Do Schools Improve When States Take Them Over?

by David Safier

Yesterday I wrote about a bill in the legislature to have the state take over Phoenix’s Roosevelt School District for 3 years. Is it a good idea? I asked. Has it been done elsewhere?

I did some research. Yes, it has been done elsewhere. Sometimes the state takes over a school district, sometimes a city does. The research has been done. The findings are in. The scholars are in agreement: they don’t know if it has any effect.

The largest experiment is in Philadelphia, where the state took over the school district in 2002. They kept some schools as they were, turned some into charter schools and gave some to private education companies to run. They found some general improvement, but other districts in the state improved as well, so the researchers couldn’t attribute the changes to the takeover. Private companies, even those putting extra money into their schools, did no better than standard public or charter schools. Not even the charters run by universities showed significant gains over the others. The only factor that seemed to help was providing extra staff support.

Another study indicated that city takeovers of districts are more effective than state takeovers, but the difference isn’t overwhelming.

For me, the morals of this story are: A state takeover isn’t a bad thing if it’s done well, and if a district is truly dysfunctional, it might help straighten things out a little; and, No one has found the magic bullet that makes reluctant students from poor families become better students. Recent study after recent study, including ones conducted by our charter- and private-school-friendly Department of Education, don’t show significant gains made by charter or private schools.

Folks, education is a very difficult task. People who say they know sure fire ways to fix things are fooling themselves, or they’re snake oil salesmen trying to fool others. We’ve got to keep looking for ways to improve — and we need to put enough money into education to put plans into practice — but we should keep our expectations within reasonable bounds. We need to aim for progress, not miracles.