Obama seeks accountability in underachieving schools

Speaking before a meeting of America’s Promise Alliance, an education group founded by former secretary of state Colin L. Powell and his wife, Alma, Obama called curbing the nation’s dropout problem a pressing economic and social imperative.

The plan seeks to help 5,000 of the lowest-performing schools in the nation over the next five years.

In his speech, Obama said the firing of the entire faculty at a Rhode Island school is an example of how there has to be accountability. Officials in Central Falls decided last week to fire 93 high school teachers, administrators, and other support staff by the end of the year.

“This is a problem we cannot afford to accept and we cannot afford to ignore,’’ Obama said at US Chamber of Commerce headquarters. “The stakes are too high - for our children, for our economy, and for our country.’’

According to a White House fact sheet, “Every school day, about 7,000 students decide to drop out of school - a total of 1.2 million students each year - and only about 70 percent’’ of entering freshmen end up graduating. As a result of this “dropout crisis,’’ it said, the nation loses $319 billion a year in potential earnings.

The problem is concentrated in the nation’s poorest schools and among minority students. Just 2,000 of America’s schools - about 12 percent of the nation’s total - account for half of the nation’s dropouts, and more than 50 percent of them have mostly African-American or Latino students. Boys are also much more likely than girls to be unsuccessful in school.

Obama has sought to combat the dropout problem with an infusion of federal aide for school districts that devise innovative plans to help students graduate.

The president’s budget for the fiscal year that begins in October proposes $900 million for school turnaround grants, up from $546 million in fiscal 2010. The economic stimulus law enacted last year provided an additional $3 billion for the turnaround initiative. The 2011 budget, released last month, awaits action in Congress.

Obama has provided big funding increases, but he also emphasized that schools cannot attack the problem in isolation. “Education is not and cannot be the task of government alone,’’ he said, adding that parents, business leaders, and nonprofit organizations all have huge roles to play.

Several Democratic and Republican lawmakers have signaled that they may seek to revise Obama’s plan, which would provide $50.7 billion in discretionary funding for the Education Department - an increase of more than 9 percent - but would freeze or consolidate some major programs favored by Congress.

With the proposed $900 million in school turnaround funding, Obama is placing a bet on four strategies to fix thousands of schools in which reform ideas have come and gone without success. Targeted schools include those with low graduation rates and the lowest-achieving schools in impoverished neighborhoods.

Each of the strategies, at a minimum, appears to require replacing the school’s principal.

Obama’s initiative seeks to tighten school accountability policies. Under the No Child Left Behind law, enacted in 2002 under President George W. Bush, the possible sanctions for low-performing schools range from school closure to a more open-ended requirement for schools to adopt an “alternative’’ governance strategy to raise performance.

Critics of school accountability programs say that the remedies are unproven and that the circumstances of struggling schools vary significantly. The mass teacher firings last week at the school in Rhode Island showed that such interventions can touch off political controversy.

But Obama indicated that sometimes such actions may be necessary. “If a school continues to fail its students year after year after year, if it doesn’t show signs of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability,’’ he said.