This report from Public Impact describes an unusual $55 million public-private school turnaround initiative in North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools called Project L.I.F.T. (Leadership and Investment for Transformation). Despite its sizable price tag, the project offers lessons for funders, district leaders, and anyone else taking on the tough work of overhauling low-performing schools—as spelled out in this examination of outcomes at the project’s two-year midway point.
Launched in 2012–13, L.I.F.T. is an effort led (and largely funded by) a group of donors working in partnership with the district to raise the graduation rate at West Charlotte High School and improve performance at select feeder schools. The project’s initial investment group (led by local foundations) pledged $40.5 million to the effort during its planning phase; corporate sponsors, individual donors, and federal School Improvement Grants and Title 1 dollars have funded the rest. Project reforms center on four areas: time, talent, technology, and parent and community engagement. This has included implementing extended learning in select schools and opening a credit recovery high school, as well as issuing hiring bonuses, revamping the district’s hiring calendar, and implementing “Opportunity Culture”—an initiative through which teachers teach more students for more pay. Laptops have been subsidized or purchased for families and for elementary schools. Engagement efforts included ongoing communications initiatives and wraparound services such as mobile medical clinics and dental clinics.
Two years in, L.I.F.T. has fallen short of its ambitious goals of a 90 percent graduation rate at West Charlotte High School and a 90 percent proficiency rate for students in feeder schools. (The authors point out how North Carolina’s new state standards, assessments, and proficiency cutoff points have made the 90 percent threshold even more onerous.) But L.I.F.T. has seen some early successes: West Charlotte’s graduation rate has risen to 78 percent (up from 56 percent in 2011–12); all nine L.I.F.T. schools met or exceeded growth targets in reading, and all but one exceeded growth in math in 2013–14 (compared to five schools meeting or exceeding growth in both subjects during the project’s early implementation phase). Teacher vacancy rates at the start of the school year have plummeted from three hundred in 2012 to fewer than five two years later, and overall teacher retention has nudged up by six percentage points (from 55 percent to 61 percent). The district received eight hundred applications for twenty-seven Opportunity Culture positions and is expanding the program. The district is beginning to borrow L.I.F.T.’s greatest successes and replicate them elsewhere (including a University of Virginia school turnaround leadership initiative). Thus, despite missing promised benchmarks, the project has sown many seeds—especially around teacher and principal talent—that may yield later payoffs.
This North Carolina endeavor is worthy of close study by Ohio leaders for at least two reasons. First, the funding and governance model is unique and could be adopted by city leaders: As the authors note, “public-private partnerships of this scale and ambition are relatively rare.” Project funders, along with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg superintendent and one community member, make up Project L.I.F.T.’s board. An executive director and a handful of staff (including a former Wells Fargo recruiter as the human capital strategist) drive the project and are dually accountable to the L.I.F.T. board and the district. With just twelve pages of governance guidelines and a five-page “collaboration agreement” between them, the relationship between the L.I.F.T. board and the district is characterized by trust and nimbleness—hard to come by in the typical city school system. Second, Public Impact’s report is a thorough review of a large-scale project that includes useful information on the timeline, budget details, and admitted mistakes at the midway point; that kind of careful documentation is necessary when undertaking an innovative (and expensive) reform project. For urban reform groups seeking to turn around low-performing schools, this report should be required reading.
Source: Juli Kim and Shonaka Ellison, “The Project L.I.F.T. Story: Early Lessons from a Public-Private Education Turnaround Initiative,” Public Impact (December 2015).
