The new education reform law signed with great fanfare last month by Gov. Deval Patrick is designed to address one of the most urgent tasks facing public schools: the persistent achievement gap that has poor and minority students lagging far behind their more affluent and white peers. One of the chief ways it aims to do this is by granting broad new powers to district superintendents and the state education commissioner to intervene and make big changes in the state’s lowest performing schools.
It sounds like a logical and bold approach to an important problem. But what if it has little chance of working?
That’s the bleak assessment of Andy Smarick, a visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a Washington-based education policy and research organization. Writing in the current issue of the journal Education Next, Smarick says the expectations from the new push for school turnarounds are entirely unfounded. “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,” he writes. “But there is no reason to believe it is.”
Smarick argues that the track record when it comes to turning around failing schools is abysmal.
Smarick argues that the track record when it comes to turning around failing schools is abysmal, and that we are much better off focusing on more charter schools and other start-up operations that he says have shown much better results. Turnaround efforts in the private sector are notoriously hard to pull off, says Smarick, with attempts to pull a sinking company out of the ditch failing far more often than they succeed. The odds, he says, are even higher against schools, which are weighted down by rigid district bureaucracies, teacher contracts, and other obstacles that businesses don’t have to contend with.
Nobody takes issue with the claim that school turnaround efforts have largely been a bust. At most, say education policy experts, 10 percent of such attempts bear any fruit, and often this amounts to only very incremental improvement in student achievement outcomes. “By any sober assessment, we’d have to say we’ve made only modest progress in remedying underperformance,” says Paul Reville, the state’s secretary of education. But the alternative to pushing forward with new turnaround efforts, he says, “is doing nothing.”
Even if Smarick is right, and new school start-ups have a much greater track record of success, that hardly looks like a scalable solution for the thousands of chronically underperforming US schools. Even with no caps on the growth of charter schools — the new law will double the number of charter schools allowed in Massachusetts — there simply isn’t a sufficient pipeline of dynamic school leaders to open enough high-quality charter schools to serve all the students now attending a failing district public school.
That seems to make the challenge of improving urban schools a no-win situation. But not everyone is convinced that the past is prologue when it comes to fixing schools. Mass Insight, a Boston-based education research organization, has been working for several years to develop strategies for turning around the country’s lowest performing schools. If the track record with school turnaround to date has been poor, says Justin Cohen, who is directing the group’s school reform program, it’s because these haven’t been real turnaround efforts, but instead “light touch” school improvement efforts that simply chip away at the margins. “Sending a consultant into a school once a month is not a turnaround, having an instructional coach over the summer is not a turnaround,” says Cohen.
Mass Insight has called for much more robust efforts, which include the ability to replace teachers, bring in new principals, and grant schools budgeting and curriculum autonomy, while setting clear benchmarks for significant improvement in student outcomes within two years. “It’s a much more substantial change that has been done,” says Cohen.
These are precisely the kinds of operating freedoms that charter schools enjoy. It is no coincidence that in a 2007 Mass Insight report on school turnaround, four of the five examples of Massachusetts schools that have broken the mold by showing that low-income students can consistently achieve at high levels are charter schools. The fifth example is the University Park Campus School, an innovative Worcester district public school that was started from scratch in 1997. (Pictured at right; read the 2004 CommonWealth story on the school.) “These schools represent the proof-point” that it’s possible to have high-performing, high poverty schools, says the Mass Insight report.
But do these examples actually prove that successful school turnarounds are possible or do they simply underscore Smarick’s contention that such schools are most possible when reform-minded education leaders are able build them from scratch? As an earlier Fordham Institute study put it: “Being a high-performing school and becoming a high-performing school are very different challenges.”
The charter-like freedoms that Mass Insight says are needed to turn around failing schools are exactly what the new Massachusetts law allows for in the state’s lowest performing schools. The dismal history of school turnaround efforts to date means we don’t know whether even such sweeping changes will be sufficient to turnaround failing schools. What does seem clear, however, is that nothing short of deploying the full breadth of these powers stands a chance of making good on the promise of quality schools for all children.
