From today's Chicago Tribune front page story about the turnaround at Chicago's Marshall HS:

(T)he outward signs of change have been apparent for weeks. The red brick facade has been scoured, leaving a salmon-colored dust on the sidewalk. Mounds of sod sit on the freshly paved parking lot, and workers have gouged the outline of a new football stadium into the brown earth behind the school....a number of students won't return to Marshall next year, according to the head of the school turnaround office, Donald Fraynd. There are about 120 seniors without the credits to graduate who will be encouraged to enroll at alternative schools. Another 20 to 30 with the poorest discipline records will be encouraged to go elsewhere if they can't get their acts together, Fraynd said.

"Just throwing money" at turnarounds?

Those business types who used to bluster that more money isn't the answer to fixing schools are singing a different tune now that some big money is flowing  into their coffers. Larry Miller's blog figures the running cost of the Green Dot Charter Co. takeover of Locke High School in Los Angeles: "Before and since Green Dot’s takeover, tax dollars have financed Locke’s annual operating budget of upward of $30 million, which during the four-year turnaround will total about $115 million....By then, expenditures will have exceeded that four-year, taxpayer-supported budget by about $15 million, with philanthropies making up most of the difference."

Miller quotes Tim Cawley, a managing director at Chicago's own turnaround monster, Academy for Urban School Leadership:  "(E)ven expenditures surpassing $15 million on a big school could be a smart national investment. We’re wasting billions every year by not fixing these schools because the students they’re not educating end up filling our prisons.”

Gee, that argument sounds familiar. Oh, yeah, it's one that public school advocates have been making for years here in Illinois and elsewhere as we beg and plead for states to adequately fund our schools, with the corporate types fighting it every step of the way.