Turnaround strategies similar to those being touted by the Obama administration and by the current leadership of Denver Public Schools have had uneven results, at best, in 23 school districts studied by the Center on Education Policy.
The study looked at districts that used five turnaround strategies mandated by the No Child Left Behind Law. These strategies resemble, but are not identical to, four strategies that form an integral part of the Race to the Top competition. Writes Edweek (registration required):
At the forum, Jack Jennings, the center’s president and a former aide to Democrats on the education committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, said that in light of the center’s research, he wondered whether the department was acting “on a hunch rather than on evidence” in requiring states to use one of four specific turnaround models when spending stimulus dollars.
Let’s hope that lessons learns from the failures of NCLB strategies have led to substantially refined approaches. Next, we have to worry about how states that win R2T, and districts within those states, implement these strategies.
If educators and administrators repeat the mistakes of the recent past, billions of dollars will have been wasted, and it wil be a long, long time before the purse strings are loosened again.
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Having worked in the trenches of school improvement for the past seven years, these findings don’t surprise me. The Department of Education, large school districts (including DPS), and most reform organizations focus their attention on approaches involving structural change rather than the more fertile (but difficult to plow) ground of school culture. “Make them junior highs again!” “More charters!” “I know, let’s try half IB and half neighborhood!” “Magnets!”
Changes in school structures and policy may be necessary at times, but they are not sufficient to cause systemic, sustainable change. Structural and policy changes are often irrelevant to dysfunctional school cultures, commonly characterized by low levels of collective efficacy; deeply embedded sort and select thinking; assigning responsibility for student success solely to students; low student engagement; outdated and ineffective lesson design and instructional strategies, a lack of monitoring and accountability; and an inability to reform themselves.
DPS has pockets of excellence within its system, but why where is the discussion of the factors that contribute to these successful outliers? A high performing system should be knocking down the doors of Beech Court Elementary and West Denver Prep – not to slavishly replicate their structures, but to learn from their reformed school cultures.
My experience tells me that these cultural attributes, leadership practices, and instructional skills can be identified, taught, and replicated. This alternative school improvement process offers the potential for lasting change when the school, as a system, begins to gain the capacity to learn and change on its own. When we provide the proficient leadership that schools need and deserve, our teachers can begin to own improvement initiatives rather than continuing as the scapegoats of a dysfunctional system and an often unproven reform agenda.
I agree. I believe that the most powerful leverage points for deep and lasting change are much closer to the ground than the majority of silver bullet programs and other efforts I’ve watched roll through my district in the past 10 years.