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The Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss

Obama policy blamed for popular principal's reassignment

An elementary school principal in Lincoln, Neb., is being reassigned. District officials say that she's great and that the school's real problem is poverty. But , they say, the price for receiving millions of federal stimulus dollars is her reassignment.

"It is a direct result of the federal government infringing upon the local control of education, which we all find distressing," Lincoln Public Schools Superintendent Susan Gourley was quoted as saying by the Journal Star.

Why is this happening?

Because Elliott School, where De Ann Currin is principal, is expected to be among five Title I schools identified in Nebraska as among the lowest of the low-achieving schools, making it eligible for a portion of $17 million available to Nebraska. The money is part of $3.5 billion that the Obama administration has made available to help the most “persistently low-achieving schools” in each state.

But to claim the Title I money, which is used to help high-poverty schools, Education Secretary Arne Duncan is requiring that each school district choose one of four “restructuring” options for each of the identified schools.

Two require closing the school and either reopening it as a charter or sending the students elsewhere; another requires that the principal and at least half the staff be replaced, and the last --the least onerous -- requires that the principal be replaced and other reform measures taken.

Currin has been doing an excellent job, according to Gourley and associate superintendent Marilyn Moore. And Elliott School was recently praised by an outside evaluation team.

“There is no one in the federal government that knows what kind of leadership De Ann Currin is providing, and there’s lots of people in Lincoln, Nebraska, that do," Gourley was quoted as saying.

But district officials concluded that Elliott can use the federal money, and that the easiest way to get it is to replace Currin, even though it makes no objective sense.

That is because the way the “lowest-performing schools” are identified in each state --and in Nebraska, in each district -- is different, so the measures have no real meaning.

The real problem, officials say, is poverty; 90 percent of Elliott’s students are eligible for free and reduced price meals, an indicator of poverty.

"I mean, who do you blame for poverty?" Gourley said.

A report released by the nonprofit Center on Education Policy late last year studied federal restructuring strategies undertaken in six states. The conclusion: none of them showed promise, and all of those states -- Georgia, New York, Ohio, Maryland, California and Michigan, had started moving away from them.