Students are not held accountable for the present failing schools, and yet they are KEY to the success of any “new” school? When has THAT logic ever worked in the private sector?

The present school improvement logic is a lot like the” hole in the tennis racket” theory. A lousy player always look at his or her racket and blames the equipment.

Why not close the bottom 20% of schools, hire KIPP, fire all teachers and overhead, and re-open the school the next Monday with new leadership independent of the school district for the SAME students?

Let’s see what happens then.

My guess: The same results at best.

It appears there is cultural encoding in these old buildings and school symbols that has conditioned parents and children to expect a certain educational outcome: And that may just be sustained low performance.

Unless the government or KIPP is willing to use brutal COMPULSION nothing will change.

We built and maintain a culture of failure in education that is perpetuated by the armies of well paid, well heeled consultants and businesses whose career is perpetuating the problem.

Andy Smarick suggests that the energy we spend turning around failing schools would be better spent shutting them down and starting new ones. That’s part of the solution, but we should be skeptical that closure alone is the answer.

First, this argument assumes that “close and replace” always beats turnaround on results. Smarick cites literature on businesses in the private sector, where turnarounds work only one-third of the time. He’s right, but what’s not cited is the fact that less than 30 percent of new businesses last more than six years. Not the dramatically better results we’re looking for.

But maybe this churn means better student outcomes, which leads to my second point. The data don’t look good for that either. A recent report by the Consortium on Chicago School Research studied the nation’s largest close-and-replace strategy. More often than not, the strategy meant worse outcomes for the children. Moreover, a recent study by CREDO (Center for Research on Education Outcomes) at Stanford tells us that only one-third of new charter schools are demonstrably better than their neighborhood comparisons. The rest are the same or worse.

Third, the word “turnaround” can be used to mean different things, and sometimes it’s code for weak interventions. I agree with Smarick when he talks about the failed strategies of the past, but a reasonable definition of turnaround should exclude those half measures. The new federal guidelines for school improvement adopt a more robust definition of turnaround, wherein the adults in a building, especially teachers and leadership, are subject to change, and outside organizations can manage schools under performance contracts.

Our research shows that high-poverty schools that outperform their peers share certain qualities: an intense focus on instructional practice, an integrated approach to student support services, and flexibility from bureaucratic operating conditions. The creative destruction and market competition inherent in closure are great for allocating scarce resources, but they’re not enough to ensure quality and equity for vulnerable children. We need to invest in turning around failing schools as well.

Justin C. Cohen
The School Turnaround Strategy Group
Mass Insight

Andy Smarick’s “The Turnaround Fallacy” (features, Winter 2010) suffers from three fallacies. First, Smarick erroneously believes that school turnarounds have been tried widely and haven’t worked. In fact, interventions in failing schools are typically lukewarm and reliant on coaching, new curriculum packages, or other rearranging of deck chairs. Real turnaround attempts, in which a district hires a highly capable leader with “the big yes” to do what’s needed to fix the school, almost never happen.

Second, he wrongly suggests that in healthy industries, leaders don’t try to fix failing units, which simply close and make way for new upstarts. In fact, large companies with failing units try many strategies. They typically start by enforcing faithful execution of practices that work in other areas. When that doesn’t work, they replace the leader and give the new manager a change mandate. Smarick is right that the threat of closure is essential; today, bad schools have more lives than cats. To rescue more schools from “the brink of doom,” policymakers must make the option of school “doom” real, but then vigorously try to fix failing schools in the meantime.

Third, he grossly overstates the potential of start-up schools. Don’t get us wrong. We strongly back a large-scale effort to start great new schools. But research from other sectors pegs the probability of start-up success at about 25 percent, comparable to the estimated 30 percent of major corporate-change efforts that succeed. Like Smarick, we’re fans of outliers like KIPP, but together these networks will add a few hundred schools, not the few thousand we need. Even if these networks are joined by other wildly successful upstarts, only a small fraction of students in failing schools will benefit.

That’s why the nation needs a portfolio of strategies to change the fortunes of kids trapped in failing schools. Clinging to just one approach will write off millions who desperately need something different. Let’s start great new schools and fix bad ones. Let’s expect both strategies to work some of the time, but not always. And when they don’t work, let’s try again, rapidly, so kids don’t continue to languish in schools that aren’t getting the job done.

Bryan C. Hassel & Emily Ayscue Hassel
Co-Directors
Public Impact

FYI, we are releasing findings in late February on a similar study of 303 middle grades schools and of the many district and school practices that differentiate the high performers from the low performers. This new study used the 2009 CSTs on math and English language arts in grades 6-8 as the dependent variable, and has test data going back four years for the 204,000 students in the school sample.

To EducationNext:

Andy Smarick makes a compelling argument that we would be better off closing failing schools (The Turnaround Fallacy, Winter 2010), but he doesn’t take into account the stark reality that often urban districts simply have too many “failing schools” to close them all. Closing a district’s most persistently underperforming schools must be an option, but districts cannot stop there. Even the most extreme school closure program will leave the majority of students in their current schools, many of which are also inadequate. Instead, districts must develop a comprehensive approach to address all of their turnaround schools as well as low-performing schools that don’t quite qualify for turnaround attention.

At Education Resource Strategies (ERS) we believe that districts need to make decisions about failing schools as part of a long-range, district-wide strategy that incorporates all resources—people, time, and money. While we agree with Smarick that evidence is not clear on a single turnaround strategy that works, we do know that schools can accelerate improvement through strong, transformational leaders, collaborative teacher teams, and targeting expertise and resources to help students who have fallen behind. It is true that success for turning schools around is mixed, but there is a lot that districts can do to increase the probability of success. These keys to success include:

1. Implementing a district-wide strategy for measuring school performance and determining appropriate action, including the possibility of school closure
2. Recruiting transformational school leaders who can establish high expectations for improved performance
3. Implementing strategies that give these leaders the flexibility to efficiently assign teaching staff and to assemble high-performing teams with appropriate expertise
4. Ensuring sufficient expert instructional support and collaborative time for teachers to adjust instruction based on data
5. Funding targeted student support and taking the time to accelerate student learning
6. Providing additional problem solving and support from central staff

A successful turnaround strategy might be as ambitious as a “cure for cancer,” as Smarick claims. So just like medical researchers we have to keep trying. Closing schools should unquestionably be part of a school districts’ strategy, but only a district-wide transformation will result in improving education for all children that the district serves.

Karen Hawley Miles
President and Executive Director
Education Resource Strategies

Incremental improvement strategies are not the same as whole school turnaround. Andy Smarick’s recent article (“The Turnaround Fallacy,” Winter 2010) applies the word “turnaround” to a wide range of efforts to help struggling schools and, while he makes an interesting case, I disagree with his premise that school turnaround efforts “have consistently fallen far short of hopes and expectations.”

We have had success – using a very specific turnaround model – in transforming some of Chicago’s poorest performing schools. None of the school improvement efforts Smarick describes are the kind of whole school, top-to-bottom transformation that applies to what is happening in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) that are led by the Academy of Urban School Leadership (AUSL).

Since 2006, CPS has brought in AUSL to turn around eight schools where the test scores, attendance, discipline issues and graduation rates tell us the students are not getting the education they need. Our top-to-bottom approach is like hitting a reset button for these schools. We accomplish this without disruption to students, who return in the fall to their neighborhood school, which has been transformed with renovated facilities, a new principal who has hand-picked a new team of teachers, a new curriculum, new conduct codes and disciplinary standards, and new expectations for student success. And we deliberately foster the direct involvement of parents and community members.

Our data – dramatically improved attendance, test scores, and attitudes toward learning – demonstrate success. We also have the overwhelming support of students, parents, and teachers who have participated in the process, some of them formerly among our loudest critics.

It’s not realistic to think that dozens of failing schools in Chicago (and thousands nationally) can be closed and effectively replaced with new-start schools. There aren’t sufficient budget and time resources. And our students do not have time to wait while we sort out new-start school options. At AUSL, we are transforming schools now because our students deserve nothing less.

Dr. Donald Feinstein
Executive Director
Academy for Urban School Leadership

The real key to success is high quality, energetic, competent principals in the schools. While all the inequalities will continue to exist, hiring good people, training and supporting them will foster increased student gains.
Dr. Ed

Now there’s a desperate thought!

First, we judge schools to be “failing” with reference to more successful schools, with the failing ones usually in the poor parts of town, and the successful ones in the wealthier part of town. It’s a zero sum game, because half the schools will always be below average, and there will always be a bottom 20% of schools. Being shocked, shocked! that some school is in the bottom 10% is like being shocked that there are losing teams in the NFL, or shocked that they can’t all be turned into winning teams next year.

It’s great to be horrified that conditions are inhumane or unacceptably violent in many of these schools, or that kids aren’t learning specific things, and work to end some specific condition, but there is no evidence anywhere that anyone knows how to bring an entire high-poverty urban district up to the level of the schools in wealthy suburbs. A few boutique schools with high test scores (and many with high dropout rates) doesn’t change the discussion any.

What’s in my circle of influence is to encourage teachers to be better than seems possible, but what is in national policymakers’ circle of influence is to try to change macro conditions so that we don’t have so many kids in poverty and so many high-poverty schools where kids feel like there is no hope. If you see your relatives losing ground economically despite working two jobs and having stayed in school, all that rah-rah stuff about education isn’t convincing.

The second puzzle is this strange rich man’s assumption that free markets create uniform excellence everywhere. Drive through the poor parts of town, and you’ll find that the private for-profit services (restaurants, etc.) are lousy compared to those in the rich parts of town in exactly the same way that public schools in the poor parts of town are often lousy in comparison to those in the rich parts of town.

Again, “failing” as we discuss schools is a normative term, and in that sense, market solutions fail to ensure widespread excellence in private sector goods and services as well. Don’t rich folks know that most goods and services are average to mediocre to lousy? Yes, goods improve over time, but there is the same “gap” between rich and poor in what citizens get from the private sector as in what they get from the public sector. And the gap is increasing.

Perhaps we should hold Ben Bernanke more “accountable” and fire him because he’s been unable to solve the deplorable “mansion gap” between rich and poor. If he just had higher expectations for blue-collar workers, do you think we’d all have the same size mansions?

Inequality begets inequality.

Also, I’d like to know how the turn-around effort affects successful schools. I work at a school where test scores are good, AP classes are plentiful and the graduation rate is high. Because of the need to make annual progress, our administration treats the school like a failing school and constantly implements turn-around strategies. The focus is constantly shifting and my guess is that this approach will soon start driving down scores and disrupting the structure which has historically made our school successful. Are there any findings regarding how these heroic turnaround-efforts affect successful schools when principals start panicing about making huge improvement gains?