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Forbes
Hechinger Report
Proof Points: A turnaround on school turnarounds
A fresh look at 35 studies finds that student achievement tends to improve amid the disruption
By Jill Barshay
September 21, 2020
A September 2020 meta-analysis found that student achievement tended to
improve after a school turnaround. But not always. In some cases, such
as in North Carolina, pictured above, student achievement suffered
after a turnaround effort. Credit: Photo by Ken Cedeno/Corbis via Getty
Images
How do you fix a broken, failing school where student achievement,
attendance and graduation rates are rock bottom? Education experts
argue over this a lot. One idea has been to bring in a new principal
and make drastic changes to turn the school around quickly like the way
corporate turnaround artists revive a bankrupt company.
School turnarounds are dramatic moves — sometimes jettisoning the
entire teaching staff — that eschew slow, incremental change. The idea
gained popularity in the 2000s and the Obama administration spent more
than $3.5 billion on rapid turnarounds for schools that ranked among
the bottom 5 percent. The results weren’t great. A Mathematica study of
480 low-performing schools found that the federally funded turnaround
efforts failed to boost math or reading scores or high school
graduation or college enrollment rates. It seemed that the whole notion
of quick school turnarounds was a misguided failure.
But now a pair of researchers has gone back to review all the data and
studies on recent turnaround efforts and synthesized the results from
35 different studies, of which the influential Mathematica study is but
one. Their fresh look at the collective evidence shows that rapid
turnarounds aren’t useless, according to a paper published September
2020 in the journal of Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.
Indeed, attendance, test scores and graduation rates all tend to
improve in schools that embark on a turnaround.
School attendance increased by almost a half a percentage point, on
average, and graduation rates increased by almost 10 percentage points.
Math and reading test scores went up by a small amount, particularly
after the second year of a turnaround and beyond. The researchers
characterized the gains as similar to those of previous reform efforts,
such as New York City’s experiment with smaller high schools or the
national whole school reform movement of the 1990s.
“There is positive evidence for school turnarounds,” said Christopher
Redding, an assistant professor of education at the University of
Florida, who was one of the study’s co-authors. “Maybe this is a way
that we can move forward. But it’s very disruptive and it raises
serious questions about local ownership and trust of public
institutions. It gives me some pause to give a strong recommendation
for turnarounds based on our findings.”
No one, including Redding, is disputing the rigorous Mathematica study.
But if you add additional turnaround efforts that the Mathematica study
didn’t look at, the evidence for school turnarounds is more positive.
For example, turnarounds in Tennessee, New Orleans, Boston and
Lawrence, Massachusetts, produced strong achievement gains. Some took
place after the Mathematica study. The Mathematica study also ignored
the very worst schools in its analysis and those schools tended to show
larger gains after a turnaround effort, Redding explained to me. (The
Mathematica researchers focused on borderline schools that were just
below and above a federal threshold to qualify for turnaround funds and
found that the schools that went through turnarounds didn’t have better
outcomes than those that didn’t.)
The word “turnaround” itself is a nebulous catchall concept,
encompassing everything from new leadership and staff to new rules and
policies. Sometimes existing teachers are retrained and sometimes
they’re replaced. Sometimes new leaders introduce a data-driven culture
where students are frequently tested and both teachers and principals
are judged by how much test scores improve. In some cases, principals
are given extra autonomy to run the school as they see fit, controlling
the budget and expanding the school schedule with longer days or weeks.
Stricter school discipline for students has been a common theme in many
turnarounds. The researchers even considered some charter schools to be
a turnaround if charter administrators took over a traditional public
school and restarted it.
The authors tried to tease out which types of turnarounds worked better
than others but the studies didn’t point to a clear conclusion. There
were success stories for both retaining and replacing teachers. In
other words, sometimes it’s sufficient to replace the principal without
changing the labor force, a move that has been politically and racially
fraught in some communities.
Although school closures aren’t really a turnaround effort, one of the
few clear insights from the meta-analysis is that closing down
low-performing schools and sending the students to better schools
elsewhere generally didn’t work. Often there weren’t much better
schools nearby for kids to go to.
A second clear insight is that there are no quick wins, as advocates of
turnaround strategies had hoped. Across all types of turnarounds,
achievement gains mostly emerged in the second, third and fourth years
of implementation. The researchers urged policymakers to “temper their
expectations regarding the immediacy of turnaround efforts.”
There were also several cases of negative outcomes, where students were
left worse off from a turnaround. In addition to some school closures,
students were left worse off in a turnaround attempt in Rhode Island
where school leaders and teachers struggled to implement so many
reforms at once. Another risk is when higher income students flee a
school that is undergoing a turnaround, which a North Carolina study
documented.
I was thinking, as I read this meta-analysis, how Silicon Valley types
like to celebrate disruption and they might consider school turnarounds
to be a classic case in point. Maybe you fire some teachers and break
some things in the process, but look, the kids end up learning more.
That’s ultimately what we want, right?
The catch here is that most of these turnaround efforts were
accompanied by a huge influx of federal funds. The turnarounds came
with money. And there’s a growing body of research showing that student
achievement tends to go up when you spend more money on students. It’s
possible that all the achievement gains we’re seeing in this analysis
happened because we spent more money on low-income students, not
because we turned their schools around.
Unfortunately, we don’t know if the extra money was driving the results
here. Redding said you’d have to track long-term test scores for the
children in these turnaround schools to see if achievement remained
high after the turnaround funds were spent.
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