Failing schools are schools that should be closed because they have no prospect of dramatically improving their students' extremely poor academic performance. These schools are heavily concentrated in low-income, minority, urban communities. In Michigan alone at least 35 schools, including about half of Detroit's high schools, are on the list. Most are controlled by traditional school districts, but as charter schools age, some of them also land on failing schools lists.

You can't close failing schools without someplace else and better to send their tens of thousands of students. In big urban school districts, failing schools are surrounded mostly by low-performing, but not-yet-failing schools. These schools must do better or they will become failing schools. Some of them improve, at least incrementally or sporadically, but many stagnate; they lack the motivation, or the will, or the capacity to get better. Making them enroll more students, especially students who have been unsuccessful in school, will likely tip these schools into failure; in any case, it's unlikely to help them improve.

What's needed is a big supply of new schools to replace the failing ones--good schools that give their students a real shot at success.  But where will new good schools come from?

Recently, the state-appointed financial czar for the Detroit Public Schools (DPS), Robert Bobb, said it is "totally and completely unacceptable" that so many schools in the district (one of the worst performers in the U.S.) consistently fail to meet state and federal academic goals. The district must look at dramatic improvement, Bobb said, adding that he'd consider bringing in a private management firm, having the district turn a failing school into a charter school, or replacing a school's entire staff.

Meanwhile the state legislature debates a bill to create a "school turnaround czar" who would take over failing schools, restructure them (e.g., extending the school day, changing the curriculum, forcing changes in the teachers' contract), appoint a new manager if they still aren't working, and establish a charter school nearby to which parents could send their children. 

Both plans would hand failing schools and their students to new leadership who could hit the reset button on the school. (Note that both start with a czar--Bobb, already appointed in Detroit, and a state turnaround boss--with the authority, like a bankruptcy judge, to cut through the conflict, paralysis, and compromising that characterizes school district responses to the failing schools problem.)

Problem solved? Not so fast.

Whoever takes over failed schools faces an innovation problem, not just a management problem. Thanks to lots of experimentation by charter schools in particular, we now know what a school has to be like if it will engage low-income students in learning and keep them in school. High school graduation rates of 90 percent are being attained (compared to the 30-50 percent of traditional urban districts). At the same time, there's evidence that some "high-poverty" schools "beat the odds" academically, their students doing much better on state tests. But there's been little systematic study of how these schools do it. Few high-poverty schools anywhere deliver high student engagement, retention, and academic achievement. So far, neither the charter movement nor the centralized school districts has demonstrated much ability to radically improve student achievement at large scale. The reason for this failure is simple: neither system is designed to effectively develop and rapidly scale up innovations that greatly boost performance. Yet that's just what's needed to meet the failed schools challenge.

A big supply of new good schools requires a big supply of good leaders, teachers, and other staff, but both the charter movement and the district bureaucracies already face human-resource constraints. Good schools for low-income students need leaders and faculty who are deeply committed to "doing whatever it takes" to achieve the mission of dramatically improving students' achievement. The adults in the school must be disciplined experimenters to figure out what works with the kids, not just "tell me what to do" employees; they must be systems builders, not passive recipients of existing processes; they must combine 24/7 mission-zeal with professional practice, not settle for "good enough" results. Think: Teacher of the Year and Teach for America, blended for know-how and energy. Where will this human supply come from? Here, too, charters and central districts have not generated what's needed with any consistent quality or at large scale.

Replacing failed schools with good ones will require more than a czar's handoff to new management. It depends on organizing for scalable innovation and building a capacity to develop the people who make good schools work. Those supply-side problems need more attention.