News Clips

In Turnaround News…

D.C. Teachers’ Contract addresses School Turnaround

An article in the Washington Post addresses the contents of the new D.C. teachers’ contract, which was ratified on Wednesday.  The contract indicates that there will be performance pay, new school turnaround models, greater collaboration, and improved teacher mentoring.  As they wait for Council approval, the union and D.C. Public Schools acknowledge that the challenge in moving forward will be to actually implement these changes.

In Other News…

Race to the Top – Part II

As states rushed to submit their applications for the second installment of Race to the Top funding, NY Times columnist David Brooks offers his commentary.  He begins by questioning the role and effectiveness of government intervention and points to several examples, some successful and others less so.  He draws from a speech President Obama gave, in which he stated, “Our government shouldn’t try to guarantee results, but it should guarantee a shot at opportunity for every American who’s willing to work hard.”  Brooks goes on to describe how the Obama administration “has used federal power to incite reform, without dictating it from the top.”  He describes the administration’s approach to education policy as “catalytic” and suggests that a similar process is needed for health, energy, and environmental policy.

Data as a Critical Ingredient to Ed Reform

It seems that every reform initiative has its advocates and detractors who point to “sound” data that “validates” their arguments.  Richard Hess offers an interesting piece about the importance of data.  He explains that data is essential to (1) tracking student progress, (2) identifying effective and ineffective strategies, and (3) empowering leaders to address poorly-performing schools.  He goes on to point out that, “Like a trip to the gym, these steps can feel like drudgery and they don’t deliver much immediate gratification—but they can make a big difference in the long term.”  These are practices we believe in at the School Turnaround Group, as we base all of our initiatives on research.  Please stay tuned for an upcoming publication on how to evaluate school turnaround.

Openings in the windy city!

The Office of School Turnaround at Chicago Public Schools is currently hiring a Director of Curriculum & Instruction and a school principal. See our website for the position descriptions and more information about how to apply.

Principals as CEOs

A new U.S. News podcast series, Leadership for the Next Decade, recently featured Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan as the special guest. Duncan discusses how troubled some of our schools are and that principals need the same skills as CEOs to turn those schools around and run them efficiently and effectively. Listen to the podcast here. Acknowledging that some principals require a different set of skills than is taught in most traditional leadership programs is the first step, actually training principals through alternative programs (see profiles of this type of program) and supporting them in the most challenging schools is where the real work must happen.

Leaders vs. Laggards

The Center for American Progress, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Enterprise Institute recently joined forces and released Leaders and Laggards: A state-by-state report card on educational innovation. The report analyzes a variety of indicators from school management and finance systems, to HR practices (hiring, evaluation, performance pay, removal of ineffective teachers), the use of data, and the environment for state reform. The report doesn’t focus on under-performing schools, but our experience has shown that barriers, inefficiencies, or restrictions at the state and district levels are magnified in those persistently chronically under-performing schools.

Several places implementing a variety of reform efforts and piloting innovative programs are highlighted, but it’s clear that the majority of districts and states continue to work under restrictive policies and archaic practices. The report’s methodology, and the use of (and exclusion of other) indicators, has resulted in a bit of noise from various stakeholders. But, even with these cautions, the report forces us to ask the right questions.

We have the research and the data to show that many policies and practices aren’t showing results, and we have the Race to the Top and the Innovation Fund competitive grant programs to spur innovative growth — now the question is: will education leaders take the steps and gather the political courage to make the changes that are so urgently needed?

For more information, read EdWeek’s analysis of the report.

Missed Congeniality

Kevin Carey gets on the “niceness” meme bandwagon:

“Sometimes interests conflict, and that usually leads to, well, conflict. The case for [DC Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhees's] interests is increasingly being made in terms of rising state and national test scores, improved special education, renewed facilities, and more. What, other than vague complaints about disrespect and the bizarre notion that it’s possible to fix the worst school district in America without making people angry, supports the interests of the other side?”

At the core of this argument is the notion that making schools better for children will inevitably conflict with some subset of adult interests.  That’s okay.  And by the way, as a thought experiment, where it is possible to affect change without disrupting existing adult power structures, we probably should.  That’s not the case anywhere I know of, though.

Experts Debate Turnaround

The National Journal Online hosts one of their “Expert Blogs” on turnaround.  Everyone from Diane Ravitch to Rick Hess to Kevin Carey gets in on the debate action, as they comment on the same Andy Smarick piece I mentioned last week.  There’s a lot of the familiar, “Turnaround is hard!” and “We should just close bad schools!” chorus.  But Richard Rothstein gets at an idea that isn’t terribly popular:

“If we want to turn around low-performing schools, the first task should be to ensure we are identifying these schools accurately. Such identification requires much more than test scores. It requires expert human judgment, with qualified experts visiting schools to interpret test scores and evaluate the overall quality of instruction.”

So, first of all, I have more faith in test scores than Rothstein does.  He’s right that you need a qualitative analysis to figure out what the heck to do to fix a failing school, but schools that persistently demonstrate ridiculously low test scores are usually pretty bad, and I’m not uncomfortable with using those scores as a primary scrub of which schools are failing.

That said, what I WISH Rothstein had said was, “The first task should be to ensure that we have a shared understanding of when a school has – in fact – turned around.”  We have no agreed upon metric as a country that allows us to pat our colleagues on the back and say, “We did it!”  We need that.  Badly.

I have been in hours-long meetings debating “metrics,” and I have come to believe that the tendency to over-think and redefine success for each individual education initiative is a huge part of our paralysis around failing schools.  Yes, all work on “standards,” at any level – state or national – is part of solving this issue, but with billions of dollars flooding the turnaround zone, we need some answers fast.

The Pain and the Fury

Linda Perlstein could not be more right about this:

People want to see test scores rise, fast. Well, guess what? The kind of change required for that to happen causes pain. Lots. ALWAYS.

I was having a wonderful conversation this morning with some funders, and someone made the point that leaders engaged in change management are made or broken then they decide whether to push past the hard stuff (made) or to abandon change at the pain points (broken).  It’s always hard, and you have to deal with it.

Tough Day for Fixing Failing Schools

On the heels of my last post on “The Turnaround Fallacy,” Sam Dillon turns in a NYTimes piece on the Consortium on Chicago Schools Research’s new report on closing failing schools.  The punchline is that closure wasn’t necessarily good for kids.  There are two points I want to make here.

First, folks who think that “close and replace” should be the dominant strategy for school change need to read this piece.  As our Mass Insight founder Bill Guenther is fond of saying, “You have to pull multiple levers at once.”   Closure is only a part of school change, and if you really want to transform learning for kids in need, you have to have an “inside strategy” for turning around failing schools.

Second, the term “turnaround” is used to define many competing things.  We think it’s a fairly broad term that can encompass a number of different schol change strategies.  In particular, the draft requirements for the latest USED School Improvement Grants include four different school change strategies: Turnaround, Restart, Closure, and Transformation.  We would argue that the only one that doesn’t fit in our definition of “turnaround” is the Closure category.  Transformation is somewhat weak sauce and smacks a little of the old “other” option under NCLB restructuring, but the rest have real promise if executed with our “Three Cs”: capacity through Lead Partner organizations; clustering to achieve scale; and changing operating conditions to enable dramatic action.

The Panacea Fallacy

Andy Smarick has emerged as the leading wet blanket for fixing failing schools, and folks are sure to be talking about his newest piece in EdNext, “The Turnaround Fallacy” (NB: he’s also a friend and a very smart guy, although we disagree vigorously on this issue).  I could forgive a little devil’s advocacy, because what’s right in his new piece is that nobody knows what will work at scale for actually fixing failing schools.  Folks have tried for years to do something about persistently failing schools, and most of the strategies utilized were of the middling sort, a shortcoming we covered in depth in The Turnaround Challenge.  The old world of school fixer-uppers is filled with half-measures and happy schools … places where folks congratulate themselves for trying while kids suffer.  This is why I always encourage folks to treat anyone who has “The Solution” for failing schools as a snake-oil salesman.

So, it’s not Smarick’s skepticism that bugs me, because everyone should be healthily skeptical of any strategy sold as the panacea for chronic failure.  Yet, in the same piece where he dismisses anything that could possibly fix failing schools, Smarick introduces a grand idea to – you guessed it – fix failing schools.  His answer is closure and replacement, and he explains it thusly:

The churn caused by closures isn’t something to be feared; on the contrary, it’s a familiar prerequisite for industry health … Churn generates new ideas, ensures responsiveness, facilitates needed change, and empowers the best to do more … These principles can be translated easily into urban public education via tools already at our fingertips thanks to chartering: start-ups, replications, and expansions. Chartering has enabled new school starts for nearly 20 years and school replications and expansions for a decade. Chartering has demonstrated clearly that the ingredients of healthy, orderly churn can be brought to bear on public education.

Now, I’m no shrinking violet when it comes to closing failing schools; I was a part of a team that did some of that.  But it’s AT BEST part of a solution for remedying failure, and at worst it just moves the proverbial deck chairs by putting kids in equally bad schools.  Nowhere in Smarick’s argument is there evidence that novelty and competition drive equity or quality.  Creative destruction and competition are great for allocating scarce resources, but they’re not enough to ensure quality and equity for poor kids.

So I ask Smarick: Why should I be excited about “industry churn” for its own sake?  Quality and equity for disadvantaged children is what we care about, right?

USED Parental Options/Information Conference

Blogging today from USED’s conference for the office of parental options and information, which includes charter schools.  I was on a plenary panel with sharp folks from Green Dot and AUSL.  We discussed a ton of stuff, but there was remarkable consensus on the following items:

1) Community engagement – engaging the community early and often in the turnaround process is critical.  It’s impossible to over-communicate change.

2) Planning, planning, planning – ideally, turnaround operators should have a full year of planning (Year 0), and even before that, they should be readying themselves for that planning year.  Yes, that’s right … planning for the planning.

3) Strong relationships with districts – turnaround at scale will require the witting participation of districts in the process.  States and the federal government should do everything they can to make it easier for districts to make hard choices.