature sharply cut public-school funding due to the faltering economy, school-related fundraising events have taken on an air of added urgency.Mercer Island, for example, raised more than $400,000 at a fundraising breakfast in April, double the amount it raised a year ago.

Unequal funding of education leads to unequal education opportunities. This report which looked at Milwaukee public schools is illustrative of the return to “separate and unequal” education. Return to Separate and Unequal Education As Principal Mc Clean said there is no one reason why we can’t close failing schools, but there is one umbrella reason, an entrenched institutional structure which favors the status quo.

The entrenched status quo consists of:

1. Unequal funding in education
2. Quite often, less gifted teachers and staff are concentrated in underperforming schools. Many problem staff are transferred to underperforming schools
3. Students with a myriad of needs are concentrated in underperforming schools
4. Parents who may love their children and want the best for them, but are unaware of the political process and how to leverage the political process to their advantage
5. A reluctance on the part of decision makers to try creative solutions to address underperforming schools if it alienates one of their key constituencies.

If we can close Lehman, why can’t we close a failing schools? As Albert Einstein said,

Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.

Quite often this society is not focused on the future, but the here and now.

Dr. Wilda says this about that ©