Arne Duncan's Reforms: Rep. Judy Chu Wants Them Left Behind

Teachers unions have long had a friend in Democrats, and they've got a new one in Rep. Judy Chu of California.

Chu called Thursday for lawmakers to ditch a model -- championed by another Democrat, Education Secretary Arne Duncan -- for fixing the country's worst performing schools, a combination of multimillion-dollar grants and federally prescribed reform models that call for school closures and staff firings.

Flanked by leaders from the two national teachers unions, Chu said individual districts should decide for themselves how to fix failing schools. That's been a demand of teachers for years, who say they've become scapegoats for under-performing students.

"You cannot have schools without teachers and principals," Chu said. "If we want to save schools, this must change."

Granted, Chu's advocacy would not have been news five years ago. There's that longstanding relationship, in which Democrats have cozied up to teachers unions for campaign coffers and party foot soldiers. Chu herself can count the American Federation of Teachers as her second largest donor for the 2010 cycle, according to the website OpenSecrets. But that's all changed under Duncan. He's focused reform on the bottom 5 percent of public schools -- institutions where, by all accounts, students have been failing for years. Duncan received $3.5 billion under the economic stimulus act to do so, and this March began doling out eight-figure grants to states that agreed to his reform wishes.

The plan is too prescriptive, critics say, and forces school chiefs to choose between firing staff, closing schools, opening charter schools or overhauling the curriculum with a new principal (known as "transformation" in Duncan's department).

The movement has gained some traction with a mix of moderate Democrats and Republicans, though House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller (D-Calif.) counted himself among the skeptics at a hearing Wednesday. Still, Miller is more interested in reworking the turnaround models than trashing them.

"They were just too stark," he said of the White House reforms. "They kind of alarmed people, but throwing them out isn't the answer either. It doesn't make sense at this stage in the game."

Chu said Thursday that she'd had early discussions with Miller's staff, but when asked about that later in the day, the chairman said he didn't "know anything about it."

The House's top Republican on the issue also pleaded ignorance of Chu's proposal. "We started the process in a bipartisan matter," said Rep. John Kline, R-Minn. "I don't want to start drawing lines in the sand before we get there."

Chu's plan would give districts up to five years to turn around failing schools, with school closure as a last resort. The eight-page paper also calls for longer days, more teacher development and more social services for disadvantaged students.

That's all fine, but only as a first step, said Charles Barone, federal policy director for Democrats for Education Reform, a moderate reform group in New York. "Once you've tried professional development and none of those things work, don't you think you need to sort of look at it as a human capital issue?" Barone said. "It seems pretty reasonable in every other sector of society."