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I'm not an educator, but I graduated from a "failing" school. When I started applying for colleges, I would sometimes have to meet representatives from the college in person for interviews, and without fail I always got asked about the "failing" status of the school and why I thought they should ignore that stigma.
Obviously I'm in college now so I was able to get in to places on my own merits, but I feel like the stigma of graduating not from just a "failing" school but also from an entire district full of "failures" - no matter how well the student does on an absolute scale rather than a relative one (I only bring this up because I was also told at some points that coming from a struggling high school would make people think that I only appeared to excel because other students weren't excelling, if that makes sense?) - is going to be something that's much more difficult to overcome. It seems to me like this is going to hurt good students who put a lot of effort into their education, but for whatever reason can't get waivers to get into different schools approved by the administrators.
Which, in my experience, has been a lot more common than some people seem to think. ("What do you mean they wouldn't let you switch from Failure High School to Decent High School? Just get them to sign the papers." "They wouldn't, though. They said it wasn't possible." According to my mom - a former teacher - they probably just wanted to keep me there they thought my high grades would boost the school's average. Then again she's my mom, so she was probably just trying to make me feel better!)
Feel free to correct me if you don't think that's going to be an issue - I'm just pretty cynical when it comes to this sort of thing, but that's because I've been on the receiving end of some pretty spectacular failures within the educational system.
Personally, I think it would be more effective if, instead of drawing up new districts and creating an entire cluster of idiocy - because that's really the only way I can see this going - they used a fraction of what the new districts would cost to just send a small, core team of educators to help get the schools back on the right track while keeping them in the districts they're in now. But again, I'm just a college student, so I don't know if that would actually be feasible.
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