This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Just about any human endeavour can be improved. And a fresh set of eyes brought to bear on any operation is often a good idea.
But the outside "turnaround" experts who are being brought in, at taxpayer expense, to give advice to 25 of Utah's lowest-rated public schools will not be earning their pay unless they are at least open to the possibility that what they must do is to turn around and tell members of the Utah Legislature that what the schools need most is not new ideas, new managers or new teachers, but more resources.
The same Legislature that cooked up a scheme to grade each of the state's public schools also put in a requirement that the bottom 3 percent of those schools bring in outside consultants and that, over the next three years, those schools will be expected to raise their grades.
If they succeed, the school gets more money and the teachers get bonuses. Which, especially for schools that serve mostly low-income and/or immigrant populations, is exactly backwards. They should get the funds and bonuses first, then have a chance to make much-needed improvements.
If they fail, the school could be converted to a charter, taken over by the state or just shut down. Which may be what the public-education doubters who have a lot of pull with the lawmakers wanted all along.
The reasonable fear among educators and their supporters is that the whole thing is just a ruse to drain money — some $8 million initially — out of the already under-funded public education system and divert it to consultants, out-of-town experts and technology vendors. To folks who may or may not know education but sure as heck know lobbying.
The hope, even among many of those same educators, is that the consultants will, indeed, see something the rest of us don't see, know something the rest of us don't know, find a stone that has so far been left unturned.
The hitch is that, even if the consultants and the school communities agree on a plan to improve the performance of the now-underperforming schools, there is no promise that those silver bullets will be paid for.
A truly honest consultant report could very well remind lawmakers that the schools with the lowest grades tend to be those with the lowest average incomes among the families those schools serve. And that the only real remedy for that — even when such things as smaller class sizes, more aides and more remedial learning have been added — is a concerted effort to pull whole families out of poverty with access to health care, better pay and, of course, better education.
Because that's what it turns on.