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Montana Superintendent Denise Juneau Presses Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Education Reform in Rural States
Among the topics: the $4 billion Race to the Top competition, states’ momentum toward adoption of common academic standards, and the challenges for rural states in turning around their lowest-performing schools through methods mandated as a condition of receiving billions of dollars in Title I school improvement grants.
The needs of rural states prompted especially lively discussion. “The frontier is really where we are,” said Denise Juneau, Montana’s state superintendent. “We are more rural than rural.”
Ms. Juneau emphasized that even the so-called transformation model, which is less drastic than the three other turnaround models that the U.S. Department of Education has said are acceptable, won’t work in her state because the approach requires the principals to be replaced. The five schools that Montana has identified as the lowest-performing are all located on isolated American Indian reservations she said.
Even if those districts could find strong principals to replace the existing ones, Ms. Juneau said, there are more fundamental challenges, such as where they would stay.
“We lack housing,” she told the secretary. “If we want to get a turnaround specialist in these places, we may not even be able to buy a double-wide trailer for them.”
By Lesli A. Maxwell
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