| 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.
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| Public Impact’s work covers two strategies to address chronic school failure: |
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Turnarounds: taking dramatic action to improve an existing school |
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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: |
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In Education Next, Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel describe six leadership strategies that recur in successful 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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 [pdf] choose the best restructuring option for each school 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.
| Scroll down to see examples of our other projects in this area.
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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