Anyone interested in what to do about America's most persistently failing schools--and especially those caught up in today's turnaround craze--should consider Part II of this report a must-read. A MUST-read.
Every year, the Brown Center at Brookings releases a study on a number of issues important to K-12 schooling. Tom Loveless, the author, is one of my favorite scholars. He is an honest broker through and through.
The question at the heart of the 2010 report's second section is "do schools ever change their performance?" The results are eye-popping and--please forgive me for the immodesty--support the argument I made in The Turnaround Fallacy.
Loveless looked at the nearly 1,200 California schools with an 8th grade in 1989 and 2009 to see how their performance changed over two decades. Of the schools in the lowest quartile in 1989, nearly two-thirds of them were still in the lowest quartile 20 years later.
How many schools were successful "turnarounds," schools that went from the bottom quartile to the top quartile? Only 1.4 percent. As Loveless puts it in his characteristically understated way:
It is highly unlikely that a low-performing school becomes a high-performing school. The chances (four out of 290) are less than one out of seventy.
Even a much more modest definition of turnaround is seldom reached. Of schools in the bottom ten percent in 1989, only 3.5 percent reached the state average in 2009.
It is essential that people realize that these schools were not ignored over these 20 years. California (and other states for that matter) have been trying to fix their lowest performers. The range of interventions attempted is staggering. But some schools are simply broken and continue to hurt poor kids. In Loveless's words, "Achievement seems to be part of the institutional DNA of schools, handed down from decade to decade, the past influencing the future."
But for some reason we won't accept this lesson. The federal government is investing billions in turnaround efforts through the School Improvement Fund and Race to the Top. As I've read through state RTT applications, it's downright depressing how little policy-makers have internalized the data--not only do few plan to make use of school closures and new starts, most plan to use the weakest intervention model allowed, "transformations."
How many more studies do we need before we finally accept that turnarounds are not the answer for our most persistently failing schools?
--Andy Smarick