In Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s angry ultimatum on education, he inserted $8 million into his executive budget to fix the state’s lowest-performing schools using “receivership,” a strategy with two decades worth of unimpressive results.

Under receivership, the state hires an individual, company or charter operator to run a school or district. They call the shots. The principal and the superintendent have no say. Contracts, including the teachers contract, are suspended.

Cuomo cited a Massachusetts receivership model — its Lawrence school district has shown some test score improvement — but the strategy has more often failed or just not done much of anything.

Some examples

In 2002, Pennsylvania turned 45 low-performing Philadelphia schools over to seven private managers. A mass exodus of teachers followed, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Perspectives on Urban Education journal, with departures as high as 80 percent in schools managed by a for-profit charter.

Unable to attract and keep certified teachers, many schools had a hard time implementing a coherent academic program, the journal found. By 2006, the policy think tank RAND found that student academic gains in the 45 schools merely matched those of a comparison group of low-achieving schools. A group of schools that were restructured under district management showed larger gains.

Indiana’s elected state superintendent, Tony Bennett, turned over five schools to outside private operators in 2012. The schools have since seen steep enrollment drops (35 to 60 percent at the four Indianapolis schools taken over by charter operators) and one operator has threatened to quit if the state doesn’t give it more money. The for-profit EdisonLearning sued the Gary school district over unpaid utility bills at the high school it runs. Only one of the five schools has risen above an F. Bennett was voted out of office that same year.

The Roosevelt School District on Long Island was taken over by the New York State Education Department in 2002. After nine years and an investment of $300 million, budget deficits improved a bit and political infighting was curbed, but “in relative terms, Roosevelt remains far behind most other districts in student performance,” according to a 2013 Newsday report by John Hildebrand. The high school remains on the state’s lowest-performing list as do the middle school and one of the elementary schools.

“I can tell you right off the bat that the State Education Department has no capabilities to run a school district,” state Regent Roger Tilles of Great Neck told Hildebrand. “We need other alternatives, if we’re ever going to turn around other districts that are really not succeeding.”

A 2004 policy brief by the Education Commission of the States summarized the experience of many other state takeovers. “For the most part,” the commission said, “they seem to be yielding more gains in central office activities than in classroom instructional practices … student achievement still oftentimes falls short of expectations after a state takeover.”

Lawrence, Mass.

In Lawrence, the district Cuomo touts, the state-appointed receiver, Jeffrey Riley, cut the administration by one-third in 2011, replaced half of the principals in its 28 schools, instituted intensive professional development and created a tutoring program.

He fired 10 percent of teachers. “Some people said you should fire all the teachers,” he told Capital New York on Feb. 12. “But 90 percent of the teachers, in my opinion, were great, good or working hard to improve and I can work with those kinds of people.”

Riley negotiated a new contract with the Lawrence teachers, and the union is running one of the schools.

Lawrence test scores and graduation rates have gone up modestly. But the president of Lawrence’s teachers union, Frank McLaughlin, says the improvement is not due to state control but to resources.

“Lawrence is a better school system than it was three or four years ago,” he told Capital New York, “but that’s for multiple reasons: We eliminated the corrupt government that was running the city, and we have more resources that are getting to the children.”

That, plain and simple, may be the secret to improvement: education resources. A Rutgers University researcher, Bruce Baker, recently showed that New York State’s struggling schools have double or triple the poverty rates of schools in good standing. While Cuomo claims the state has thrown money at these schools for too long, Baker calculated that 12 of the 17 lowest-performing school districts cited by Cuomo are among those with the largest state funding shortfalls, based on student need.

Struggling schools aren’t just suffering from low test scores. They are most often struggling from poor attendance, high turnover, corruption, disorder, fights, homelessness, illness, despair and poverty. Those issues cannot be fixed by executive fiat. The students in these schools need intervention programs, trained support staff, enrichment, access to opportunities, and the time and commitment of adults with expertise.

In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Chancellor Carmen Fariña launched the $150 million School Renewal Program to turn around 94 state-identified struggling schools. It does not involve the state or any outside entity. It relies on an influx of skilled teachers and administrators and extensive academic supports along with wraparound health and social services using a community schools model.

Given the record on receivership, this seems like a far more promising approach.