July 31, 2005
Every summer, thousands of parents in Florida and other states decide to pull
their children out of substandard schools and transfer them to higher-performing
campuses across town.
Education reformers tell them it's their right, and that low-performing schools won't get better without the competitive pressure that comes from losing students.
But early indications are that transfers are no guarantee of success. Student test scores from Orange, Duval and Miami-Dade counties and other research show that students who stay at the struggling schools tend to improve their test scores slightly more than students who transfer, the Orlando Sentinel found.
Among those findings:
Thousands switch schools
More than 3 million American families every year face similar choices. About 32,000 students in the United States took transfers under No Child Left Behind in 2003. In Florida, a hothouse for the school-choice revolution, roughly 3,000 students transferred under Gov. Jeb Bush's "A-Plus Plan" last year.
The federal law links transfers to a school's failure to make progress in the teaching of reading and math. Florida law allows transfers from schools that earn an F grade from the state based on student scores from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.
Henry Levin, a Columbia University education professor who collects studies on school choice, said no one has thoroughly studied whether transfers are good for students.
"If a public school is failing, then you must give a child a choice," said Levin, director of the National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education, summarizing the position of school-choice advocates. "There's a certain logic to it. The problem is there's not a lot of data on the side of the people who make that argument."
Faced with the offer of a transfer, many parents struggle with the decision.
"It was something that was really, really hard for me to do," Orange County parent Sandralia McReynolds said, "because I want my child to get the best education possible and get the tools that he's going to need for later on in life and go on to college and succeed and excel to the point where he has no limits."
Last school year, McReynolds chose to send her son to A-rated Winter Park High instead of letting him attend his F-rated neighborhood school, Jones High. A year later, she said she's still unsure whether she made the right decision.
McReynolds' son, Preston, had a high B average when he left Jones for Winter Park, but ended his year at the new campus with a high C average.
"I don't regret going to Winter Park," he said. "I did learn you have to work hard and finish all your work and do your homework."
Preston's experience does not appear to be unusual. More than two-thirds of students who transferred out of Jones in 2004 saw their grade-point average fall, while only about half of the students who stayed at Jones had a grade drop, according to an Orange district report.
The district also found that teens who stayed at Jones maintained a C average while the average for those who transferred fell to a high D.
F-school advantages
Educators offer varying reasons for why students at low-ranked schools might improve more than transfer students.
Students who leave must endure the stresses of learning a new campus, meeting new faculty and making new friends. Those who stay behind just have to go back to their old routines, said James Lawson, an Orange County area superintendent who oversees Jones and two other struggling high schools, Oak Ridge and Evans.
Pre-dawn bus rides can rob students of the sleep they need to succeed. The same dependence on the school bus can kill their chances to participate in sports and other after-school activities.
"I have seen students who are exceptional students only because they want to play in sports," Lawson said.
Students who attend "failing" schools often come from struggling middle schools and homes with few books, Lawson said. Teachers at their neighborhood schools may be more adept at dealing with those challenges than instructors across town, he said.
Amy Lingren, Duval County's director of instructional support, said her district has added strong academic programs at those schools and lured top teachers to them with the potential for $12,000 in bonuses.
Additionally, the schools have truant officers who track down missing kids every day -- an idea planned for Jones this year. Duval also tries to keep strong students from moving by educating parents about opportunities at F campuses, such as tutoring, smaller class sizes and magnet programs.
"It doesn't surprise me that there are those kind of gains [by students who stay] because they start so far behind," said Lingren, who works with principals at challenged schools in Jacksonville.
No research on transfers
For now, however, the question of whether school transfers are good for children is mostly open.
"We haven't looked at it in a scientific way," said U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings at a luncheon of education reporters in May. "These are issues that we'll look at as this law matures."
Florida can point to improved test scores for all groups or children and rising high-school graduation rates since the "A-Plus Plan" took effect. But the state does not track transfer students in any way.
To John Winn, the state's education commissioner, whether students get higher test scores when they transfer is not the point. Parents should have a choice when their school is struggling and the school should have plenty of incentive to improve, he said.
Winn compared student transfers to finding a new doctor.
"When your child has not shown improvement, you have no guarantee that the second doctor is going to do any better," Winn said. "It doesn't mean that you should not have had the choice."
Decisions in the dark
Dianne Piché, executive director of the bipartisan nonprofit group Citizens Commission on Civil Rights, is an advocate of choice. But she complains that parents are being forced to make transfer decisions in the dark.
"We believe that choice, when done right, can be a very powerful tool," she said.
Last year, Piché's organization surveyed 47 states and 137 school districts to find out how they informed parents about new educational choices. Their report, "Choosing Better Schools," found seven districts that provided parents with information about student achievement at choice schools.
Orange County, which was not surveyed, offered parents multiple school choices and indicated the letter grade of the schools where students could transfer.
"By now all states and districts should be publishing report cards on schools . . . we're disappointed that school districts aren't tracking this data more," Piché said. "We're disappointed the U.S. Department of Education and the state aren't asking for this. They should be."
A spokesperson for Spellings' office said the department plans to study the performance of transfer students in the next year.
Dear Editor:
Mary Shanklin's July 31 article on transferring students fails to note two important
points. First, one year of data is inconclusive and potentially misleading.
It is very common to find a slight decrease in performance of transfer students
during their first year at a new school as they adjust to different surroundings.
Second, the purpose of school choice programs and competition is to improve
all schools, which is exactly what has happened at schools like Jones, that,
under the threat of competition, have improved student achievement. In fact,
a Harvard University study published in April concluded that those schools that
could lose students improve the most. Isn't improved schools the purpose of
all education reform?
Sincerely,
Carolyn
Rethwisch
Teacher’s Hands Academy