Act Strategically When Schools Fail
Thousands of schools nationwide are in restructuring status under No Child Left Behind. While some of these schools may have missed the mark by a narrow margin, many if not most of them have failed to provide students with even an adequate education for years, and in some cases decades. To respond to this challenge, education leaders need better tools to choose change that works and make chosen changes happen.
Public Impact’s work covers two strategies to address chronic school failure:
- Turnarounds: taking dramatic action to improve an existing school
- Starting Fresh: creating a “new” school through contracting or chartering
See below for Public Impact’s work on turnarounds. For Starting Fresh, click here.
Turnarounds are widely used in other sectors to fix failing organizations and units. Public Impact has surveyed this cross-sector experience to generate a set of resources to help schools, districts, and others effect successful turnarounds:
Try, Try Again: Tripling The Number of Fixed Failing Schools Without Getting Any Better at Fixing Schools. How? By shortening the time that passes before recognizing failure and retrying major change. Most initial efforts to fix failing schools will fail (just like 70% or more major change efforts and start-ups across sectors fall short). But if policymakers commit to faster “retry rates” – one or two years – the cumulative success rate in failing schools can be much higher. Rapid retry won’t be easy: we’ll need strong “leading indicators” that show which efforts are on-track, and a ready supply of leaders and school operators to step in when initial efforts fail. But the payoff would be much dramatically higher rates of success in fixing failing schools. Read more in our Try, Try Again slide deck.
In Education Next Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel describe six leadership strategies that recur in successful school turnarounds. Using the NYC Police Department and Continental Airlines, the authors explain the importance of focusing on a few early wins, breaking organizational norms, pushing rapid-fire experimentation, getting the right staff, driving change with data, and running a “turnaround campaign” to build support for change and silence naysayers.
Racing to the Top with Low-Performing High Schools. [pdf] Achieve is a leading national voice for raising expectations for American high schools so that all students graduate ready for what’s next. To assist the 35 states in its American Diploma Project (ADP) Network, Achieve created a series of briefs on how states could use the U.S. Department of Education’s “Race to the Top” competition to advance their college- and career-readiness agenda. Public Impact drafted the brief on low-performing schools, providing guidance for states on meeting – and going beyond – the Race to the Top criteria.
Competencies for Turnaround Success Series. Public Impact has developed a series of resources for The Chicago Public Education Fund and District of Columbia Public Schools designed to support school turnarounds. The series includes guides and toolkits that help select turnaround leaders and teachers based on the competencies – or patterns of thinking, feeling, speaking and acting – that enable them to be successful in turnarounds.
School Turnarounds: Doing What Works. The School Turnaround section of the Doing What Works website, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, features video interviews with Bryan C. Hassel about the leadership strategies that recur in successful turnarounds and the district’s role in supporting turnaround principals. Julie Kowal offers expert advice about strategies for motivating and redeploying staff, and discusses the district’s role in supporting principals’ staffing changes in turnaround schools.
Public Impact has developed a series of resources entitled School Restructuring Options Under No Child Left Behind: What Works When, in conjunction with the Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement. The series includes a guide to help district and state leaders [33 MB pdf] choose the best restructuring option for each school, updated in a 2nd edition released in 2009, and white papers identifying what we know from research about when the first four restructuring options under NCLB work: reopening as a charter school, contracting with external providers, turnarounds with new leaders and staff, and state takeovers.
School Turnarounds: A Review of the Cross-Sector Evidence on Dramatic Organizational Improvement. Prepared for the Center on Innovation and Improvement, this updated and expanded version of Public Impact's 2005 paper reviews the considerable literature from the business, nonprofit, government, and education sectors on what factors make turnarounds most likely to succeed, including the actions turnaround leaders take and the environment in which they work. Click here for a presentation based on this report.
Successful School Turnarounds: Seven Steps for District Leaders [pdf] One promising strategy to dramatically improve chronically low performing schools is known as a “turnaround” – a quick, dramatic, sustained improvement in performance brought about by a highly-capable leader. This type of change is different from what many have tried in the past: the changes are bigger and faster, and the press for success is relentless. Turnarounds also require different types of support and flexibility from district leaders. In this Issue Brief, prepared by Public Impact for The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement at Learning Point Associates, we offer seven steps for district leaders to support the dramatic change required to turn around chronic low performance. Steps include: making a commitment to dramatic change, choosing turnarounds for the right schools, developing a pipeline of turnaround leaders, providing leaders extra flexibility, holding schools accountable, prioritizing teacher hiring for turnaround schools, and proactively engaging the community. A webcast with summary recommendations is available here.
Performance-Based Dismissals: Cross-Sector Lessons for School Turnarounds [pdf]. In successful turnarounds, staff dismissals are typically small in number, and focused on employees who cannot or will not make the radical change necessary to dramatically improve performance. In this report, written by Julie Kowal, Jacob L. Rosch, Emily Ayscue Hassel & Bryan C. Hassel, for the Center on Innovation and Improvement, we examine the research base on performance-based dismissals in other sectors to offer strategies for leaders in turnaround schools. These include clearly communicating the goals that principals have for the school and for each employee; quickly gathering a variety of information about each employee’s skills, capacity, motivation and will; watching carefully as problem employees try to improve; and making swift decisions when unsatisfactory performance cannot be improved. We also examine the ways in which state and district policies support and impede targeted staff dismissals. Policy recommendations to support successful staffing in school turnarounds include negotiating expedited processes for perfor¬mance-based dismissals in turnaround schools; enabling greater flexibility over class sizes and classroom assignments; prioritizing recruitment, hiring, and placement for turnaround schools; and assembling teams to assist principals with dismissal procedures. A powerpoint summary of the report is available here.
Tough Decisions: Closing Persistently Low-Performing Schools [pdf]. Despite the challenges, some districts have taken the decisive step of closing low-performing schools. This paper, written by Lucy Steiner for the Center on Innovation and Improvement, discusses the lessons district officials in four urban districts learned about the school closure process. Recommendations include the need to: 1) consider school closure in the context of a larger reform effort; 2) develop a supply of higher-performing school options; 3) clearly explain to the public how current students will benefit; 4) provide support to families and students during the transition; and 5) provide staff members with clear information about next steps.
Breaking the Habit of Low Performance: Successful School Restructuring Stories [pdf] This report, written by Dana Brinson and Lauren Morando Rhim for the Center on Innovation and Improvement, provides five brief profiles of schools that dramatically improved student performance and successfully restructured under federal accountability systems. All five schools failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for several consecutive years, and—once in restructuring—had to chart a course to overhaul the way their schools operated. Featuring two large-district, urban schools, two small-district urban/suburban schools, and a rural school in a variety of grade configurations, these stories highlight the reasons for persistent low performance, the chosen restructuring options, key actions taken, and the results. Although this report does not provide conclusive evidence for the efficacy of specific restructuring approaches, it does demonstrate that successful improvement of long-failing schools is possible, and contributes to the broader body of school restructuring and turnaround stories that may support future research in effective turnaround practices.
School Turnarounds: Actions and Results [pdf] by Dana Brinson, Julie Kowal and Bryan Hassel for the Center on Innovation and Improvement, illustrates how the 14 leader actions of successful turnarounds have played out in turnaround schools. This report provides a description of the 14 leader actions, illustrative vignettes, and an annotated bibliography of the case studies included in the report and builds on Public Impact’s prior work entitled School Turnarounds: A Review of the Cross-Sector Evidence on Dramatic Organizational Improvement, a report on education-specific examples of turnarounds.
Considering School Turnarounds: Market Research and Analysis [pdf]. One strategy for turning around low-performing schools is to contract with management organizations to operate the schools. Public Impact helped Mass Insight Education conduct a market analysis of the environment for school restructuring by charter management organizations in six target urban areas: Chicago, the District of Columbia, Los Angeles, New York City, Oakland, and Philadelphia for NewSchools Venture Fund. The report revealed interest in this approach to restructuring in three of the districts (Chicago, NYC, and Philadelphia). But even in those districts, constraints prevent this strategy from being widely used. Most notable is the gap between the kinds of autonomy school operators require and the level districts are currently able to offer.
No Remedy Left Behind: Lessons from a Half-Decade of NCLB, from AEI press, features a chapter by Julie Kowal and Bryan C. Hassel on NCLB Remedies in Action: Four of NCLB’s “Restructured” Schools. The chapter is part of a comprehensive evaluation of the NCLB remedies edited by Frederick M. Hess and Chester E. Finn, Jr. and it takes a look at what NCLB restructuring looks like “on the ground” in four schools in Michigan and California. With 2,000-3,000 schools likely to be in restructuring by 2008-09, the case studies offer an important picture of how the restructuring requirements of NCLB are being put into practice at the local level. This chapter was presented in November 2006 at the American Enterprise Institute/Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, “Fixing Failing Schools: Is the NCLB Toolkit Working?”. A webcast of the conference is also available.
