As Mike just wrote, Secretary Duncan was at the National Charter Schools Conference today, and he spoke about turnarounds. While I continue to be thankful that he is focusing on America's worst schools, I'm disappointed by his direction--especially in one critically important area.
During his speech, he finally gave some more specificity about what he has in mind when he says "turnarounds." ????He gave four options.
The first is keeping the students in the school and hiring a new staff. Unfortunately, this has the effect of recycling low-performing teachers back into the system, and it's extraordinarily difficult to build a strong culture in a school where all of the students remain, especially if it is a middle or high school.
The second is turning the keys over to a charter operator, but again keeping the kids. He often points to Green Dot and Mastery as CMOs that do this work. But I just looked up Mastery's test scores, and though I respect what they are trying to do, they've only taken over three schools in Philadelphia and one of them didn't make AYP last year and another only made it thanks to confidence intervals.
The third option is to just make the school have a better culture. But if this were so easy, no school, business, nonprofit, or any other entity would ever fail. Obviously building the right culture in a broken institution isn't just a matter of will.
The fourth option--which should be THE option--is closing the failing school and opening new schools to serve the students. Unfortunately, Duncan offered this option almost apologetically, equating it to "surrender."
But as I've written about incessantly, turnarounds in all industries seldom succeed. There is no shame in closing a failed school if you open up better options.
The most distressing part of the entire speech was when Duncan said the following:
We have great charter networks like Aspire, KIPP, Achievement First and Uncommon Schools. You're steadily getting to scale. Today, I am challenging you to adapt your educational model to turning around our lowest-performing schools.
With all due respect, this is a tragically flawed idea. I hope that these outstanding operators dismiss it immediately. What these organizations do is brilliant. They start new, successful schools. We should not tinker with that. We especially should not push them into a task that decades of experience--in education and other industries--show can't be accomplished at scale.
That these groups start schools anew isn't simply part of their "model." ????Doing start-ups isn't a matter of choice, it's a virtual necessity if you want to have a consistently successful school.
An airplane isn't a reformed horse and carriage. Microsoft wasn't a reformed IBM. Amistad, KIPP Houston, IDEA, and the rest of America's stellar urban charters weren't turnarounds. They were start-ups. That is not a coincidence.
So kudos to Secretary Duncan for continually talking about persistently low-performing schools and for including closures and new starts among his favored options.
But before jumping into these other turnaround strategies, let's have a serious conversation about their likelihood of success. ????And let's completely drop the idea of messing with the organizations that are succeeding at start-ups.