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Thomas Edison Elementary School in Port Chester, NY has earned its reputation as a success story. A decade ago, only 19% of Edison’s fourth graders were proficient in English language arts. Last year 75% were. Proficiency rates in math and social studies are even higher. Not bad for a school where over 80% of students live in poverty.

If you ask the school’s principal, Dr. Eileen Santiago, the decision over ten years ago to turn Edison into a full-service community school has played a key role in its transformation. Working with strong community partners, the school offers on-site health care, education for parents, counseling for children and their families, and after-school enrichment. Add that community focus to a robust instructional program and close attention to data on how students are doing, and you get a stirring turnaround story.

Dr. Santiago recently told us more.

Public School Insights: Tell me about your school.

Santiago: I have served as principal of this school for 14 years. And I have always felt fortunate that I came into a school with many, many caring people. I did not walk into a school where the adults felt negatively about the children.

However, I was faced with other concerns. One of them was that the school had a pretty significant level of poverty. We were at over 80% free lunch. We continue to have that level of poverty today.

In addition, Edison has always served an immigrant population. The school was constructed in 1872, so you can imagine that the population has changed a lot over the years. Today the population is primarily multi-ethnic Hispanic, coming from different areas of the Hispanic world. And many of our children are undocumented immigrants. That in itself adds several levels of challenge: ...

"Every teacher for himself!" Is that the new rallying cry of school reformers? Well, no. But school reform ideas that are getting the lion's share of press don't necessarily do much to foster a climate of collaboration in our schools. If we're really aiming for dramatic improvement in our schools, that's a big deal.

Here, for example, is an idea that has been gaining ground recently: Sack the bottom 25% of teachers up for tenure each year. How do you identify the bottom 25%? By measuring their students' growth in state test scores, of course. A new study (PDF) suggests that this tactic may raise a district's test scores in the long run. This finding buoyed the spirits of folks at the National Council on Teacher Quality, who urged districts to "hold to their guns" and give the bottom quarter the axe, year after year.

The study's authors are a bit more cautious. They note that the effects of this strategy could be "modest by some standards" and that they might reflect "changes in class or school dynamics outside of a teacher's control." They also limit their analysis to teachers for whom test data are available in the first place--a minority, as it turns out. Still, they feel that student performance on tests should be fair game when it comes time to make decisions about personnel.

Maybe. But I'm more worried by the collatoral damage of draconian firing policies. What will happen to the climate of a school where every new teacher knows he has a one-in-four chance of getting the boot in a couple of years? It's a truism by now that staff in good schools work together and share responsibility for their kids. In the best low-income schools, any given child will have seen any number of ...

Read President Obama's budget, and you'll get the distinct sense that alternative certification works and staff development doesn't. The first of these gets a big shot in the arm, and the second (Title II) suffers a pretty big blow. Get the right people into the schools, the thinking seems to go, and the rest will sort itself out. But reality is more complicated than that. All roads will take us back to staff development.

Critics argue that federal staff development dollars haven't done much good, so why keep them flowing? Much better to funnel them into alternatives. The critics have a point, or maybe half a point. We haven't gotten enough bang for our federal buck, so it's tough to justify calls for more Title II money unless we can show that we will spend the money well. Of course, alt cert programs haven't yet proven their worth either, but they're newer, some are promising, and none carry the taint of "status quo."

But it would be very wrong to turn our backs on staff development because it has so often been botched in practice. Stephanie Hirsh of the National Staff ...