By REBECCA VEVEA | NY Times
Published: December 3, 2011
Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s education team made its first attempt at improving struggling schools last week, and the negative reviews came quickly. State legislators and community leaders called the proposed closing or restructuring of 21 schools “very troubling” and said administrators were violating the intent of a new state law.
Chicago Public Schools designated 10 schools for turnaround — a controversial process in which existing staff members are fired and changes are made in the school’s curriculum and learning climate. Four elementary schools will be closed, two high schools will be phased out, and six schools, one of which will also begin phasing out, will share buildings.
About 7,800 students will be affected by the proposed changes, and more than 600 teachers and other employees could lose their jobs. All the designated schools are on the city’s South and West Sides.
Legislation signed in August by Gov. Pat Quinn requires the district to follow a strict timeline for school closings and requires public comment at nearly every step of the process. The district is allowed to set the guidelines for determining which schools are subject to turnaround or closing. District officials are relying on academic achievement as the key factor in those decisions.
But academic performance at the designated schools varies widely. For example, the school district is proposing a turnaround at Pablo Casals Elementary School, where 62 percent of the students met or exceeded state standards in math and reading. At the same time, they also plan to turn around Fuller Elementary School, which had just 37 percent of students meeting or exceeding standards.
Oliver Sicat, the district’s chief portfolio officer, said administrators were careful to take action only at schools where students had a better option nearby.
“Our recommendations are to close schools where we feel like we can put our students in a better seat now,” Mr. Sicat said.
Members of the Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force, a state entity that monitors Chicago Public Schools’ compliance with the new law, said the proposed guidelines were too vague and the process was not transparent enough to satisfy the law’s requirements.
Representative Cynthia Soto, Democrat of Chicago, one of the bill’s sponsors, said, “We need explanations, specific explanations” for the decisions to close or restructure the schools.
Becky Carroll, the school district’s chief communications officer, said the district had “followed every single requirement” of the new law.
Ms. Carroll said school officials had held more than 40 meetings with community groups and elected officials, in addition to two public meetings required by the law. She estimated that 60 more meetings would be held by February, when the Board of Education is scheduled to vote on the proposed actions.
But members of the task force said the public comments fell on deaf ears; no formal revisions were made to the draft criteria before district leaders finalized them at the end of November.
In a written statement, Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, called the proposed changes “the same old, ineffective policies couched in new and exciting public relations boosting language.”
Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century School Fund, a nonprofit advocacy group, said the district’s guidelines “enable them to close whatever they want.” Ms. Filardo helped draft the law governing the school board’s decision-making process.
Under the guidelines, more than 140 schools were eligible to be closed, and district leaders said there could have been many more on the list.
“We could not do the entire city in one year,” said Jean-Claude Brizard, the Chicago Public Schools chief executive.
Andrea Lee, a member of the educational facilities task force and an education organizer for the Grand Boulevard Federation, said the Bronzeville community on the South Side had been disproportionately affected by school closings and turnarounds. She said 24 schools had closed in the past several years, and this year six area schools are affected.
Ms. Lee said the passage of the new law had initially made her cautiously optimistic, but she was “not that optimistic anymore.”
Showing posts with label turnarounds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label turnarounds. Show all posts
Sunday, December 04, 2011
Sunday, November 22, 2009
The Turnaround Fallacy
This is an interesting discussion on the issue of reform. I would also read The Last Bracey Report from an earlier posted to this site.
What's problematic here is that we fail when we look at school as a business and education as a service. History has shown us this. Children and their families are not consumers! What we haven't seen in recent history are schools that are full of top-notch, quality teachers who are prepared to facilitate learning for all children and are supported by policies and leaders that have that same goal. Rather, we see teachers fleeing the very schools that need them, policies that seek to pay them more to lure them back [to a place they don't want to be], and a system that punishes children and their families for things that are totally out of their hands. Do we need schools to partner with parents in a thoughtful way? Yes! But will the most thoughtful, engaged parent whose child attends an under-resourced school that is being punished for low test scores somehow pull a lever that will release an army of well-prepared teachers who understand and want to build relationships with poor, minority children so that they can meet their full potential all of a sudden occur??? I doubt it!
Until we stop measuring success and "high performance" on standardized, test scores we'll struggle to create school environments that are focused on learning, building upon student's assets, and thoughtful kinds of assessments that value and fight to uphold these same assets.
We need to turnaround how we think about, implement, and measure learning that is student centered. Then we need to make sure that all schools have well-equipped and prepared teachers who can recognize the full potential of every child and support them with good leaders who care about students as the future of our society, not consumers who will either "build or destroy" the business they call school.
-Patricia
For as long as there have been struggling schools in America’s cities, there have been efforts to turn them around. The lure of dramatic improvement runs through Morgan Freeman’s big-screen portrayal of bat-wielding principal Joe Clark, philanthropic initiatives like the Gates Foundation’s “small schools” project, and No Child Left Behind (NCLB)’s restructuring mandate. The Obama administration hopes to extend this thread even further, making school turnarounds a top priority.
But overall, school turnaround efforts have consistently fallen far short of hopes and expectations. Quite simply, turnarounds are not a scalable strategy for fixing America’s troubled urban school systems.
Fortunately, findings from two generations of school improvement efforts, lessons from similar work in other industries, and a budding practice among reform-minded superintendents are pointing to a promising alternative. When conscientiously applied strategies fail to drastically improve America’s lowest-performing schools, we need to close them.
Done right, not only will this strategy help the students assigned to these failing schools, it will also have a cascading effect on other policies and practices, ultimately helping to bring about healthy systems of urban public schools.
A Body at Rest Stays at Rest
Looking back on the history of school turnaround efforts, the first and most important lesson is the “Law of Incessant Inertia.” Once persistently low performing, the majority of schools will remain low performing despite being acted upon in innumerable ways.
Examples abound: In the first year of California’s Academic Performance Index, the state targeted its lowest-performing 20 percent of schools for intervention. After three years, only 11 percent of the elementary schools in this category (109 of 968) were able to make “exemplary progress.” Only 1 of the 394 middle and high schools in this category reached this mark. Just one-quarter of the schools were even able to accomplish a lesser goal: meeting schoolwide and subgroup growth targets each year.
In 2008, 52 Ohio schools were forced to restructure because of persistent failure. Even after several years of significant attention, fewer than one in three had been able to reach established academic goals, and less than half showed any student performance gains. The Columbus Dispatch concluded, “Few of them have improved significantly even after years of effort and millions in tax dollars.”
These state anecdotes align with national data on schools undergoing NCLB-mandated restructuring, the law’s most serious intervention, which follows five or more years of failing to meet minimum achievement targets. Of the schools required to restructure in 2004–05, only 19 percent were able to exit improvement status two years later.
A 2008 Center on Education Policy (CEP) study investigated the results of restructuring in five states. In California, Maryland, and Ohio, only 14, 12, and 9 percent of schools in restructuring, respectively, made adequate yearly progress (AYP) as defined by NCLB the following year. And we must consider carefully whether merely making AYP should constitute success at all: in California, for example, a school can meet its performance target if slightly more than one-third of its students reach proficiency in English language arts and math. Though the CEP study found that improvement rates in Michigan and Georgia were considerably higher, Michigan changed its accountability system during this period, and both states set their AYP bars especially low.
Though alarming, the poor record for school turnarounds in recent years should come as no surprise. A study published in 2005 by the Education Commission of the States (ECS) on state takeovers of schools and districts noted that the takeovers “have yet to produce dramatic consistent increases in student performance,” and that the impact on learning “falls short of expectations.”
Reflecting on the wide array of efforts to improve failing schools, one set of analysts concluded, “Turnaround efforts have for the most part resulted in only marginal improvements…. Promising practices have failed to work at scale when imported to troubled schools.”
Like Finding the Cure for Cancer
The second important lesson is the “Law of Ongoing Ignorance.” Despite years of experience and great expenditures of time, money, and energy, we still lack basic information about which tactics will make a struggling school excellent. A review published in January 2003 by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation of more than 100 books, articles, and briefs on turnaround efforts concluded, “There is, at present, no strong evidence that any particular intervention type works most of the time or in most places.”
An EdSource study that sought to compare California’s low-performing schools that failed to make progress to its low-performing schools that did improve came to a confounding conclusion: clear differences avoided detection. Comparing the two groups, the authors noted, “These were schools in the same cities and districts, often serving children from the same backgrounds. Some of them also adopted the same curriculum programs, had teachers with similar backgrounds, and had similar opportunities for professional development.”
Maryland’s veteran state superintendent of schools, Nancy Grasmick, agrees: “Very little research exists on how to bring about real sea change in schools…. Clearly, there’s no infallible strategy or even sequence of them.” Responding to the growing number of failing Baltimore schools requiring state-approved improvement plans, she said, “No one has the answer. It’s like finding the cure for cancer.”
Researchers have openly lamented the lack of reliable information pointing to or explaining successful improvement efforts, describing the literature as “sparse” and “scarce.” Those attempting to help others fix broken schools have typically resorted to identifying activities in improved schools, such as bolstering leadership and collecting data.
However, this case-study style of analysis is deeply flawed. As the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has noted, studies “that look back at factors that may have contributed to [a] school’s success” are “particularly weak in determining causal validity for several reasons, including the fact that there is no way to be confident that the features common to successful turnaround schools are not also common to schools that fail.”
Researchers have noted that the Department of Education has signaled its own ignorance about what to do about the nation’s very worst schools. One study reported, “The NCLB law does not specify any additional actions for schools that remain in the implementation phase of restructuring for more than one year, and [the Department] has offered little guidance on what to do about persistently struggling schools.” Indeed, the IES publication, “Turning Around Chronically Low-Performing Schools” practice guide, purportedly a resource for states and districts, concedes, “All recommendations had to rely on low levels of evidence,” because it could not identify any rigorous studies finding that “specific turnaround practices produce significantly better academic outcomes.”
Still in Its Infancy?
The prevailing view is that we must keep looking for turnaround solutions. Observers have written, “Turnaround at scale is still in its infancy,” and “In education, turnarounds have been tried rarely” (see “The Big U-Turn,” features, Winter 2009). But, in fact, the number and scope of fix-it efforts have been extensive to say the least.
Long before NCLB required interventions in the lowest-performing schools, states had undertaken significant activity. In 1989 New Jersey took over Jersey City Public Schools; in 1995 it took over Newark Public Schools. In 1993 California took control of the Compton Unified School District. In 1995 Ohio took over the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Between 1993 and 1997 states required the reconstitution of failing schools in Denver, Chicago, New York City, and Houston. In 2000 Alabama took over a number of schools across the state, and Maryland seized control of three schools in Baltimore.
Since NCLB, interventions in struggling schools have only grown in number and intensity. In the 2006–07 school year, more than 750 schools in “corrective action,” the NCLB phase preceding restructuring, implemented a new research-based curriculum, more than 700 used an outside expert to advise the school, nearly 400 restructured the internal organization of the school, and more than 200 extended the school day or year. Importantly, more than 300 replaced staff members or the principal, among the toughest traditional interventions possible.
Occasionally a program will report encouraging success rates. The University of Virginia School Turnaround Specialist Program asserts that about half of its targeted schools have either made AYP or reduced math and reading failure rates by at least 5 percent. Though this might be better than would otherwise be expected, the threshold for success is remarkably low. It is also unknown whether such progress can be sustained. This matter is particularly important, given that some point to charter management organizations Green Dot and Mastery as turnaround success stories even though each has a very short turnaround résumé, in both numbers of schools and years of experience.
Many schools that reach NCLB’s restructuring phase, rather than implementing one of the law’s stated interventions (close and reopen as a charter school, replace staff, turn the school over to the state, or contract with an outside entity), choose the “other” option, under which they have considerable flexibility to design an improvement strategy of their own (see “Easy Way Out,” forum, Winter 2007). Some call this a “loophole” for avoiding tough action.
Yet even under the maligned “other” option, states and districts have tried an astonishing array of improvement strategies, including different types of school-level needs assessments, surveys of school staff, conferences, professional development, turnaround specialists, school improvement committees, training sessions, principal mentors, teacher coaches, leadership facilitators, instructional trainers, subject-matter experts, audits, summer residential academies, student tutoring, research-based reform models, reconfigured grade spans, alternative governance models, new curricula, improved use of data, and turning over operation of some schools to outside organizations.
It’s simply impossible to make the case that turnaround efforts haven’t been tried or given a chance to work.
A Better Mousetrap?
Despite this evidence, some continue to advocate for improved turnaround efforts. Nancy Grasmick supports recognizing turnarounds as a unique discipline. Frederick Hess and Thomas Gift have argued for developing school restructuring leaders; Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel have recommended that states and districts “fuel the pipeline” of untraditional turnaround specialists. NewSchools Venture Fund, the Education Commission of the States, and the research firm Mass Insight have offered related turnaround strategies.
And the Obama administration too has bought into the notion that turnarounds are the key to improving urban districts. Education secretary Arne Duncan has said that if the nation could turn around 1,000 schools annually for five years, “We could really move the needle, lift the bottom and change the lives of tens of millions of underserved children.” In the administration’s 2009 stimulus legislation, $3 billion in new funds were appropriated for School Improvement Grants, which aid schools in NCLB improvement status. The administration requested an additional $1.5 billion for this program in the 2010 budget. This is all on top of the numerous streams of existing federal funds that can be—and have been—used to turn around failing schools.
The dissonance is deafening. The history of urban education tells us emphatically that turnarounds are not a reliable strategy for improving our very worst schools. So why does there remain a stubborn insistence on preserving fix-it efforts?
The most common, but also the most deeply flawed, justification is that there are high-performing schools in American cities. That is, some fix-it proponents point to unarguably successful urban schools and then infer that scalable turnaround strategies are within reach. In fact, it has become fashionable among turnaround advocates to repeat philosopher Immanuel Kant’s adage that “the actual proves the possible.”
But as a Thomas B. Fordham Foundation study noted, “Much is known about how effective schools work, but it is far less clear how to move an ineffective school from failure to success…. Being a high-performing school and becoming a high-performing school are very different challenges.”
In fact, America’s most-famous superior urban schools are virtually always new starts rather than schools that were previously underperforming. Probably the most convincing argument for the fundamental difference between start-ups and turnarounds comes from those actually running high-performing high-poverty urban schools (see sidebar). Groups like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) and Achievement First open new schools; as a rule they don’t reform failing schools. KIPP’s lone foray into turnarounds closed after only two years, and the organization abandoned further turnaround initiatives. Said KIPP’s spokesman, “Our core competency is starting and running new schools.”
Start Schools from Scratch
Ask those who know how to run high-performing, high-poverty schools why they start fresh, and they’ll give strikingly similar answers—and make the case against turnarounds.
A study done for NewSchools Venture Fund found that the operators of school networks believed that “changing the culture of existing schools to facilitate learning was difficult to impossible.” One compared turnarounds to putting “old wine in new bottles.”
Tom Torkelson, CEO of the high-performing IDEA network agrees: “I don’t do turnarounds because a turnaround usually means operating within a school system that couldn’t stomach the radical steps we’d take to get the school back on track. We fix what’s wrong with schools by changing the practices of the adults, and I believe there are few examples where this is currently possible without meddling from teacher unions, the school board, or the central office.”
Chris Barbic, founder and CEO of the stellar YES Prep network, says that “starting new schools and having control over hiring, length of day, student recruitment, and more gives us a pure opportunity to prove that low-income kids can achieve at the same levels as their more affluent peers. If we fail, we have only ourselves to blame, and that motivates us to bring our A-game every single day.”
KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg says simply, “The best way we can look a child in the eye and say with confidence what kind of school and environment we will provide is by starting that school and environment from scratch.”
A 2006 NewSchools Venture Fund study confirmed a widespread aversion to takeover-and-turnaround strategies among successful school operators. Only 4 of 36 organizations interviewed expressed interest in restructuring existing schools. Remarkably, rather than trusting successful school operators’ track records and informed opinion that start-ups are the way to go, Secretary Duncan urged them to get into the turnaround business during a speech at the 2009 National Charter Schools Conference.
The findings above deserve repeating: Fix-it efforts at the worst schools have consistently failed to generate significant improvement. Our knowledge base about improving failing schools is still staggeringly small. And exceptional urban schools are nearly always start-ups or consistently excellent schools, not drastically improved once-failing schools.
So when considering turnaround efforts we should stop repeating, “The actual proves the possible” and bear in mind a different Kant adage: “Ought implies can.”
If we are going to tell states and districts that they must fix all of their failing schools, or if we are to consider it a moral obligation to radically improve such schools, we should be certain that this endeavor is possible. But there is no reason to believe it is.
Turnarounds Elsewhere
Education leaders seem to believe that, outside of the world of schools, persistent failures are easily fixed. Far from it. The limited success of turnarounds is a common theme in other fields. Writing in Public Money & Management, researchers familiar with the true private-sector track record offered a word of caution: “There is a risk that politicians, government officials, and others, newly enamored of the language of failure and turnaround and inadequately informed of the empirical evidence and practical experience in the for-profit sector…will have unrealistic expectations of the transformative power of the turnaround process.”
Hess and Gift reviewed the success rates of Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Reengineering (BPR), the two most common approaches to organizational reform in the private sector. The literature suggests that both have failed to generate the desired results two-thirds of the time or more. They concluded, “The hope that we can systematically turn around all troubled schools—or even a majority of them—is at odds with much of what we know from similar efforts in the private sector.”
Many have noted that flexibility and dynamism are part of the genetic code of private business, so we should expect these organizations to be more receptive to the massive changes required by a turnaround process than institutions set in what Hess calls the “political, regulatory, and contractual morass of K–12 schooling.” Accordingly, school turnarounds should be more difficult to achieve. Indeed, a consultant with the Bridgespan Group reported, “Turnarounds in the public education space are far harder than any turnaround I’ve ever seen in the for-profit space.”
Building a Healthy Education Industry
We shouldn’t be surprised then that turnarounds in urban education have largely failed. The surprise and shame is that urban public education, unlike nearly every other industry, profession, and field, has never developed a sensible solution to its continuous failures. After undergoing improvement efforts, a struggling private firm that continues to lose money will close, get taken over, or go bankrupt. Unfit elected officials are voted out of office. The worst lawyers can be disbarred, and the most negligent doctors can lose their licenses. Urban school districts, at long last, need an equivalent.
The beginning of the solution is establishing a clear process for closing schools. The simplest and best way to put this into operation is the charter model. Each school, in conjunction with the state or district, would develop a five-year contract with performance measures. Consistent failure to meet goals in key areas would result in closure. Alternatively, the state could decide that districts only have one option—not five—for schools reaching NCLB-mandated restructuring: closure.
This would have three benefits. First, children would no longer be subjected to schools with long track records of failure and high probabilities of continued failure.
Second, the fear of closure might generate improvement in some low-performing schools. Failure in public education has had fewer consequences (for adults) than in other fields, a fact that might contribute to the persistent struggles of some schools. We should have limited expectations in this regard, however. Even in the private sector, where the consequences for poor performance are significant, some low-performing entities never become successful.
Third, and by far the most important and least appreciated factor, closures make room for replacements, which have a transformative positive impact on the health of a field. When a firm folds due to poor performance, the slack is taken up by the expansion of successful existing firms—meaning that those excelling have the opportunity to do more—or by new firms. New entrants not only fill gaps, they have a tendency to better reflect current market conditions. They are also far likelier to introduce innovations: Google, Facebook, and Twitter were not products of long-standing firms. Certainly not all new starts will excel, not in education, not in any field. But when provided the right characteristics and environment, their potential is vast.
The churn caused by closures isn’t something to be feared; on the contrary, it’s a familiar prerequisite for industry health. Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan’s brilliant 2001 book Creative Destruction catalogued the ubiquity of turnover in thriving industries, including the eventual loss of once-dominant players. Churn generates new ideas, ensures responsiveness, facilitates needed change, and empowers the best to do more.
These principles can be translated easily into urban public education via tools already at our fingertips thanks to chartering: start-ups, replications, and expansions. Chartering has enabled new school starts for nearly 20 years and school replications and expansions for a decade. Chartering has demonstrated clearly that the ingredients of healthy, orderly churn can be brought to bear on public education.
A small number of progressive leaders of major urban school systems are using school closure and replacement to transform their long-broken districts: Under Chancellor Joel Klein, New York City has closed nearly 100 traditional public schools and opened more than 300 new schools. In 2004, Chicago announced the Renaissance 2010 project, which is built around closing chronically failing schools and opening 100 new public schools by the end of the decade.
Numerous other big-city districts are in the process of closing troubled schools, including Detroit, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. In Baltimore, under schools CEO Andrés Alonso, reform’s guiding principles include “Closing schools that don’t work for our kids,” “Creating new options that have strong chances of success,” and “Expanding some programs that are already proving effective.”
Equally encouraging, there are indications that these ideas, which once would have been considered heretical, are being embraced by education’s cognoscenti. A group of leading reformers, the Coalition for Student Achievement, published a document in April 2009 that offered ideas for the best use of the federal government’s $100 billion in stimulus funding. They recommended that each state develop a mechanism to “close its lowest performing five percent of schools and replace them with higher-performing, new schools including public charter schools.”
A generation ago, few would have believed that such a fundamental overhaul of urban districts was on the horizon, much less that perennial underperformers New York City, Chicago, and Baltimore would be at the front of the pack with much of the education establishment and reform community in tow. But, consciously or not, these cities have begun internalizing the lessons of healthy industries and the chartering mechanism, which, if vigorously applied to urban schooling, have extraordinary potential. Best of all, these districts and outstanding charter leaders like KIPP Houston (with 15 schools already and dozens more planned) and Green Dot (which opened 5 new schools surrounding one of Los Angeles’s worst high schools) are showing that the formula boils down to four simple but eminently sensible steps: close failing schools, open new schools, replicate great schools, repeat.
Today’s fixation with fix-it efforts is misguided. Turnarounds have consistently shown themselves to be ineffective—truly an unscalable strategy for improving urban districts—and our relentless preoccupation with improving the worst schools actually inhibits the development of a healthy urban public-education industry.
Those hesitant about replacing turnarounds with closures should simply remember that a failed business doesn’t indict capitalism and an unseated incumbent doesn’t indict democracy. Though temporarily painful, both are essential mechanisms for maintaining long-term systemwide quality, responsiveness, and innovation. Closing America’s worst urban schools doesn’t indict public education nor does it suggest a lack of commitment to disadvantaged students. On the contrary, it reflects our insistence on finally taking the steps necessary to build city school systems that work for the boys and girls most in need.
Andy Smarick is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
What's problematic here is that we fail when we look at school as a business and education as a service. History has shown us this. Children and their families are not consumers! What we haven't seen in recent history are schools that are full of top-notch, quality teachers who are prepared to facilitate learning for all children and are supported by policies and leaders that have that same goal. Rather, we see teachers fleeing the very schools that need them, policies that seek to pay them more to lure them back [to a place they don't want to be], and a system that punishes children and their families for things that are totally out of their hands. Do we need schools to partner with parents in a thoughtful way? Yes! But will the most thoughtful, engaged parent whose child attends an under-resourced school that is being punished for low test scores somehow pull a lever that will release an army of well-prepared teachers who understand and want to build relationships with poor, minority children so that they can meet their full potential all of a sudden occur??? I doubt it!
Until we stop measuring success and "high performance" on standardized, test scores we'll struggle to create school environments that are focused on learning, building upon student's assets, and thoughtful kinds of assessments that value and fight to uphold these same assets.
We need to turnaround how we think about, implement, and measure learning that is student centered. Then we need to make sure that all schools have well-equipped and prepared teachers who can recognize the full potential of every child and support them with good leaders who care about students as the future of our society, not consumers who will either "build or destroy" the business they call school.
-Patricia
For as long as there have been struggling schools in America’s cities, there have been efforts to turn them around. The lure of dramatic improvement runs through Morgan Freeman’s big-screen portrayal of bat-wielding principal Joe Clark, philanthropic initiatives like the Gates Foundation’s “small schools” project, and No Child Left Behind (NCLB)’s restructuring mandate. The Obama administration hopes to extend this thread even further, making school turnarounds a top priority.
But overall, school turnaround efforts have consistently fallen far short of hopes and expectations. Quite simply, turnarounds are not a scalable strategy for fixing America’s troubled urban school systems.
Fortunately, findings from two generations of school improvement efforts, lessons from similar work in other industries, and a budding practice among reform-minded superintendents are pointing to a promising alternative. When conscientiously applied strategies fail to drastically improve America’s lowest-performing schools, we need to close them.
Done right, not only will this strategy help the students assigned to these failing schools, it will also have a cascading effect on other policies and practices, ultimately helping to bring about healthy systems of urban public schools.
A Body at Rest Stays at Rest
Looking back on the history of school turnaround efforts, the first and most important lesson is the “Law of Incessant Inertia.” Once persistently low performing, the majority of schools will remain low performing despite being acted upon in innumerable ways.
Examples abound: In the first year of California’s Academic Performance Index, the state targeted its lowest-performing 20 percent of schools for intervention. After three years, only 11 percent of the elementary schools in this category (109 of 968) were able to make “exemplary progress.” Only 1 of the 394 middle and high schools in this category reached this mark. Just one-quarter of the schools were even able to accomplish a lesser goal: meeting schoolwide and subgroup growth targets each year.
In 2008, 52 Ohio schools were forced to restructure because of persistent failure. Even after several years of significant attention, fewer than one in three had been able to reach established academic goals, and less than half showed any student performance gains. The Columbus Dispatch concluded, “Few of them have improved significantly even after years of effort and millions in tax dollars.”
These state anecdotes align with national data on schools undergoing NCLB-mandated restructuring, the law’s most serious intervention, which follows five or more years of failing to meet minimum achievement targets. Of the schools required to restructure in 2004–05, only 19 percent were able to exit improvement status two years later.
A 2008 Center on Education Policy (CEP) study investigated the results of restructuring in five states. In California, Maryland, and Ohio, only 14, 12, and 9 percent of schools in restructuring, respectively, made adequate yearly progress (AYP) as defined by NCLB the following year. And we must consider carefully whether merely making AYP should constitute success at all: in California, for example, a school can meet its performance target if slightly more than one-third of its students reach proficiency in English language arts and math. Though the CEP study found that improvement rates in Michigan and Georgia were considerably higher, Michigan changed its accountability system during this period, and both states set their AYP bars especially low.
Though alarming, the poor record for school turnarounds in recent years should come as no surprise. A study published in 2005 by the Education Commission of the States (ECS) on state takeovers of schools and districts noted that the takeovers “have yet to produce dramatic consistent increases in student performance,” and that the impact on learning “falls short of expectations.”
Reflecting on the wide array of efforts to improve failing schools, one set of analysts concluded, “Turnaround efforts have for the most part resulted in only marginal improvements…. Promising practices have failed to work at scale when imported to troubled schools.”
Like Finding the Cure for Cancer
The second important lesson is the “Law of Ongoing Ignorance.” Despite years of experience and great expenditures of time, money, and energy, we still lack basic information about which tactics will make a struggling school excellent. A review published in January 2003 by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation of more than 100 books, articles, and briefs on turnaround efforts concluded, “There is, at present, no strong evidence that any particular intervention type works most of the time or in most places.”
An EdSource study that sought to compare California’s low-performing schools that failed to make progress to its low-performing schools that did improve came to a confounding conclusion: clear differences avoided detection. Comparing the two groups, the authors noted, “These were schools in the same cities and districts, often serving children from the same backgrounds. Some of them also adopted the same curriculum programs, had teachers with similar backgrounds, and had similar opportunities for professional development.”
Maryland’s veteran state superintendent of schools, Nancy Grasmick, agrees: “Very little research exists on how to bring about real sea change in schools…. Clearly, there’s no infallible strategy or even sequence of them.” Responding to the growing number of failing Baltimore schools requiring state-approved improvement plans, she said, “No one has the answer. It’s like finding the cure for cancer.”
Researchers have openly lamented the lack of reliable information pointing to or explaining successful improvement efforts, describing the literature as “sparse” and “scarce.” Those attempting to help others fix broken schools have typically resorted to identifying activities in improved schools, such as bolstering leadership and collecting data.
However, this case-study style of analysis is deeply flawed. As the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has noted, studies “that look back at factors that may have contributed to [a] school’s success” are “particularly weak in determining causal validity for several reasons, including the fact that there is no way to be confident that the features common to successful turnaround schools are not also common to schools that fail.”
Researchers have noted that the Department of Education has signaled its own ignorance about what to do about the nation’s very worst schools. One study reported, “The NCLB law does not specify any additional actions for schools that remain in the implementation phase of restructuring for more than one year, and [the Department] has offered little guidance on what to do about persistently struggling schools.” Indeed, the IES publication, “Turning Around Chronically Low-Performing Schools” practice guide, purportedly a resource for states and districts, concedes, “All recommendations had to rely on low levels of evidence,” because it could not identify any rigorous studies finding that “specific turnaround practices produce significantly better academic outcomes.”
Still in Its Infancy?
The prevailing view is that we must keep looking for turnaround solutions. Observers have written, “Turnaround at scale is still in its infancy,” and “In education, turnarounds have been tried rarely” (see “The Big U-Turn,” features, Winter 2009). But, in fact, the number and scope of fix-it efforts have been extensive to say the least.
Long before NCLB required interventions in the lowest-performing schools, states had undertaken significant activity. In 1989 New Jersey took over Jersey City Public Schools; in 1995 it took over Newark Public Schools. In 1993 California took control of the Compton Unified School District. In 1995 Ohio took over the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Between 1993 and 1997 states required the reconstitution of failing schools in Denver, Chicago, New York City, and Houston. In 2000 Alabama took over a number of schools across the state, and Maryland seized control of three schools in Baltimore.
Since NCLB, interventions in struggling schools have only grown in number and intensity. In the 2006–07 school year, more than 750 schools in “corrective action,” the NCLB phase preceding restructuring, implemented a new research-based curriculum, more than 700 used an outside expert to advise the school, nearly 400 restructured the internal organization of the school, and more than 200 extended the school day or year. Importantly, more than 300 replaced staff members or the principal, among the toughest traditional interventions possible.
Occasionally a program will report encouraging success rates. The University of Virginia School Turnaround Specialist Program asserts that about half of its targeted schools have either made AYP or reduced math and reading failure rates by at least 5 percent. Though this might be better than would otherwise be expected, the threshold for success is remarkably low. It is also unknown whether such progress can be sustained. This matter is particularly important, given that some point to charter management organizations Green Dot and Mastery as turnaround success stories even though each has a very short turnaround résumé, in both numbers of schools and years of experience.
Many schools that reach NCLB’s restructuring phase, rather than implementing one of the law’s stated interventions (close and reopen as a charter school, replace staff, turn the school over to the state, or contract with an outside entity), choose the “other” option, under which they have considerable flexibility to design an improvement strategy of their own (see “Easy Way Out,” forum, Winter 2007). Some call this a “loophole” for avoiding tough action.
Yet even under the maligned “other” option, states and districts have tried an astonishing array of improvement strategies, including different types of school-level needs assessments, surveys of school staff, conferences, professional development, turnaround specialists, school improvement committees, training sessions, principal mentors, teacher coaches, leadership facilitators, instructional trainers, subject-matter experts, audits, summer residential academies, student tutoring, research-based reform models, reconfigured grade spans, alternative governance models, new curricula, improved use of data, and turning over operation of some schools to outside organizations.
It’s simply impossible to make the case that turnaround efforts haven’t been tried or given a chance to work.
A Better Mousetrap?
Despite this evidence, some continue to advocate for improved turnaround efforts. Nancy Grasmick supports recognizing turnarounds as a unique discipline. Frederick Hess and Thomas Gift have argued for developing school restructuring leaders; Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel have recommended that states and districts “fuel the pipeline” of untraditional turnaround specialists. NewSchools Venture Fund, the Education Commission of the States, and the research firm Mass Insight have offered related turnaround strategies.
And the Obama administration too has bought into the notion that turnarounds are the key to improving urban districts. Education secretary Arne Duncan has said that if the nation could turn around 1,000 schools annually for five years, “We could really move the needle, lift the bottom and change the lives of tens of millions of underserved children.” In the administration’s 2009 stimulus legislation, $3 billion in new funds were appropriated for School Improvement Grants, which aid schools in NCLB improvement status. The administration requested an additional $1.5 billion for this program in the 2010 budget. This is all on top of the numerous streams of existing federal funds that can be—and have been—used to turn around failing schools.
The dissonance is deafening. The history of urban education tells us emphatically that turnarounds are not a reliable strategy for improving our very worst schools. So why does there remain a stubborn insistence on preserving fix-it efforts?
The most common, but also the most deeply flawed, justification is that there are high-performing schools in American cities. That is, some fix-it proponents point to unarguably successful urban schools and then infer that scalable turnaround strategies are within reach. In fact, it has become fashionable among turnaround advocates to repeat philosopher Immanuel Kant’s adage that “the actual proves the possible.”
But as a Thomas B. Fordham Foundation study noted, “Much is known about how effective schools work, but it is far less clear how to move an ineffective school from failure to success…. Being a high-performing school and becoming a high-performing school are very different challenges.”
In fact, America’s most-famous superior urban schools are virtually always new starts rather than schools that were previously underperforming. Probably the most convincing argument for the fundamental difference between start-ups and turnarounds comes from those actually running high-performing high-poverty urban schools (see sidebar). Groups like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) and Achievement First open new schools; as a rule they don’t reform failing schools. KIPP’s lone foray into turnarounds closed after only two years, and the organization abandoned further turnaround initiatives. Said KIPP’s spokesman, “Our core competency is starting and running new schools.”
Start Schools from Scratch
Ask those who know how to run high-performing, high-poverty schools why they start fresh, and they’ll give strikingly similar answers—and make the case against turnarounds.
A study done for NewSchools Venture Fund found that the operators of school networks believed that “changing the culture of existing schools to facilitate learning was difficult to impossible.” One compared turnarounds to putting “old wine in new bottles.”
Tom Torkelson, CEO of the high-performing IDEA network agrees: “I don’t do turnarounds because a turnaround usually means operating within a school system that couldn’t stomach the radical steps we’d take to get the school back on track. We fix what’s wrong with schools by changing the practices of the adults, and I believe there are few examples where this is currently possible without meddling from teacher unions, the school board, or the central office.”
Chris Barbic, founder and CEO of the stellar YES Prep network, says that “starting new schools and having control over hiring, length of day, student recruitment, and more gives us a pure opportunity to prove that low-income kids can achieve at the same levels as their more affluent peers. If we fail, we have only ourselves to blame, and that motivates us to bring our A-game every single day.”
KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg says simply, “The best way we can look a child in the eye and say with confidence what kind of school and environment we will provide is by starting that school and environment from scratch.”
A 2006 NewSchools Venture Fund study confirmed a widespread aversion to takeover-and-turnaround strategies among successful school operators. Only 4 of 36 organizations interviewed expressed interest in restructuring existing schools. Remarkably, rather than trusting successful school operators’ track records and informed opinion that start-ups are the way to go, Secretary Duncan urged them to get into the turnaround business during a speech at the 2009 National Charter Schools Conference.
The findings above deserve repeating: Fix-it efforts at the worst schools have consistently failed to generate significant improvement. Our knowledge base about improving failing schools is still staggeringly small. And exceptional urban schools are nearly always start-ups or consistently excellent schools, not drastically improved once-failing schools.
So when considering turnaround efforts we should stop repeating, “The actual proves the possible” and bear in mind a different Kant adage: “Ought implies can.”
If we are going to tell states and districts that they must fix all of their failing schools, or if we are to consider it a moral obligation to radically improve such schools, we should be certain that this endeavor is possible. But there is no reason to believe it is.
Turnarounds Elsewhere
Education leaders seem to believe that, outside of the world of schools, persistent failures are easily fixed. Far from it. The limited success of turnarounds is a common theme in other fields. Writing in Public Money & Management, researchers familiar with the true private-sector track record offered a word of caution: “There is a risk that politicians, government officials, and others, newly enamored of the language of failure and turnaround and inadequately informed of the empirical evidence and practical experience in the for-profit sector…will have unrealistic expectations of the transformative power of the turnaround process.”
Hess and Gift reviewed the success rates of Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Reengineering (BPR), the two most common approaches to organizational reform in the private sector. The literature suggests that both have failed to generate the desired results two-thirds of the time or more. They concluded, “The hope that we can systematically turn around all troubled schools—or even a majority of them—is at odds with much of what we know from similar efforts in the private sector.”
Many have noted that flexibility and dynamism are part of the genetic code of private business, so we should expect these organizations to be more receptive to the massive changes required by a turnaround process than institutions set in what Hess calls the “political, regulatory, and contractual morass of K–12 schooling.” Accordingly, school turnarounds should be more difficult to achieve. Indeed, a consultant with the Bridgespan Group reported, “Turnarounds in the public education space are far harder than any turnaround I’ve ever seen in the for-profit space.”
Building a Healthy Education Industry
We shouldn’t be surprised then that turnarounds in urban education have largely failed. The surprise and shame is that urban public education, unlike nearly every other industry, profession, and field, has never developed a sensible solution to its continuous failures. After undergoing improvement efforts, a struggling private firm that continues to lose money will close, get taken over, or go bankrupt. Unfit elected officials are voted out of office. The worst lawyers can be disbarred, and the most negligent doctors can lose their licenses. Urban school districts, at long last, need an equivalent.
The beginning of the solution is establishing a clear process for closing schools. The simplest and best way to put this into operation is the charter model. Each school, in conjunction with the state or district, would develop a five-year contract with performance measures. Consistent failure to meet goals in key areas would result in closure. Alternatively, the state could decide that districts only have one option—not five—for schools reaching NCLB-mandated restructuring: closure.
This would have three benefits. First, children would no longer be subjected to schools with long track records of failure and high probabilities of continued failure.
Second, the fear of closure might generate improvement in some low-performing schools. Failure in public education has had fewer consequences (for adults) than in other fields, a fact that might contribute to the persistent struggles of some schools. We should have limited expectations in this regard, however. Even in the private sector, where the consequences for poor performance are significant, some low-performing entities never become successful.
Third, and by far the most important and least appreciated factor, closures make room for replacements, which have a transformative positive impact on the health of a field. When a firm folds due to poor performance, the slack is taken up by the expansion of successful existing firms—meaning that those excelling have the opportunity to do more—or by new firms. New entrants not only fill gaps, they have a tendency to better reflect current market conditions. They are also far likelier to introduce innovations: Google, Facebook, and Twitter were not products of long-standing firms. Certainly not all new starts will excel, not in education, not in any field. But when provided the right characteristics and environment, their potential is vast.
The churn caused by closures isn’t something to be feared; on the contrary, it’s a familiar prerequisite for industry health. Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan’s brilliant 2001 book Creative Destruction catalogued the ubiquity of turnover in thriving industries, including the eventual loss of once-dominant players. Churn generates new ideas, ensures responsiveness, facilitates needed change, and empowers the best to do more.
These principles can be translated easily into urban public education via tools already at our fingertips thanks to chartering: start-ups, replications, and expansions. Chartering has enabled new school starts for nearly 20 years and school replications and expansions for a decade. Chartering has demonstrated clearly that the ingredients of healthy, orderly churn can be brought to bear on public education.
A small number of progressive leaders of major urban school systems are using school closure and replacement to transform their long-broken districts: Under Chancellor Joel Klein, New York City has closed nearly 100 traditional public schools and opened more than 300 new schools. In 2004, Chicago announced the Renaissance 2010 project, which is built around closing chronically failing schools and opening 100 new public schools by the end of the decade.
Numerous other big-city districts are in the process of closing troubled schools, including Detroit, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. In Baltimore, under schools CEO Andrés Alonso, reform’s guiding principles include “Closing schools that don’t work for our kids,” “Creating new options that have strong chances of success,” and “Expanding some programs that are already proving effective.”
Equally encouraging, there are indications that these ideas, which once would have been considered heretical, are being embraced by education’s cognoscenti. A group of leading reformers, the Coalition for Student Achievement, published a document in April 2009 that offered ideas for the best use of the federal government’s $100 billion in stimulus funding. They recommended that each state develop a mechanism to “close its lowest performing five percent of schools and replace them with higher-performing, new schools including public charter schools.”
A generation ago, few would have believed that such a fundamental overhaul of urban districts was on the horizon, much less that perennial underperformers New York City, Chicago, and Baltimore would be at the front of the pack with much of the education establishment and reform community in tow. But, consciously or not, these cities have begun internalizing the lessons of healthy industries and the chartering mechanism, which, if vigorously applied to urban schooling, have extraordinary potential. Best of all, these districts and outstanding charter leaders like KIPP Houston (with 15 schools already and dozens more planned) and Green Dot (which opened 5 new schools surrounding one of Los Angeles’s worst high schools) are showing that the formula boils down to four simple but eminently sensible steps: close failing schools, open new schools, replicate great schools, repeat.
Today’s fixation with fix-it efforts is misguided. Turnarounds have consistently shown themselves to be ineffective—truly an unscalable strategy for improving urban districts—and our relentless preoccupation with improving the worst schools actually inhibits the development of a healthy urban public-education industry.
Those hesitant about replacing turnarounds with closures should simply remember that a failed business doesn’t indict capitalism and an unseated incumbent doesn’t indict democracy. Though temporarily painful, both are essential mechanisms for maintaining long-term systemwide quality, responsiveness, and innovation. Closing America’s worst urban schools doesn’t indict public education nor does it suggest a lack of commitment to disadvantaged students. On the contrary, it reflects our insistence on finally taking the steps necessary to build city school systems that work for the boys and girls most in need.
Andy Smarick is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Report Questions Duncan’s Policy of Closing Failing Schools
Interesting twist here. Wonder how this will play into the plans that states are outlining to receive federal RTTT funds.
Here's the link to the full report When Schools Close: Effects on Displaced Students in Chicago Public Schools
-Patricia
By SAM DILLON | NY Times
October 28, 2009
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan presided over the closing of dozens of failing schools when he was chief executive of the Chicago public schools from 2001 until last December. In his new post, he has drawn on those experiences, putting school turnaround efforts at the center of the nation’s education reform agenda.
Now a study by researchers at the University of Chicago concludes that most students in schools that closed in the first five years of Mr. Duncan’s tenure in Chicago saw little benefit.
“Most students who transferred out of closing schools re-enrolled in schools that were academically weak,” says the report, which was done by the university’s Consortium on Chicago School Research.
Furthermore, the disruptions of routines in schools scheduled to be closed appeared to hurt student learning in the months after the closing was announced, the researchers found.
The reading scores of students in schools designated for closing “showed a loss of about six weeks of learning” on standardized tests in the months after the closing announcement, the report said. Math scores declined somewhat less, it said.
Partly because of the disruption caused by the closings, Mr. Duncan changed strategy after 2006. Instead of closing schools permanently, or for a year, and then reopening with a new staff, he shifted to the turnaround approach, in which the staff of failing schools was replaced over the summer but the same students returned in the fall.
The new report focused only on the elementary schools closed permanently from 2001 to 2006, and thus offers no conclusions about the effectiveness of the turnaround strategy.
Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for Mr. Duncan, noted that the report also found that students who ended up in higher-achieving schools showed more gains on standardized tests.
“Clearly, the students who transferred to better schools did better, but the ones who went to similar schools did not,” Mr. Hamilton said. “That’s why we worked in parallel to create more new high-quality learning options.”
Still, the report’s findings are likely to provoke new debate about Mr. Duncan’s efforts to encourage the use of Chicago’s turnaround strategy nationwide. He has set the goal of closing and overhauling 1,000 failing schools a year nationwide, for five years, and Congress appropriated $3 billion in the stimulus law to finance the effort.
A review of the history of school reform efforts, published in the current issue of Education Next, a journal published by Harvard University, argues that school turnaround efforts have failed more often than not.
“This leaves reform advocates in a pickle,” said Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “The Obama administration’s solution is that we’re going to make all the lousy schools better, but that’s harder than the administration has let on. The next most attractive alternative is to shut them down, and let the kids go to other schools, but this Consortium report has found that that brought little benefit to students in Chicago.”
Recommend
Here's the link to the full report When Schools Close: Effects on Displaced Students in Chicago Public Schools
-Patricia
By SAM DILLON | NY Times
October 28, 2009
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan presided over the closing of dozens of failing schools when he was chief executive of the Chicago public schools from 2001 until last December. In his new post, he has drawn on those experiences, putting school turnaround efforts at the center of the nation’s education reform agenda.
Now a study by researchers at the University of Chicago concludes that most students in schools that closed in the first five years of Mr. Duncan’s tenure in Chicago saw little benefit.
“Most students who transferred out of closing schools re-enrolled in schools that were academically weak,” says the report, which was done by the university’s Consortium on Chicago School Research.
Furthermore, the disruptions of routines in schools scheduled to be closed appeared to hurt student learning in the months after the closing was announced, the researchers found.
The reading scores of students in schools designated for closing “showed a loss of about six weeks of learning” on standardized tests in the months after the closing announcement, the report said. Math scores declined somewhat less, it said.
Partly because of the disruption caused by the closings, Mr. Duncan changed strategy after 2006. Instead of closing schools permanently, or for a year, and then reopening with a new staff, he shifted to the turnaround approach, in which the staff of failing schools was replaced over the summer but the same students returned in the fall.
The new report focused only on the elementary schools closed permanently from 2001 to 2006, and thus offers no conclusions about the effectiveness of the turnaround strategy.
Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for Mr. Duncan, noted that the report also found that students who ended up in higher-achieving schools showed more gains on standardized tests.
“Clearly, the students who transferred to better schools did better, but the ones who went to similar schools did not,” Mr. Hamilton said. “That’s why we worked in parallel to create more new high-quality learning options.”
Still, the report’s findings are likely to provoke new debate about Mr. Duncan’s efforts to encourage the use of Chicago’s turnaround strategy nationwide. He has set the goal of closing and overhauling 1,000 failing schools a year nationwide, for five years, and Congress appropriated $3 billion in the stimulus law to finance the effort.
A review of the history of school reform efforts, published in the current issue of Education Next, a journal published by Harvard University, argues that school turnaround efforts have failed more often than not.
“This leaves reform advocates in a pickle,” said Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “The Obama administration’s solution is that we’re going to make all the lousy schools better, but that’s harder than the administration has let on. The next most attractive alternative is to shut them down, and let the kids go to other schools, but this Consortium report has found that that brought little benefit to students in Chicago.”
Recommend
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
School within a school is new strategy to transform education
By Sarah Carr
September 27, 2009
At first, Aliska Prejean was a little skeptical when school leaders told her a new administration would take over the lower grades at Carver Elementary, where her five children are enrolled.
Without a car, she worried about the logistics of picking up her children at different times. And without much money, she worried about having to buy a bunch of new uniforms.
The educators who visited her house to explain the concept were reassuring, however. And when school started in August, her pre-kindergartener and second-grader happily went off to the new school, Benjamin Mays Prep, located on the same campus as Carver, which her three older children continued to attend.
Carver is one of four campuses across the city where educators have embarked this fall on an unusual method of rehabilitation. Instead of closing the school completely, or handing over the reins to a new leader, they hope to transform the schools gradually:
At the Carver campus, Benjamin Mays Prep, a charter school, took over only the pre-kindergarten through second grades; each year, Mays will add a grade until Carver no longer exists.
"If we can prove this transformation process works, it holds tremendous promise not just for New Orleans, but nationwide, " said Matt Candler, chairman of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, who helped design the concept.
The strategy comes at a time of intense interest nationally in how to turn around the country's lowest-performing schools. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has charged states with devising ways to reinvent the country's "chronically underperforming" schools, the bottom 5 percent.
So far, three other approaches have dominated: closing the weakest schools; reconstituting them with new faculty and staffs; or handing them over to new operators, like the state or a nonprofit group that manages clusters of charters.
The strategy under way at Carver and the other three campuses is unique in that it blends all three approaches, but takes more time to implement. Its backers say that it's less painful to a community than closing a school outright, and makes it easier to eradicate low expectations and unhealthy school cultures since the new programs start with only the youngest children. Critics call it inefficient to staff one campus with two separate administrations and support staffs, and worry about neglect of the older students.
Regardless of such opinions, the experiment at Carver, Gregory, Wicker and Drew elementary campuses requires unprecedented cooperation among the schools.
"We knew very early on that this marriage had to work, " said Duke Bradley, the leader of Mays Prep.
Education with a drumbeat
Early one morning at the Carver campus, housed in modular units not far from the flood-ravaged original building in the Upper 9th Ward, a handful of Carver students in navy uniforms quietly walked between the buildings. As visitors approached the rear of the campus, the sound of children's voices chanting in unison built to a crescendo.
"Mays Prep! Mays Prep! Mays Prep Knights!!!"
In the small Carver auditorium, the entire student body of Mays Prep sat in a horseshoe pattern around Bradley.
"We're going to count to 50 by fives, " he cried out. "I don't know if Southern University can do that. I don't know if Boston University can do that. I don't know if Smith (College) can do this well." Like many other charter schools, Bradley refers to classes by the alma mater of their teacher, an attempt to instill a college-bound focus in children as young as four.
After revving up the youngsters for 30 minutes, Bradley brought out a drum and played as the children headed back to class.
By the end, he dripped with sweat and the school staff and students stood wide awake, as if from a jolt of caffeine.
Most of Mays Prep's students attended Carver last year, with the exception of the pre-kindergarteners, who usually have older siblings at either Carver or Mays Prep. The schools share gym and auditorium space, but have separate dismissal times and locations, and completely separate staffs and academic programs.
Mays Prep, like the four other new "transformation" schools, is a charter, meaning it is publicly funded and accountable, but privately run. Carver, Drew, Gregory and Wicker -- the four schools that will gradually be replaced -- are all non-charters run by the Recovery School District. In one indication of the different management styles, two of the transformation schools invited a reporter to stop by on the spot, while a leader of one of the traditional schools sought permission from the district before commenting on the arrangement.
Prejean said she loves both schools this year, despite their somewhat different feels. "Usually you can't just stop a principal dead in his tracks and ask him or her a question, but you can do that at both these schools, " she said.
Another parent, who did not want to be named, said she prefers Mays Prep to Carver. She wishes the new charter had taken on more grades, because she has children in the older grades as well.
"Mays Prep does home visits, they make phone calls, " she said. "You don't hear much from Carver."
The takeover strategy
While Candler might try to bring the grade-by-grade transformation model to other communities, some other local educators are taking a different approach to failing schools.
Two New Orleans-based charter management organizations have applied to take over poorly performing schools as soon as next year. They would take control of all the grades at once, a more common model nationally.
"The whole push under Obama is to have turnaround organizations go in and take over the weakest links, " said Gary Robichaux, director of one of the new charter organizations.
The takeover strategy avoids the friction that can result when two different schools coexist, but it can be incredibly challenging unless the new leaders come with in-depth knowledge of the school community, staff and needs.
Louella Givens, a member of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, which oversees the RSD, said she's skeptical of the transformation model because of the inefficiencies and unallayed "concerns about what is happening for the children in the upper grades."
"They haven't given us any reports on what's going on in those schools, " she said.
Candler argues that "more often than not, (leaders of both schools) see themselves as accountable to the whole population."
In the past year, the Recovery School District has brought in new leaders at all four of the schools being phased out to ease the transition. At the Drew campus, for instance, both principals have a background working for the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP network of schools.
"I think it helps when you have similar philosophies, whether it's KIPP or not, " Drew principal Marc Merriman said.
Prejean said the Benjamin Mays/Carver cohabitation is working out better than she had initially thought. Though she can't afford to buy more than one uniform for each of her five children, she takes time to wash all five each night, whether it's the maroon and khaki of Mays Prep, or the navy blue of Carver.
"I guess since Katrina nothing at all is weird to me anymore, " she said. "I've been in church buildings where there was two different churches going on and it worked out fine. That's how Mays Prep inside of Carver feels to me."
September 27, 2009
At first, Aliska Prejean was a little skeptical when school leaders told her a new administration would take over the lower grades at Carver Elementary, where her five children are enrolled.
Without a car, she worried about the logistics of picking up her children at different times. And without much money, she worried about having to buy a bunch of new uniforms.
The educators who visited her house to explain the concept were reassuring, however. And when school started in August, her pre-kindergartener and second-grader happily went off to the new school, Benjamin Mays Prep, located on the same campus as Carver, which her three older children continued to attend.
Carver is one of four campuses across the city where educators have embarked this fall on an unusual method of rehabilitation. Instead of closing the school completely, or handing over the reins to a new leader, they hope to transform the schools gradually:
At the Carver campus, Benjamin Mays Prep, a charter school, took over only the pre-kindergarten through second grades; each year, Mays will add a grade until Carver no longer exists.
"If we can prove this transformation process works, it holds tremendous promise not just for New Orleans, but nationwide, " said Matt Candler, chairman of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, who helped design the concept.
The strategy comes at a time of intense interest nationally in how to turn around the country's lowest-performing schools. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has charged states with devising ways to reinvent the country's "chronically underperforming" schools, the bottom 5 percent.
So far, three other approaches have dominated: closing the weakest schools; reconstituting them with new faculty and staffs; or handing them over to new operators, like the state or a nonprofit group that manages clusters of charters.
The strategy under way at Carver and the other three campuses is unique in that it blends all three approaches, but takes more time to implement. Its backers say that it's less painful to a community than closing a school outright, and makes it easier to eradicate low expectations and unhealthy school cultures since the new programs start with only the youngest children. Critics call it inefficient to staff one campus with two separate administrations and support staffs, and worry about neglect of the older students.
Regardless of such opinions, the experiment at Carver, Gregory, Wicker and Drew elementary campuses requires unprecedented cooperation among the schools.
"We knew very early on that this marriage had to work, " said Duke Bradley, the leader of Mays Prep.
Education with a drumbeat
Early one morning at the Carver campus, housed in modular units not far from the flood-ravaged original building in the Upper 9th Ward, a handful of Carver students in navy uniforms quietly walked between the buildings. As visitors approached the rear of the campus, the sound of children's voices chanting in unison built to a crescendo.
"Mays Prep! Mays Prep! Mays Prep Knights!!!"
In the small Carver auditorium, the entire student body of Mays Prep sat in a horseshoe pattern around Bradley.
"We're going to count to 50 by fives, " he cried out. "I don't know if Southern University can do that. I don't know if Boston University can do that. I don't know if Smith (College) can do this well." Like many other charter schools, Bradley refers to classes by the alma mater of their teacher, an attempt to instill a college-bound focus in children as young as four.
After revving up the youngsters for 30 minutes, Bradley brought out a drum and played as the children headed back to class.
By the end, he dripped with sweat and the school staff and students stood wide awake, as if from a jolt of caffeine.
Most of Mays Prep's students attended Carver last year, with the exception of the pre-kindergarteners, who usually have older siblings at either Carver or Mays Prep. The schools share gym and auditorium space, but have separate dismissal times and locations, and completely separate staffs and academic programs.
Mays Prep, like the four other new "transformation" schools, is a charter, meaning it is publicly funded and accountable, but privately run. Carver, Drew, Gregory and Wicker -- the four schools that will gradually be replaced -- are all non-charters run by the Recovery School District. In one indication of the different management styles, two of the transformation schools invited a reporter to stop by on the spot, while a leader of one of the traditional schools sought permission from the district before commenting on the arrangement.
Prejean said she loves both schools this year, despite their somewhat different feels. "Usually you can't just stop a principal dead in his tracks and ask him or her a question, but you can do that at both these schools, " she said.
Another parent, who did not want to be named, said she prefers Mays Prep to Carver. She wishes the new charter had taken on more grades, because she has children in the older grades as well.
"Mays Prep does home visits, they make phone calls, " she said. "You don't hear much from Carver."
The takeover strategy
While Candler might try to bring the grade-by-grade transformation model to other communities, some other local educators are taking a different approach to failing schools.
Two New Orleans-based charter management organizations have applied to take over poorly performing schools as soon as next year. They would take control of all the grades at once, a more common model nationally.
"The whole push under Obama is to have turnaround organizations go in and take over the weakest links, " said Gary Robichaux, director of one of the new charter organizations.
The takeover strategy avoids the friction that can result when two different schools coexist, but it can be incredibly challenging unless the new leaders come with in-depth knowledge of the school community, staff and needs.
Louella Givens, a member of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, which oversees the RSD, said she's skeptical of the transformation model because of the inefficiencies and unallayed "concerns about what is happening for the children in the upper grades."
"They haven't given us any reports on what's going on in those schools, " she said.
Candler argues that "more often than not, (leaders of both schools) see themselves as accountable to the whole population."
In the past year, the Recovery School District has brought in new leaders at all four of the schools being phased out to ease the transition. At the Drew campus, for instance, both principals have a background working for the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP network of schools.
"I think it helps when you have similar philosophies, whether it's KIPP or not, " Drew principal Marc Merriman said.
Prejean said the Benjamin Mays/Carver cohabitation is working out better than she had initially thought. Though she can't afford to buy more than one uniform for each of her five children, she takes time to wash all five each night, whether it's the maroon and khaki of Mays Prep, or the navy blue of Carver.
"I guess since Katrina nothing at all is weird to me anymore, " she said. "I've been in church buildings where there was two different churches going on and it worked out fine. That's how Mays Prep inside of Carver feels to me."
Sunday, August 09, 2009
Research Doesn’t Offer Much Guidance on Turnarounds
EDWEEK.org
Published Online: August 4, 2009
By Debra Viadero
Ever since U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called for turning around 5,000 of the nation’s worst-performing schools, the phone has been ringing steadily at the University of Virginia’s School Turnaround Specialist Program. Most of the calls are from educators looking for expert advice on how to go about transforming failing schools into success stories.
But if research-tested prescriptions for success are what those callers want, neither the center’s experts nor any other scholar may have much to offer. That’s because rigorous research on how to engineer the kind of dramatic transformation that Mr. Duncan is advocating is a scarce commodity, according to many scholars.
“There is both a lack of turnarounds in education and a lack of research about turnarounds,” said Bryan C. Hassel, a co-director of Public Impact, a Chapel Hill, N.C., consulting firm that has studied turnarounds in education and other fields. “And the research base for turnarounds outside of education isn’t any kind of ‘gold standard’ research base, either.”
The press for research-based solutions to the school turnaround problem is also heightened by the promise of billions of dollars in economic-stimulus grants to states from the U.S. Department of Education to do the job. The Race to the Top program alone includes $3.5 billion meant to be used for that purpose, as well as for meeting the other goals of that program, and the federal education-spending bill is expected to include millions more in Title I school improvement grants.
But even before Secretary Duncan began offering federal dollars and making speeches highlighting the topic in June, the need for dramatic action on the school turnaround front was obvious.
Under the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires schools to undergo restructuring when they fail to reach their academic targets for five years in a row, the list of failing schools grows annually. By the 2007-08 school year, five years into the law, more than 3,500 schools across the country were officially in some stage of restructuring.
Counting Successes
While no one is tracking how many schools at the national level have successfully emerged from restructuring, a handful of small-scale studies suggest the number is tiny, even when including the high-profile successes that Mr. Duncan has touted in Boston, Chicago, Hartford, Conn., New York City, and Philadelphia.
A Michigan case study by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy, for example, found that only five of the 34 elementary and middle schools identified for restructuring in that state had left that status.
At the Virginia turnaround-specialist program, one of a handful across the country to specialize in transforming chronically low-performing schools, the track record is better. Of the 43 principal “turnaround specialists” in the program’s first three cohorts, 57 percent went to schools that have since either met their targets for adequate yearly progress under the NCLB law or achieved substantial academic gains.
Not everyone agrees, though, that research on turning around the poorest-performing schools is lacking. Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University research scientist, for one, contends that in many cases, “we have more knowledge than we actually apply.”
He and his colleagues are putting their know-how to work through an intensive strategy that builds on the Talent Development model for school improvement that was developed at Johns Hopkins, adds an early-warning system so that educators can identify students at risk of dropping out early, and enlists City Year, a Boston-based group that recruits young people for a year of full-time service, to act as mentors and tutors for the neediest students.
A one-year pilot of the model in Philadelphia resulted in a 40 percent reduction in the number of students with behavior and attendance problems. In addition, Mr. Balfanz said, half the students with failing grades were able to raise their grades. He is expanding the model in the fall to New Orleans, Chicago, and San Antonio for further testing.
Studies Ignored?
Those who see a lack of research evidence for turning around failing schools, some researchers say, are also ignoring the large body of existing research on comprehensive school reform, a strategy that makes use of off-the-shelf models for schoolwide improvement.
Reviews of studies of those whole-school improvement models have shown that, while most don’t seem to work, a handful, such as Success For All and Direct Instruction, consistently produce academic improvements over time.
“I’m distressed that this is being approached as though we know so little,” said Robert E. Slavin, Success For All’s developer. “We learned a vast amount from research on comprehensive school reform that would be of great use in turning around low-performing schools.”
In a new policy brief, the Washington-based Alliance for Excellent Education echoes Mr. Slavin’s view, calling on the federal government to do more to encourage whole-school reform as part of a systemic strategy for improving low-performing schools.
But a practice guide on school turnaround strategies by the Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences, or IES, suggests there’s a good reason to bypass that research: Whole-school improvement strategies tend to be slow and scattershot.
“School turnaround work involves quick, dramatic improvement within three years,” the guide says, “while school improvement is marked by steady, incremental improvement over a longer period of time.”
One-size-fits-all research solutions are also hard to find because winning strategies differ from school to school, experts say.
“The reason we put so much emphasis on diagnostics is that turnaround specialists have to determine what conditions led to the decline in the first place,” said Daniel L. Duke, a professor of educational leadership with the University of Virginia program.
A lack of scientific research notwithstanding, there’s no shortage of research-informed advice on how to transform chronically low-performing schools.
Experts are drawing recommendations from case studies of schools that have successfully transformed; turnarounds in other sectors of the economy, such as business; and the body of literature on schools that “beat the odds” by achieving better-than-expected results given their demographic makeups. Those sources may have a lower standard of evidence, but it’s better than no guidance at all, many scholars say.
Serious About Change
The most recent contribution to that genre of reports was the IES practice guide. Published in May, the guide represents the considered opinion of a federally appointed panel of experts on best bets for strategies practitioners can use to turn around schools stuck in a low-performing rut.
According to Rebecca Herman, a researcher from the Washington-based American Institutes for Research, or AIR, who headed the panel, the experts relied mostly on case studies to develop four cross-cutting recommendations.
Primary among them, the report says, is to “signal the need for change with strong leadership.” That could mean a public pronouncement on the urgency for change, replacing the principal, or requiring a school’s leader to take on a higher-profile role in guiding instruction, according to the report.
For example, at Delaplaine McDaniel Elementary School in Philadelphia, school officials recruited Darlynn Gray, a turnaround specialist trained by the Virginia program, to act as the new principal. A charismatic figure, she immediately set to work meeting with teachers and parents, leading the students in combined morning dance sessions and academic pep rallies, and using a bullhorn to monitor students’ behavior as they walked home from school.
Philadelphia took a different approach at Pickett Charter Middle School, another successful turnaround with results documented in a case study. District officials closed the school and turned it over to Mastery Learning, a charter-management group with a reputation for a “tight” management style.
Expert opinion is nearly unanimous, though, on the importance of achieving an early, quick win, regardless of who is in charge. One famous example of that strategy from Ms. Hassel’s work: William Bratton, when he took over the New York City police department in the late 1980s, led a crackdown on minor criminals, such as the then-ubiquitous “squeegee pests” who washed the windows of cars stopped in traffic and then demanded payment. The effort helped convince skeptical New Yorkers that the police department could make a visible difference. In schools, experts say, an early, quick win might be as simple as a fresh paint job on a tired building.
The IES practice guide also calls for maintaining a focus on student learning. Typically, scholars say, turnaround schools do that by collecting data to identify and track gaps in student learning or behaviors that get in the way of learning, such as poor attendance patterns or discipline problems, so that they can be addressed strategically.
An influential 2007 report by the Boston-based Mass Insight Education and Research Institute extended recommendations to include districts and states. It called on districts to build “protective zones” in which clusters of schools, many of them partnering with charter-management organizations or other external providers, could operate free of traditional bureaucratic constraints. States, in turn, would form small, specialized units to supervise and coordinate the work of “lead” turnaround specialists in those districts.
“There’s lots of research behind what hasn’t worked, and what successful, individual urban schools look like,” said William E. Guenther, the president and founder of Mass Insight and one of the primary authors of its 2007 report. “If we simply say ‘Let’s wait for the research,’ then it will be too late.”
Meanwhile, in an effort to fill in the research gap, the Institute of Education Sciences has also launched three new research programs, all aimed at building up a “menu of practices” from which educators can choose when faced with having to revitalize a persistently low-performing school.
Under the first grant, which was awarded to the AIR this month, researchers will use student-achievement data to identify promising practices, programs, or policies from low-performing schools that turn the corner in three states: Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. The other two grants, due to be awarded next year, will underwrite a national center on scaling up effective schools and a program of research aimed at developing a framework educators can use to diagnose problems in low-performing schools.
But Mr. Hassel of Public Impact said federal education officials also should be studying the 5,000 turnaround attempts that are about to be unleashed with funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic-stimulus package approved in February.
“That’s a huge learning opportunity, but there’s no apparatus to glean the knowledge from that experience,” he said. “We learned far too little from the No Child Left Behind experience on this.”
Vol. 28, Issue 37
Published Online: August 4, 2009
By Debra Viadero
Ever since U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called for turning around 5,000 of the nation’s worst-performing schools, the phone has been ringing steadily at the University of Virginia’s School Turnaround Specialist Program. Most of the calls are from educators looking for expert advice on how to go about transforming failing schools into success stories.
But if research-tested prescriptions for success are what those callers want, neither the center’s experts nor any other scholar may have much to offer. That’s because rigorous research on how to engineer the kind of dramatic transformation that Mr. Duncan is advocating is a scarce commodity, according to many scholars.
“There is both a lack of turnarounds in education and a lack of research about turnarounds,” said Bryan C. Hassel, a co-director of Public Impact, a Chapel Hill, N.C., consulting firm that has studied turnarounds in education and other fields. “And the research base for turnarounds outside of education isn’t any kind of ‘gold standard’ research base, either.”
The press for research-based solutions to the school turnaround problem is also heightened by the promise of billions of dollars in economic-stimulus grants to states from the U.S. Department of Education to do the job. The Race to the Top program alone includes $3.5 billion meant to be used for that purpose, as well as for meeting the other goals of that program, and the federal education-spending bill is expected to include millions more in Title I school improvement grants.
But even before Secretary Duncan began offering federal dollars and making speeches highlighting the topic in June, the need for dramatic action on the school turnaround front was obvious.
Under the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires schools to undergo restructuring when they fail to reach their academic targets for five years in a row, the list of failing schools grows annually. By the 2007-08 school year, five years into the law, more than 3,500 schools across the country were officially in some stage of restructuring.
Counting Successes
While no one is tracking how many schools at the national level have successfully emerged from restructuring, a handful of small-scale studies suggest the number is tiny, even when including the high-profile successes that Mr. Duncan has touted in Boston, Chicago, Hartford, Conn., New York City, and Philadelphia.
A Michigan case study by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy, for example, found that only five of the 34 elementary and middle schools identified for restructuring in that state had left that status.
At the Virginia turnaround-specialist program, one of a handful across the country to specialize in transforming chronically low-performing schools, the track record is better. Of the 43 principal “turnaround specialists” in the program’s first three cohorts, 57 percent went to schools that have since either met their targets for adequate yearly progress under the NCLB law or achieved substantial academic gains.
Not everyone agrees, though, that research on turning around the poorest-performing schools is lacking. Robert Balfanz, a Johns Hopkins University research scientist, for one, contends that in many cases, “we have more knowledge than we actually apply.”
He and his colleagues are putting their know-how to work through an intensive strategy that builds on the Talent Development model for school improvement that was developed at Johns Hopkins, adds an early-warning system so that educators can identify students at risk of dropping out early, and enlists City Year, a Boston-based group that recruits young people for a year of full-time service, to act as mentors and tutors for the neediest students.
A one-year pilot of the model in Philadelphia resulted in a 40 percent reduction in the number of students with behavior and attendance problems. In addition, Mr. Balfanz said, half the students with failing grades were able to raise their grades. He is expanding the model in the fall to New Orleans, Chicago, and San Antonio for further testing.
Studies Ignored?
Those who see a lack of research evidence for turning around failing schools, some researchers say, are also ignoring the large body of existing research on comprehensive school reform, a strategy that makes use of off-the-shelf models for schoolwide improvement.
Reviews of studies of those whole-school improvement models have shown that, while most don’t seem to work, a handful, such as Success For All and Direct Instruction, consistently produce academic improvements over time.
“I’m distressed that this is being approached as though we know so little,” said Robert E. Slavin, Success For All’s developer. “We learned a vast amount from research on comprehensive school reform that would be of great use in turning around low-performing schools.”
In a new policy brief, the Washington-based Alliance for Excellent Education echoes Mr. Slavin’s view, calling on the federal government to do more to encourage whole-school reform as part of a systemic strategy for improving low-performing schools.
But a practice guide on school turnaround strategies by the Education Department’s Institute of Education Sciences, or IES, suggests there’s a good reason to bypass that research: Whole-school improvement strategies tend to be slow and scattershot.
“School turnaround work involves quick, dramatic improvement within three years,” the guide says, “while school improvement is marked by steady, incremental improvement over a longer period of time.”
One-size-fits-all research solutions are also hard to find because winning strategies differ from school to school, experts say.
“The reason we put so much emphasis on diagnostics is that turnaround specialists have to determine what conditions led to the decline in the first place,” said Daniel L. Duke, a professor of educational leadership with the University of Virginia program.
A lack of scientific research notwithstanding, there’s no shortage of research-informed advice on how to transform chronically low-performing schools.
Experts are drawing recommendations from case studies of schools that have successfully transformed; turnarounds in other sectors of the economy, such as business; and the body of literature on schools that “beat the odds” by achieving better-than-expected results given their demographic makeups. Those sources may have a lower standard of evidence, but it’s better than no guidance at all, many scholars say.
Serious About Change
The most recent contribution to that genre of reports was the IES practice guide. Published in May, the guide represents the considered opinion of a federally appointed panel of experts on best bets for strategies practitioners can use to turn around schools stuck in a low-performing rut.
According to Rebecca Herman, a researcher from the Washington-based American Institutes for Research, or AIR, who headed the panel, the experts relied mostly on case studies to develop four cross-cutting recommendations.
Primary among them, the report says, is to “signal the need for change with strong leadership.” That could mean a public pronouncement on the urgency for change, replacing the principal, or requiring a school’s leader to take on a higher-profile role in guiding instruction, according to the report.
For example, at Delaplaine McDaniel Elementary School in Philadelphia, school officials recruited Darlynn Gray, a turnaround specialist trained by the Virginia program, to act as the new principal. A charismatic figure, she immediately set to work meeting with teachers and parents, leading the students in combined morning dance sessions and academic pep rallies, and using a bullhorn to monitor students’ behavior as they walked home from school.
Philadelphia took a different approach at Pickett Charter Middle School, another successful turnaround with results documented in a case study. District officials closed the school and turned it over to Mastery Learning, a charter-management group with a reputation for a “tight” management style.
Expert opinion is nearly unanimous, though, on the importance of achieving an early, quick win, regardless of who is in charge. One famous example of that strategy from Ms. Hassel’s work: William Bratton, when he took over the New York City police department in the late 1980s, led a crackdown on minor criminals, such as the then-ubiquitous “squeegee pests” who washed the windows of cars stopped in traffic and then demanded payment. The effort helped convince skeptical New Yorkers that the police department could make a visible difference. In schools, experts say, an early, quick win might be as simple as a fresh paint job on a tired building.
The IES practice guide also calls for maintaining a focus on student learning. Typically, scholars say, turnaround schools do that by collecting data to identify and track gaps in student learning or behaviors that get in the way of learning, such as poor attendance patterns or discipline problems, so that they can be addressed strategically.
An influential 2007 report by the Boston-based Mass Insight Education and Research Institute extended recommendations to include districts and states. It called on districts to build “protective zones” in which clusters of schools, many of them partnering with charter-management organizations or other external providers, could operate free of traditional bureaucratic constraints. States, in turn, would form small, specialized units to supervise and coordinate the work of “lead” turnaround specialists in those districts.
“There’s lots of research behind what hasn’t worked, and what successful, individual urban schools look like,” said William E. Guenther, the president and founder of Mass Insight and one of the primary authors of its 2007 report. “If we simply say ‘Let’s wait for the research,’ then it will be too late.”
Meanwhile, in an effort to fill in the research gap, the Institute of Education Sciences has also launched three new research programs, all aimed at building up a “menu of practices” from which educators can choose when faced with having to revitalize a persistently low-performing school.
Under the first grant, which was awarded to the AIR this month, researchers will use student-achievement data to identify promising practices, programs, or policies from low-performing schools that turn the corner in three states: Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. The other two grants, due to be awarded next year, will underwrite a national center on scaling up effective schools and a program of research aimed at developing a framework educators can use to diagnose problems in low-performing schools.
But Mr. Hassel of Public Impact said federal education officials also should be studying the 5,000 turnaround attempts that are about to be unleashed with funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the economic-stimulus package approved in February.
“That’s a huge learning opportunity, but there’s no apparatus to glean the knowledge from that experience,” he said. “We learned far too little from the No Child Left Behind experience on this.”
Vol. 28, Issue 37
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