Contents

• About FSG Social Impact Advisors
• Executive Summary
• Introduction
• Part I: Understanding the Landscape
• Measuring Success
• Federal Funding and the Four Turnaround Models
• Turnaround Actors
• Part II: Shaping the Future of Turnaround
• Key Gaps
• Gaps in Capacity
• Gaps in Funding
• Gaps in Public and Political Will
• Gaps in Conditions
• Gaps in Research and Knowledge Sharing
• Gaps in High School Settings
• Critical Actions
• Conclusions
• Appendices

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 The School Turnaround Field Guide

Given the early stages of turnaround work, it is not surprising that our research and interviews unearthed significant gaps that must be filled to ensure that school turnarounds can succeed at scale (see Exhibit 17).

Gaps in Capacity

There are not enough high-quality experts or organizations engaging in school turnaround work to reach the necessary scale. Existing organizations are still building their own capacity and expertise, and district and state offices lack the people, tools, and infrastructure to assess providers and support turnaround work. The gaps in capacity break down into four categories:

• Human Capital Capacity. Education leaders point to human capital at the school and system levels as a significant concern. At the school level, there is an insufficient supply of high-quality teachers and leaders who are prepared to take on the uniquely challenging environments of turnaround situations. This problem is particularly acute given that several of the turnaround models require new leaders and teachers. Many of the organizations who recruit, train, and support new principals and teachers are not focused on school turnaround or are still building their own capacity to identify and prepare turnaround-ready educators. Although institutes of higher education have the potential to provide greater scale in preparing enough teachers and leaders to go into targeted schools, significant concerns exist about whether their current programs can prepare turnaround leaders and teachers. School operators, districts, states, and other turnaround providers are also struggling with finding and training the right people to lead and staff their own turnaround initiatives and offices.
• District and State Capacity. Many states and districts still have no specific department or staff focused on school turnarounds. Additionally, they lack turnaround-specific funding streams; structures like data and accountability systems or rubrics to vet partners; knowledge of best practices; and capabilities like engaging unions, partnering with business and philanthropy, or analyzing real-time data. Finally, states and districts have often fallen into relationships based on compliance, and they now need to build their capacity to work more effectively as turnaround collaborators. “We at the state departments of education need to build our capacity,” says John King at the New York State Department of Education. “Federal policy is now asking states to go from a compliance focus to a support focus, which is a big transformation in and of itself.”
• Operator Capacity. Few turnaround-focused operators exist to serve the market, and most of those that do are still too early in their work to have proven results. “I’m not sure we have the experienced, proven vendors that could do this job in a sufficiently critical mass to cover the whole United States with lead partners,” says Smith at the Virginia Department of Education. The U.S. Department of Education has urged CMOs to take on turnarounds, but for the most part, charter management organizations and charter operators have not taken up the challenge en masse. This may be due to the fact that many charter organizations are still struggling to reach scale and quality within their existing models or that their models differ in important ways from those needed to succeed in turnarounds.
• Provider Capacity. As with operators, there are not enough proven turnaround-focused providers to serve the number of schools and districts in need of turnaround. It may also be a challenge to convince high-quality human capital and other service providers to enter this space, because the work is difficult and because turnaround schools represent only a small sliver of the market that these organizations can attempt to serve. “The turnaround market may not be big enough right now to be worth spending time on it,” says Larry Berger of Wireless Generation. “Why wouldn’t I rather sell to Buffalo, New York, than to all the turnaround schools? They can guarantee demand in a way that the turnaround space can’t.” This challenge is particularly acute in rural areas, where providers or operators are unlikely to be motivated by the possibility of reaching scale. However, in some areas, the lure of federal funding is leading to a large number of new entrants into the school turnaround space. In the long term, this will be good for the field’s capacity; but, in the short term, many of these organizations have little direct turnaround experience and need to build their own expertise and capacity.

Gaps in Funding

State and district leaders expressed concerns that RTTT and other federal funding is short term and will not be available to sustain the work unless turnaround is more formally built into the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. On the positive side, there is the potential for additional funding in the near future. In January 2010, President Obama requested an additional $1.35 billion from Congress to serve as a Round III of Race to the Top, with pools of money potentially to be made available to districts as well as states. The proposal for 2011 funding also specifically calls for $900 million in a reauthorized School Turnaround Grants program.

There is also great potential for existing federal revenue streams, such as Title I, Title II, and IDEA, to be used to greater effectiveness in the lowest-performing schools. Beyond the federal level though, states are facing increasingly stretched budgets, and most states have no specific operational funding streams allocated to support school turnaround. While many states, districts, operators, service providers, and researchers are looking to philanthropic sources to fill in gaps, significant concerns remain about the ability to create or access sustainable long-term operational funding.⁵⁹

Gaps in Public and Political Will

State and district departments of education, as well as school boards, mayors, and other governing bodies, must be willing to make the difficult decisions required for school turnaround, such as closing failing schools and negotiating with teachers’ unions to gain more flexibility over teacher contracts. “We need to use every ounce of our energy and every bit of political capital to [make turnaround happen],” says Andres Alonso, CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools. “It’s about building the political urgency and the sense that whoever gets in the way is working against kids.”⁶⁰

There is also a need for greater community engagement, particularly from parents and community-based organizations, to ensure a continuous demand for and commitment to dramatic school improvement. A few districts and states are beginning to take on some of this community engagement and empowerment work. The Baltimore City Public Schools system has taken an active role in engaging community organizers and assigning them to schools in an effort to partner grassroots organizations with the school system. In San Jose, California, the community launched San Jose 2020, an effort to bring together the county office of education, the city of San Jose, educators, business leaders, and community organizers, with the goal of eliminating the achievement gap in San Jose by the year 2020.

In order to effectively mobilize communities to demand high-quality education for their children, “We must develop the information to show that there’s a crisis,” says Bob Wise, president of the Alliance for Quality Education. “This information is how we can assist policymakers and school leaders in generating the necessary public and political will to drive change.” New York City has introduced an easy-to-understand school-level grading system that gives schools annual ratings of A through F and that is communicated to parents. Gary Huggins of the Aspen Institute’s No Child Left Behind Commission echoes the urgent need for community engagement. “NCLB created this data-rich environment but parents don’t know the information,” says Huggins. “We have to get a lot better about making that have meaning to parents.”

Gaps in Conditions

Policies and conditions in districts and states across the country are frequently described, at best, as unsupportive, and at worst, as roadblocks to turnaround success. The gaps in conditions break down into five categories:

• Collective-Bargaining Agreements. Interviewees point to provisions in agreements that may hinder turnaround, including hiring, firing, and tenure rules; working hours; teacher distribution; and restrictions around performance management and teacher observation and evaluation. These provisions and policies limit the ability of school leaders, operators, districts, and states to make decisions in the best interests of children.
• Data and Accountability Systems. Districts and states lack effective, timely data systems to link student performance over time with specific turnaround interventions.
• Operating Flexibility for Management Organizations. State and district policies, regulations, and laws frequently do not support the level of autonomy that schools and operators need over key dimensions necessary for change — staffing, program, budget, schedule, and data.
• Limitations on Charter Involvement. Many states still have charter caps, limiting their ability to employ the restart model. Funding levels and facilities restrictions can also deter charter operators from being willing to take over schools in the restart model.
• Governance and Leadership. In order for turnaround efforts to be sustained, superintendents and school boards must align their efforts and be willing to take on dramatic change. “When the superintendent and board can build an effective partnership, the likelihood of changes being sustained increases,” says Joe Villani, deputy executive director of the National School Board Association. However, the average superintendent stays on the job for less than 3.5 years, and the vagaries of election cycles can undermine school board members’ commitment.⁶¹ The challenge, then, is how to sustain turnaround efforts over a longer time frame. In some cities, mayoral control has paved the way for turnaround efforts, laying the groundwork for bold interventions around teacher evaluations and dismissals, charter schools, and contracting with external providers.

Gaps in Research and Knowledge Sharing

There is not yet enough evidence to identify the most effective interventions for turnaround. Unfortunately, state policies or a lack of student- and teacher-linked data systems often obstruct the ability to track the effectiveness of various interventions at the student level. Given that many states and districts are employing multiple models for turnaround, it will be important to develop a clear research agenda that will allow the field to determine whether or not certain models outperform others in particular contexts.

“I am worried that we are not going to learn as much as we could about what works in schools,” says Bryan Hassel of Public Impact. “Under NCLB, there was no information gathered on what was tried and what worked or didn’t work. As we continue with this work, gathering key data would be really useful.”

Interviewees also voiced the need for further research into the relative effectiveness of turnaround approaches for particular student subgroups. “We need to learn more about the extra focus needed for high-need populations in these turnaround situations — English Language Learners students, disabled students, homeless or underhoused students, and so on,” says John King of the New York Department of Education. “What are the best practices regarding each of these student subpopulations?”

At the school level, examples exist of schools that have been successfully turned around, but stakeholders across the field point to a greater need for proof points and evidence to show how to implement at scale what has worked in the past. As one interviewee noted, “No model yet exists that is both scalable and replicable.”At the system level, too, there is a need to examine and document systems that have been successfully turned around, and to pinpoint factors that contributed to turnaround success.

In addition, few mechanisms exist for knowledge sharing in the field to identify the most effective practices and tools and bring them to scale. “Who is going to track who does what with the school improvement dollars?” asks Laura Weeldreyer, deputy superintendent of Baltimore City Public Schools. “Was one of the models more successful than the others? What processes did districts use to choose interventions, and did schools have a say? There are no processes in place to learn what others are doing.”

Fortunately, the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences announced in fall 2009 a commitment to evaluate what states are doing with their stimulus education dollars, whether common strategies have emerged, and whether the efforts funded improved schooling. “I certainly don’t want to be here in three years and have somebody say, ‘What did we get for that $10 billion?’” says John Easton, director of IES. “We’ve got to be learning from this.”

Exhibit 18 identifies the three most commonly cited questions for a “learning agenda” of the turnaround field.

Gaps in High School Settings

As we identified gaps, interviewees consistently cited high schools and rural schools as the two settings where the gaps identified above were most severe and particularly difficult to address. Because of that, we have included Exhibits 19 and 20, which speak to high school and rural school turnarounds, respectively.

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References

59 U.S. Department of Education.

60 “Driving Dramatic School Improvement” conference.

61 Council of the Great City Schools, “Urban Indicator: Urban School Superintendents: Characteristics, Tenure, and Salary Sixth Survey and Report,” Winter 2008/2009, http://www.cgcs.org/research/research_pub.aspx.