Yes. We can improve schools, and we can scale up. Improving schools takes this: a bottom-up approach to creating coherent, inspiring school cultures that are guided by a supportive accountability system that includes a school review.

Coherent and inspiring school cultures are those where everyone values knowledge and values the people around them. Bottom-up implies that districts cannot simply impose their will on schools, principals cannot simply impose their will on teachers, and teachers cannot simply impose their will on kids. Every school is different. But if that’s the case, then how can we create successful models and scale them up?

Well, let’s look at what good schools do. The good schools I have visited stand out not because of particular programs (as noted elsewhere here, there are no silver bullets), but because they focus on coherent approaches to the causes of student failure. These school know where they want to go, and in order to get there they consistently gather information, analyze that information, set goals, allocate resources, monitor, and revise.

That’s the process, and that’s what we need to focus on. What kinds of information do good schools look at? Well certainly not just test scores. Rather they focus on information about the root causes of student failure, and they seek coherent ways to address them.

Let’s say, for example, that a school is struggling to create a safe and respectful culture. In that case, the school community might regularly gather information from safety surveys, anecdotal records, and incident reports. As a community, they would use this information to set goals and implement plans that are schoolwide and that address the needs of individual kids. Of course, concerns about safety and respect can be found in almost all schools, but the information each school gathers will vary, and thus so will its needs, the goals it sets, the resources it allocates, the programs it might select and tailor as one part of a coherent solution. The same is true of other school issues such as professional development needs and parental involvement. Particulars may vary. What varies less in successful schools is the approach.

Collaborative process is what good schools do well, and supportive accountability systems can spur that kind of culture through a hands-on look at the school. Reviewers must look at process and coherence, rather than program and procedure. They must ask what a school sees to be its own underlying needs, and look at how well it is using process to address those needs. What is more, supportive accountability isn’t simply judgment . It is accountability that also helps the school address those needs through funding, through technical assistance, through whatever expertise and resources are needed to help the school improve.

Such a system is scalable, and if you want to see both the promise it holds and the dangers of doing it incorrectly, then look at New York City. In New York, about 1400 schools are regularly involved in a Quality Review whose focus is on process. Schools are reviewed based on criteria that essentially follow the process I just outlined: how well these schools gather and use information to set goals, allocate resources, monitor and revise.

But in New York, this system as it stands is far from perfect and the shortcomings stem from three things: first, the focus of the review is much more on judgment and possible punishment, rather than ongoing conversation and support; second, in New York too much power is invested in principles rather than the school community; and third, the review tends to be too narrowly focused on whether schools are preparing for short-term gains on tests, rather than on improving the underlying conditions that affect schools. The first two of these shortcoming come about through intentional local policy. The third we can blame on the current form of NCLB.

The result of these shortcomings is that, fearful of judgment and seeking to impress, New York’s principals often compel teachers to generate reams and reams of test-generated numbers, gather them in binders and show an adroitness at sorting those numbers. For teachers, the weeks leading up to the review can be defined by forty days and forty nights of paper that has little relevance to their work. When reviewers arrive, they spend two days talking to many people at the school and observing classes, reviewing findings with school leadership, and then writing a report. In theory, these reports are a guide to improvement, but in a culture of punitive accountability, they are generally viewed as summative judgment rather than a basis for improvement, much less a guide for district-level support. Into the drawer they go until 40 days before the next review. This may not be the intention but without ongoing support of resources and expertise, this is quite often the result.

What is more, the problem of excessively empowered principals does not end with their ability to demand futile paperwork from busy teachers. School cultures cannot be sustained if they are not real cultures, if they are invested solely in the leadership of the school. Leaders move on. That can be good in some instances (good schools need good leadership), but just as often is not good. This is why good school cultures are bottom-up (though I resist the word bottom). They respect all voices because they must outlast their principals and that can’t happen when someone else’s beliefs have been imposed.

I dwell on New York’s reviews because they can act as a guide for what we need to do, and what we need to avoid. Ultimately, when it comes to better schools, we need to look at school conditions and the school community’s approach to education. Great minds grow from fertile ground, and in institutions fertile ground doesn’t just come about willy-nilly. We need to create it, and we can create it in every school across the country by looking at process, not programs, through supportive reviews. Do that and you will see the test scores rise.

For decades now, we have approached education reform as a school-by-school endeavor, adopting policies, setting goals, and celebrating successes based on short-term gains at isolated buildings or in specific classrooms.

If our ultimate goal is to improve public education in the United States, we cannot be satisfied with simply changing single schools. While they are to be celebrated and studied wherever they occur, incremental changes just are not enough, particularly if our long-term strategy is improved student achievement for all children. For every school that is transformed, there are several more that lack the monetary resources, leadership, and teaching capacity to improve. Studies show that our current accountability tools – largely based on data and sanctions, rather than intensive capacity-building – have not transformed dysfunctional, low-capacity schools. To truly improve, we need to overhaul the education system as high-achieving nations have, making strategic investments that can truly improve our schools in a fundamental and lasting way.

Many people have looked to examples like Finland and Singapore for clues about how to take a low-achieving and inequitable system and dramatically transform outcomes for all students and schools. But there are also examples here at home. One example of how strategic investments can produce systemic improvement can be found in New Jersey. Most are familiar with the Abbott decisions that have come out of the legal cases initially launched in the 1960s. But the real legacy of Abbott is the set of systemic changes recently made in P-12 education across the state, providing an extraordinary leap in equity and opportunity that has propelled New Jersey to one of the top-achieving states in the nation and dramatically reduced the achievement gap between white students and their black and Hispanic peers.

After decades of legal battles to avoid equalizing funding for the state’s low-income, high-minority school districts, the state finally responded in the late 1990s to the Court’s repeated rulings by providing a major infusion of funding to high-need school districts. First, state aid brought per-pupil revenue in the 28 (later 30) Abbott districts up to the per-pupil expenditures in the state’s 110 successful, suburban districts. Previously, districts serving most of the state’s African American and Hispanic students had spent about half what well-heeled districts like Princeton could spend.

With $246 million in parity aid, coupled with $312 million in supplemental program assistance, New Jersey went about implementing a new state curriculum linked to state standards. These dollars were designed to support whole school reform, ensure early childhood education for three- and four-year olds taught by a highly-qualified teaching force, full-day kindergarten, and enable smaller class sizes. The new resources allowed for greater investment in classroom technology, while ensuring adequate facilities and supporting health, social services, alternative, and summer programs to help students catch up. They supported extensive professional development, new urban teacher education programs, and literacy programs that brought classroom libraries and expert literacy coaches to inner-city schools. Most importantly, these dollars equalized the system, seeking to close the resource and opportunity gaps between the haves and have nots.

From Abbott, we learned that real improvement does not happen overnight. Many urban districts struggled at first. Others – Union City, West New York, and Perth Amboy – showed strong progress out of the gate. In Union City, for instance, educators fought to improve a district that was 96 percent Latino and the poorest district in the state. Embracing the opportunity to make the systemic changes called for under the Abbott decisions, Union City’s instructionally focused improvement strategies – aimed at recruiting and support competent teachers, developing strong bilingual education and literacy instruction, and using whole school reforms like the Comer School Development Program – reaped enormous gains that produced proficiency levels for its largely low-income, English language learning students that were comparable to those for non-urban students in the state. Union City was the first to show how strategic, efficient use of resources could make a major difference for children, and the state supported other urban districts to follow suit.

New Jersey has succeeded because of its systematic approach to education improvement. Across the state, it invested in quality preschool. It made real investments in quality teacher pedagogy. And it did so in a wholesale way, moving past an era of pilot projects and heading directly into wholesale, systemic improvement. The results speak for themselves. Today, New Jersey, a state where 45 percent of students are of color, ranks first in the nation in writing performance on NAEP and among the top five states in every other subject area – competing neck-and-neck with states that have many fewer low-income students of color.

Taking demographics into account, New Jersey is arguably the highest achieving state in the nation. It has cut its achievement gap in half over the last decade, and its African American and Hispanic students outscore the average student in California. And it did so in a state that is considered a strong teachers union state, a factor that many reformers believe is reason one why systemic improvement cannot happen. But in New Jersey, teachers were active participants in the solution, shaping the strategy and sharing in the successes.

States like New Jersey are proof positive that we cannot settle only for individual school-based reforms and changes. If we are to truly turn around our nation’s 5,000 lowest-performing schools, we need systems change that focus on highly competent teaching in a supportive school environment. We need to organize around ambitious learning goals evaluated with high-quality assessments. And we need to support all of these action steps with the resources necessary to implement with fidelity. We cannot improve thousands of schools on a case-by-case basis. We need a systematic approach, like that in high-achieving nations, that offers real, lasting improvements to each and every one of those schools.

There is research available on the effects of leadership on improving student achievement. School and district leadership can have a positive impact on student achievement. Schools that develop improvement plans that include the use of quality data and actually implement the plan can increase the performance of the school. The responsibility does not fall on the math, reading and writing faculty. It takes a concerted effort by all staff members to implement the improvement plan. This requires strong school leadership with support from the district leadership team.

Curriculum

The teaching staff must determine the essential skills and knowledge that each child must learn in each standard across the curriculum. The essential knowledge and skills should be assessed by using quality formative assessments. The use of technology is another component that needs to be imbedded in the instructional plans. We need to stay focused on what students really need and ward off the temptation to try each new fad that comes by.

Professional Development

The school staff needs time to work collaboratively to design a quality curriculum and then to continuously monitor the impact of their instruction. Continuous professional development on improving the curriculum and improving instructional strategies is a major component of a quality school improvement plan. Once again we need to resist the desire to find the quick fix. Stay focused on developing a quality curriculum and improving instructional strategies within the school and district is the key. Defining quality instruction, then monitoring progress is a key for the school principal.

Leadership

The school leadership must include staff, parents and district staff to assist the principal. Focusing on curriculum and instruction is difficult with all of the daily challenges that face a principal, but being grounded and staying focused as much as possible on implementing the school improvement plan has to be the ongoing mission of the principal. The principal must monitor that each faculty member is imbedding the key essentials of reading, writing and mathematics in their instruction.

This seems too simple for a very complicated problem. There have been many books written on how to turn around poor performing schools. There are also other factors outside of the school day that have a huge impact on the student before they enter the school door, but a strong focus on curriculum and instruction by the leadership is the beginning to improving school performance.

As George Wood points out there is no “silver bullet” to turn around our lowest performing schools, but there is a lot of evidence out there—many of it mentioned on this blog—about approaches that are working. That said, I think we can all agree that a child’s academic performance has as much to do with what’s happening outside the classroom as inside.

Students in these 5,000 schools and in our urban neighborhoods have challenges that affect their education including poverty, crime-filled neighborhoods and schools with limited resources and teachers with the least experience. If we are truly going to turn these schools around we need to seriously consider designing them to be more holistic and full service. This means in addition to reading and math, schools offer healthcare and wellness services, along with other programs that engage the entire community.

Many people highlight the Harlem Children’s Zone and the great work of Geoffrey Canada. But you may not be aware of the other good work happening in Harlem at the Vito Marcantonio School—PS/IS 50—on behalf of its 500+ students. PS/IS 50 is a K-8 school in Spanish Harlem with a demographic of half Hispanic and half African American students and is the only school in New York City located within a housing project. Under the leadership of its dynamic principal Rebekah Mitchell, PS/IS 50 is a case study of how a failing school can be transformed.

Prior to its turnaround, PS/IS 50 spent many years in a downward spiral. Under three different principals in five years, the school was failing and nearing closure. There was considerable violence near it and gang activity infiltrating the school itself. One-third of its students were testing "far below" standards on math and literacy tests. Just imagine having to send your child there.

Since Principal Mitchell’s arrival in 2004, the school has made drastic improvements by taking a holistic approach to learning and working closely with key partners like City Year and the Children’s Aid Society. The gangs are now gone, test scores are improving and PS/IS 50 was just given a progress and overall score of “A” on the 2008-09 New York City Department of Education progress report.

The school offers an on-site health care center that provides health services to all of its students and their families. It’s also been able to increase parental involvement—a huge struggle in impoverished communities where parents often work multiple jobs— through a school-based “PTA/Family Room,” where parents, students and staff together learn about topics ranging from green-cleaning to healthy cooking, as well as standard adult education courses.

Principal Mitchell also approved an initiative to move the New York Center for Autism Charter School to be housed within PS/IS 50. They have created a peer mentorship program, which trains 6th and 7th graders from PS/IS 50 – particularly those with behavioral problems – to become teachers within their own school. They work directly with the autistic children as peer mentors.

PS/IS 50 is one terrific example, but we know of others, such as the Youth Opportunity Center in Nashville, TN, that are approaching the education and well-being of our children as a whole life experience, not just an academic one.

George Wood, principal of Federal Hocking High and Middle School in Stewart, Ohio and executive director, the Forum for Education and Democracy, submitted the following:

Everyone wants a ‘silver bullet’ when it comes to school improvement, but there just isn’t one. What works in one school won’t necessarily work in another, as it is translated through local culture, history, and the differing populations of children our public schools educate.

Having said that, there are a few keys that can be shaped to fit any school that seem to me to have the greatest potential for helping a school improve. Here are my top three:

1. Consistent leadership: I have yet to see any organization of any type improve with a rotating door of leaders. This is my 18th year at the principal’s desk in my school, and still we are finding new ways to improve the school. If we are ever to see improvement in some of the schools that struggle the most it will require the careful selection, support, and on-going education of the leaders in those schools. Additionally, they have to be rewarded for longevity and protected from the whims of central office administrators who interfere with their work.

2. Time to personalize instruction: My friend Deborah Meier often says that if we are going to help young people use their minds well we have to have the time to get to know their minds. Most secondary schools run an 8 or 9 period a day, with 25-30 kids sitting through a series of 42 minute classes. This means a teacher sees over 200 students a day in small chunks of time and that kids face a constant barrage of changing subjects and expectations. No one else in our culture is treated this way—not college students, not employees, not CEOs, etc. If we want to improve our schools we have to allow for the creative use of time so that students and teachers can dig deep into subject matter, have the space for hands-on projects and out of school experiences, and can reflect carefully on what they are studying. Many schools have taken on this challenge, led by the work of the Coalition of Essential Schools.

3. Time to know students well: At the turn of the century, when the high school day was structured, efficiency experts like Fredrick Winslow Taylor did studies on how many kids could be lectured to in a room. Taking directly from the assembly line, they created schools that treated teachers as laborers and students as raw material to be shaped into a final product. Nearly a century later we still treat kids in the same way. Good schools break this model and find ways to treat students like human beings, with emotions, needs, cares, and interests. Using tools like Advisory programs and Internships these schools know each student well and attend to personal needs and interests so that academic skills can be developed.

Leadership, personalization, time. No silver bullet here, just some tools that can be used in different ways in multiple settings to make our schools places where kids develop the skills of lifelong learning, flexibility in their career choices, and active democratic citizens. Our aim should not be the one best solution, it should be the latitude and support for schools to try combinations of solutions in collaboration with their community in support of the kids they serve.

George Wood is in his 18th year as principal of Federal Hocking High and Middle School in Stewart, Ohio and is also the Executive Director of The Forum for Education and Democracy. He is the author of several books including Time To Learn, Schools that Work, and Many Children Left Behind (with Deborah Meier). This blog is based on his daily work as a public school principal and takes its title from the 5000 hours young people spend in school during their four years of high school. It is 5000 hours they will never get back and America has an obligation to every child that this time is challenging, engaging, and enriching.

This has been an informative and stimulating exploration of the processes that give us the best chance of changing failing schools into successful schools.

Because UNCF’s base of experience relates primarily to the college experience, we may bring a slightly different perspective to the discussion. Most other contributors come from what we might call the production side of K-12 education. UNCF comes from the consuming side: Our historic mission is to educate the students who come out of the 5,000 schools the Administration wants to turn around, and the students who come from the nation’s 90,000 other schools as well. More recently, our focus has expanded to include raising our voice about the state of the education that students get before they get to college, the education that can shorten or lengthen the odds of their higher education success.

I’d like to pick up a question that Deborah Meier asks—and answers: What are we educating these students for? Are we educating them only to be employees, or citizens as well? She’s exactly right. Preparing young people for civic engagement is one of the chief missions of education at every level, and has been for at least a century. And it works: research by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau demonstrates that as education level increases, so does the number of hours devoted to volunteering and so does the rate at which people vote.

But there’s also another way of answering Dr. Meier’s question. What are we educating students for in K-12? We’re educating them to go to college. So the way we improve the education they get before they go to college should reflect that destination.

I’m on the Board of Directors of the KIPP Foundation, the parent organization of a network of charter schools across the country. What drew me to KIPP was their very explicit focus in every aspect of their organization and pedagogy on college as a destination. When you ask KIPP middle-schoolers the year in which they’ll graduate, for example, they respond not with the year they’ll graduate from middle or high school, but the year they’ll graduate from college.

KIPP has grown steadily, and will continue to expand its reach. Of course, it is the nation’s public school systems that will need to do the heavy lifting in turning out college-ready graduates. But I think there is real value in looking at KIPP and other successful, college-oriented charter schools as laboratories for college-ready education. What principles have worked in these laboratories that can be applied in public school systems?

The menu will be a familiar one to the innovators who populate this forum: The importance of innovative, inspired—and inspiring—leadership with high expectations. High-quality, trained, certified, mentored teachers who can work not only with their students but their students’ families. Pedagogy that focuses on constructivism and active learning. And educational structural elements: smaller teacher-student ratios, longer school days and school years, and local decision-making.

Not every successful charter makes the same selection from such a menu, and not every public school will either But what I want to underscore is that a very important part of making bad schools better should be the kind of students we want to emerge from those schools and where we want them to be headed.

Hmmm, let me see. How long have we been talking about turning around failing schools? Weren’t we talking about it last year? How about the year before that? The last ten years? Try since 1983.

We really only got rid of a few bad apples with NCLB, though others are on the hot seat now thanks to the spotlight, and, occasionally, reform-minded education leaders. But state-by-state, bureaucracies and impediments remain. States and districts were able to dodge state requirements for years and later, the same was true of federal requirements. The impact of high standards has been minimized by lower cut-scores on related tests. We’ve also tried money, more professional development, alternative certification, extended time, curriculum changes, moving from seat time to outcomes, reconstituting, re-contracting, takeovers…

What haven’t we tried?

Well, we haven’t made TFA the rule rather than the exception - meaning we haven’t removed education schools and lengthy certification processes from all but a small percentage of new teacher paths. So maybe expanding that as the norm would help (human capital and supply usually has something to do with success or failure). We haven’t really tried charter schools for more than a relative handful of students nationwide (a few percent). And if this question of school improvement was more than just lip service for policymakers, they might look to DC with more than 30% of its kids working successfully in charters and impacting the larger system, or even to New Orleans as a way to recraft education wholly. We could give more mayors the power to hire non-traditional superintendents as a model for rest of the nation to follow (since NYC has actually dug out of being nearly the worst system in the country since that happened there). Or maybe, just maybe, we could divest ourselves of petty ideological zealotry and accept that giving parents meaningful choices, like they have in a handful of places where the unions and their blob have not succeeded entirely in their quest to rid the universe of any school choice once and for all. Like in DC, where children once trapped in failing schools are actually empowered by that choice at places like St. Anthony’s (for a less expensive alterative) or Sidwell Friends, a more prestigious, yet still attainable, school.

Oh, but get serious, Jeanne. We need more conferences, roundtables, task forces, studies, reports, meetings and hearings to expose us to the right answers.

As my 16 year old would say, good luck with that.

Bill Jackson is absolutely right that one key ingredient for successfully engaging the lowest performing schools in the country is public will. As many district leaders have found out to their chagrin over the years, parents and community leaders sometimes mobilize to defend even the lowest performing schools in their midst—and as I’ve witnessed myself in Connecticut’s cities, parents in some of the lowest achieving schools often paradoxically grade their own child’s school at the top of the scale even while panning a district’s performance overall.

This is one set of real challenges that need to be overcome in order to realize the vision that Secretary Duncan has set forth for turning around the 5,000 lowest performing schools across the country (and he should be congratulated for proposing to put the weight of the Title I School Improvement funding stream behind this effort in the draft guidance published last week).

One model to look to in this regard is the Hartford, Connecticut school district, which has launched a comprehensive turnaround plan under the leadership of Superintendent Steve Adamowski over the past several years. The district is not a large one by national standards, just over 20,000 students and forty some schools, but as the second poorest city in the nation it has also historically been ground zero for Connecticut’s worst-in-the-nation achievement gap.

Under Adamowski’s “All Choice” reform plan, the starting point has been the district’s ranking of all of its existing schools top to bottom on academic performance. Targeting the half dozen schools in the bottom tier, the district has actually employed three of the four turnaround models specified in the Duncan’s recently released guidance: “turnaround,” “school closure” and “transformation.” In practical terms this has meant that about 15 percent of the district’s schools have been closed for no reason other than abysmally low academic performance (e.g. fewer than 5 percent of 4th graders reading at grade level). Ordinarily, one might expect that this volume of neighborhood school closures would have prompted large-scale community protests. And while there have been some noisy parent forums along the way, the reality has been very different because the district has paired its closure strategy with an even greater wave of new school openings—16 new or totally reconstituted schools have sprung up over the same time period. As part of this effort, the district has adopted a portfolio management approach, welcoming in high-performing charter school management organizations like Achievement First, as well as fostering school management partnerships with the Core Knowledge Foundation, Montessori and others.

In addition to the challenge of building public will, turnaround efforts at scale also require an explicit human capital strategy. In Hartford’s case this is very much a work in progress, but one key pillar so far has been the district’s recruitment of as many Teach for America corps members as it can get its hands on—just three years in, TFA now accounts for something approaching 5% of the total teaching staff district wide. Given the district’s pressing need for entrepreneurial leaders to staff out its many new schools, the district also aggressively pursued New Leaders for New Schools during its last national RFP, but came in runner up to Charlotte-Mecklenburg in that competition. Accordingly the district is now working with a local funder to create its own school leadership academy.

The results of all of this for student learning are certainly encouraging. There are now two years of student achievement data since the All Choice plan was implemented and the Hartford district has reversed a decade long decline and has posted performance gains that dramatically outpace the state for the past two years running. This past year, for instance, the percentage of elementary and middle school students performing at grade level on the state mastery tests increased 4 points—on top a 3 point increase the year before—a pace which will erase the achievement gap in less than a decade.

But it’s worth noting a caution from Hartford’s example: this kind of new schools driven turnaround strategy rests critically on the entrepreneurial zeal of the school leaders themselves, whose academic achievement gains now earn them increasing autonomy over their school budgets and staffing. Likewise, it rests in no small measure on a school board which is subject to mayoral control and unified by a shared reform as embodied in the superintendent’s own dynamic leadership style. These are conditions which are missing in all too many struggling schools and districts right now…

I think one promising route to success here involves re-conceptualizing the role of school districts so that they come to think of themselves as "managers of a portfolio of schools." The Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington published an interesting report on this a few days ago.

And, to make that transformation happen, we are going to have to find a way to cultivate more of that all-too-illusive ingredient: public will. More parents and citizens are going to have to be convinced that their schools today are not as good as they think they are and that the community needs to aim for something higher. And that's going to require more than publishing low test scores every year.

I sought help this week from Andy Smarick, former White House Fellow and Deputy Ass't Secretary of Education in the last administration, who has been doing some useful analysis and thinking on this very topic (some of which will soon appear in Education Next). In addition to Andy's observations, inserted below, you may also want to have a look at Ron Brady's Fordham paper on this very topic a few years back. http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=2&id= Perhaps we've come a long way since then but I have to admit I haven't seen much evidence of it. Now take it away, Andy :

Every healthy field, profession, and industry has a mechanism for getting rid of its very worst performers. Bankruptcies bring failing firms to an end. Elections unseat poor public officials. Corrupt lawyers are disbarred, and negligent doctors lose their licenses. These tools ensure that the public is well served and protected and that scarce resources aren’t endlessly invested in failures. They also make room for new entrants to emerge—innovative companies, a crop of fresh legislators—and the best performers to grow. This churning process, though disquieting and occasionally messy in the short-term, keeps industries fresh, vibrant, responsive, and self-improving.

Tragically, in K-12 schooling, we’ve convinced ourselves that all failing schools, if plied with sufficient money and attention, can be fixed. This has led to a mindset that schools ought to exist in perpetuity, the result of which has been thousands of persistently failing schools harming millions of kids year after year after year.

Secretary Duncan deserves credit for shining a spotlight on failing schools. Unfortunately, however, he has bought in to the “turnaround” craze; consequently, he is about to invest billions of dollars in a venture that has consistently come up short. (I go into greater detail about this matter in a soon-to-be-released article in Education Next titled “The Fix-It Fallacy.”)

The secretary would be wise to bear two important things in mind. First, the success rate of turnarounds in education and other fields and industries is staggeringly low. This isn’t a coincidence, and it’s not a reflection of insufficient effort. Instead, it speaks directly to the nature of failed institutions.

Second, look at America’s most successful urban schools—charter schools like KIPP, Achievement First, YES Prep, and Uncommon Schools. What do they have in common? They are new starts, not turnarounds.

In short, while turnarounds sporadically succeed, decades of experience indicate that they are not a scalable strategy for improving struggling school systems. A better strategy, though by no means failsafe, is to close persistently failing schools and open new schools that have the DNA for success.

The NEA Foundation is focused on significant and sustainable improvement in the rates of achievement for poor and minority students through the Closing the Achievement Gaps Initiative, and we are starting to see positive results. The program is in three districts with a high number of underachieving low income and minority students: Hamilton County (Chattanooga), Tenn.; Milwaukee, Wisc.; and Seattle, Wash.

Using NEA Foundation funding to create learning networks of educators, school district officials, and members of the community, Hamilton County has helped to close the achievement gaps in the school district by more than 10 percent in both reading and math in its 21 middle schools from 2004 to 2008. The Foundation initiative has created a system of networks of teachers, principals, instructional coaches, and family partnership specialists to address specific issues related to achievement. In 2007-2008, the focus of these networks has been on strengthening instructional leadership and differentiated instruction, with an emphasis on informing teaching practice.

In its fourth year, the initiative in Milwaukee has helped create a professional development program resulting in student achievement rates that have surpassed the district average for the first time in participating schools. In conjunction with the Milwaukee Partnership Academy (a consortium of local institutions of higher education and businesses), the school district used the NEA Foundation funding to create learning teams to support professional development communities in its schools. The teams provide an opportunity for educators to regularly engage in discussions of student work and to learn how to best promote student achievement. As a result of this program, a comprehensive literacy and mathematics initiative was developed and is being implemented. The district is observing the positive impacts of this initiative in student performance at schools where the program is being implemented. Average test scores of tenth graders on the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination rose by eight percentage points. Also, high school graduation rates, now at 70 percent, have grown four times faster than the rest of the district.

In its third year of funding from the NEA Foundation, the Seattle Flight School Initiative (FSI) seeks to improve student achievement and to reduce achievement gaps by engaging parents, aligning curriculum, and creating an environment of professional development and collaboration. The initiative focuses on neighborhood clusters of elementary, middle, and high schools to provide a coherent and aligned approach for students as they transition through the district's schools. In order to improve family and community engagement, the FSI schools have used several new strategies, including conducting home visits and sponsored family nights. At Foundation-funded schools, the student achievement rates have surpassed the state's average in reading and math.

We propose that the Race to the Top grant program focus aggressively on states and local school districts working to implement proven school improvement strategies to help close achievement gaps.

Gary Huggins makes a good point – turnaround successes tend to be isolated, and we don’t have a lot of research on scalable, systemic approaches that can work on a nationwide basis. The existence of chronically underperforming schools is not evidence that no one has tried to turn these schools around; it’s proof that doing so is incredibly difficult, and requires both educational expertise and political will.

Still, there are examples worth noting. In Los Angeles, city leaders recently agreed to turn over control of 200 chronically underperforming schools – along with 50 new ones – to charter school operators and others with experience in school transformation. This is not the first time Los Angeles has been willing to transfer control from the establishment to a team of reformers. In 2007, the Los Angeles Unified School District voted to give operational control of Locke High School to Green Dot public schools. A December 2008 editorial in the Los Angeles Times stated: “Locke High School represents the kind of transformation that can take place practically overnight under committed, energetic new leadership.” And, while it may take a while to start seeing the difference academically, the transfer has helped lower truancy rates, increase parental involvement, and even raised the graduation rate.

A defining characteristic of what’s happening in Los Angeles and elsewhere in the country is aggressive local leadership – an individual or group of individuals willing to make the tough choices and reject the status quo in order to implement meaningful, transformative new policies. The approaches have not always been the same, and that’s instructive too. I’ve said it more than once because I truly believe it: What works in Lakeville, Minnesota may not work in Los Angeles, California or Louisville, Kentucky.

Certainly, states and communities can – and should – learn from one another and strive to implement shared best practices. And I agree that turning around the 5,000 lowest performing schools is a laudable goal. Still, I cannot help but be skeptical that the federal government has the tools or the expertise to parachute in from Washington and fix these schools with a standardized turnaround process. I certainly haven’t seen any evidence that the federal government knows how to transform a struggling school, much less 5,000 of them that face very, very different challenges.

How do we turn around our nation’s lowest-performing schools? Here’s an interesting opinion on the topic: http://bit.ly/rX55u. In this commentary by Richard D. Kahlenberg, the author argues that merely changing teachers and administrators doesn’t do the trick. He suggests that creating magnet schools with a mix of rich and poor kids in each building is a key component of sustainable success. He gives the Wake County School District in Raleigh, NC as an example of success.

I don’t know if this magnet approach works any better than anything else. I live very near the Wake County School District this author praises for its innovation. But I also read the papers when the test scores come out and I don’t find Wake County’s schools to be doing much better than anyone else’s. Additionally, Wake County is severely over-crowded to the point where they need to use inconvenient scheduling approaches and many portable classrooms just to get by.

So this brings up a very important idea: What do we mean by “turning around” a school?

I’m fascinated by the empty rhetoric I hear on this topic. First off, no one that I know of has established what it means to turn a school around. Most of the low-performing schools I work with feel great when their test scores eek up to state and district averages – even though this level of performance is usually quite low. To make things even fuzzier, the four recommended government “models” for turning around schools are not really models at all; they’re just the thinnest and most basic of concepts.

Take Mr. Duncan’s favorite “model” of closing down a school and re-opening it with new teachers and new leadership. In most cases where I’ve seen this approach tried, far too many low-performing teachers are re-hired simply because they’re the only teachers around. Some of the worst schools I’ve seen are in impoverished rural areas. These schools may turn over as many as half their teachers a year even without some kind of restructuring plan. The bottom line on the mass firing approach is that replacing teachers isn’t easy because—as usual—we continue to neglect to expend resources raising the quality and quantity of teachers available.

So here we are with a presidential mandate to turn around 5000 schools in five years and we don’t have a working definition of what a turnaround is, any detailed models of how to do it, or enough good people to make it work. And yet, we all recognize the moral obligation to make things better for millions of kids struggling in the worst academic conditions.

Where do we begin?

When I’m asked about turning around troubled schools, I always start with a large supply of high quality teachers. I think the best way to create a sustainable source of good teachers would be to pair a district with one of the better teacher preparation institutions in the country. The institution would send students for extended student teaching and each of these graduates would be guaranteed a job as long as they met high district standards for teaching ability.

Next would be administrators. And I think a similar approach of partnering with a high quality educational institution would work well here, too. The first thing principals would be asked to create is a healthy and supportive work environment for their teaching staff. In order for turnarounds to be sustainable, teaching staffs have to be stable. And one of the top reasons teachers leave their buildings or the profession has to do with poor working conditions—including reasonable class sizes, appropriate teaching materials, and strong support for high quality school discipline.

I would also change the traditional administrative structure of schools to include two principals instead of just one. The principal’s role is key but it is generally too large for one person to do well. Furthermore, the job splits neatly into two distinct categories. As such, I would set up schools with a Principal of Operations and a Principal of Instruction.

Now, imagine a building with strong leadership, strong teachers, good working conditions, and stability of personnel. Couldn’t issues like curriculum and instructional method be worked out on a school-by-school basis? I think they could, especially if lead teachers were required to seek consensus from other staff members and make their case for a particular approach to the Principal of Instruction who would use data and frequent observation to determine effectiveness.

Nobody wants to “turn around” a school one year only to see it turn back two or three years later. That’s why I think partnerships with strong teacher and administrator preparation programs is the key to improving quality and sustainability. For one thing, the relationship would be symbiotic: the institution would receive constant real-world feedback from the district, and the district would, in subsequent years, receive better trained teachers and administrators.

The most serious problem we have in education today is not concentrations of poverty in some schools and districts. It is the simple fact that we lack sufficient numbers of quality teachers and administrators—and that the concentration of these more talented educators is highly skewed toward schools with the best working conditions. Pairing schools in need with our best institutions of educational training would be a significant step in alleviating this problem.

In the meantime, let’s move away from empty rhetoric like undefined “turnarounds” and so many thousands of schools rejuvenated. What, for example, makes the 5001st worst school any less worthy of help than its predecessor? Our schools don’t work for lack of structures or models or political posturing; what they lack are sufficient numbers of well-trained people. And until we decide to put significant resources and strategies behind this problem, it’s not likely we’ll be able to solve many others.

by Deborah Meier

Turning around 5,000 schools—with stimulus money as the bribe? It's a question that is ound to lead us into a deadend. If the only goal is creating “employees” (vs citizens) of the future I may also be both short-sighted--just plain wrongheaded. If we see them as counter-objectives we may be forgetting that it is “the people” who create the future. It will take more than “school reform” to “turn around” the working lives of tomorrow’s adults. It may depend also on the kind of citizens they become—passively awaiting decisions made elsewhere or actively involved in decision-making. Yes, schools can and must be important players—but it begins with knowing what the game is we want to be players in. The ends we wish for limit the means we need to follow. The local nature of schooling is part of our Constitution for a reason—and I’m not at all convinced it doesn’t remain legitimate and critical to our future as a democratic nation.

Schools are composed of people—constituents. It’s their hearts and souls that need to be engaged in building new kind of interactions on the local level. Part of that task will require a new language for connecting the federal government and the states and the locals and finally the actual constituents of schools. As long as keep thinking that the COE can “do it” to “them” s long as they have the right recipe we have immediately undermined the relationships needed to do the job. It would be as foolhardy as imagining that the Feds can, through bribery, prescribe for all families the best way to raise their children—what message to impart to them, what rewards and punishments, and then how best to monitor their compliance. Because that’s what schooling is all about—raising kids. It takes adults and “villages” to do the task—above all if the goals is to produce children who can nourish democracy—our one and only secular “faith. It takes faith in ordinary people—parents, professional educators, other lay citizens and the children they share—to produce a generation of democrats. How to do that? It might mean bribing them to join together in a democratic dialogue—in every community—over their aspirations for schooling, not just schooling for their own individual child but for all their children. It takes making accessible the best ideas around, and the funds to initiate serious conversation, and then serious funding to launch new ideas. It takes remembering that democracy is always about both conserving and experimenting! Just “restoring” the early 20th century model—be it the factory or the “academy”—can’t work. Nor can the perfect curriculum. Nor more tests. Nor more “holding their feet to the fire”. Those kind of reforms lead to burnt and bloodied feet, not transformed hearts and minds.

For those who want the details about such an approach, I wrote up some of the ideas we came to in NYC 15 yeas ago about school change, based on our work at Julia Richman H.S. in NYC (see also Linda-Darling-Hammond, Jackie Ancess et al,” Reinventing High School, “NCRES, 2002). . It was a plan for “scaling up”—changing the odds—that began with what we knew close to the ground and “let it spread” by removing mandates, not adding to them. It included schools with more than one approach—progressive and conservative. I’ve written about it in “In Schools We Trust” (Beacon).. (It was alas abandoned when a new chancellor and state superintendent arrived). It was taken up again in Boston—known as Pilot Schools—and spread in pockets here and there. But it’s the kind of work that accepts the quirks that make us all different, and builds on them. It turns schools and thei communities into think-tanks for change—with the same kind of funding now spent on the think-tanks funded by private-interest players.

Fzar too much to be said on this subject!

Turning around low-performing schools was the hardest and most important work I did as the chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools. Our city had too many schools that were failing our children. They needed to be dramatically different. Change around the edges was not good enough. Chicago isn’t an isolated example. Schools throughout our country need to be much better for their students. These schools are in big cities, suburban towns, and rural areas. This is a problem that educators, community leaders, parents, students, and elected officials need solve together.

Last week, my department released proposed rules for the $3.5 billion available for turnarounds in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the fiscal 2009 budget. We’ve identified four strategies for the reform of low-performing schools.

Turnarounds: Close a school and re-open it with a new principal and at a new staff – half of them must be new to the school.

Re-starts: Close a school and re-start it under the management of a charter organization or another organization. All students would have the right to return to the restart schools.

Closures: Shut down a school and transfer its students to a high-performing school in the district.

Transformations: Create wholesale changes that include, at a minimum, replacing the school leader and developing ways to reward teachers and leaders based on their effectiveness; adopting comprehensive instructional programs with proven track records; extending learning time for students; and providing intensive support for the school.

Schools in Philadelphia, Denver, Los Angeles and Hamilton County, Tenn., are now all implementing these models. In Chicago, we found that the first model worked best. We removed the adults, kept the children in the school, and brought in new leaders and teachers for a new school year. We recruited some promising teachers and leaders from within the Chicago public schools and worked in partnership with nonprofit entrepreneurs to find others. We gave those new leaders six months to plan, hire new staffs, and run intensive workshops during the summer to get ready for the new school year. We saw strong results in all of our turnarounds and spectacular ones in others. Dodge Elementary School went from being one of the worst performing schools in Illinois to being the elementary school with the fastest rate of achievement growth in the state.

To truly fix out lowest-performing schools, local leaders need to make dramatic changes. Too often, educators and educational leaders propose changes that don’t disrupt the status quo. But the status quo isn’t good enough for students the bottom 5 percent of schools. They deserve schools that will prepare them for success in college and careers, and it’s our job to create those schools.

As a country, every year we order books, set bus schedules, and do hundreds of other activities to prepare for the new school year. We see these as necessities to running a school and school district. But educators need to make it part of their daily work to figure out how to fix the schools in the bottom 5 percent. I am challenging all of us to get into the business of turning around our chronically low performing schools.

We know what works in schools that are achieving. All we need now is the will and the way to make that happen. Funding is certainly a huge factor. A change in the way we do business and focus on student achievement without the “handcuffs” of archaic contract language and dysfunctional bureaucracies. We have to make changes in our education systems in order to reach the goal of achievement for all students. Here are just a few “ideas” of what works in our current system that should be the underpinnings for the 5,000 lowest performing schools.

Professional Staff Development

Days need to be built into a teacher’s work year which provides for staff development opportunities. Teachers are continually honing their craft and this should be done as part of their work year whenever possible.

Grade Level Collaboration

Teachers need time within their day and throughout the year to collaborate with their peers sharing ideas on how to reach students, pedagogical successes with new instructional materials, and other strategies for improving delivery of content and increasing student achievement.

Principal Leadership

When all is said and done, leadership does matter. Look at all of the research done on successful schools and you will find a dynamic Principal leading the way. He or she is the glue which brings all of the parts together – community builder, teacher supporter, student advocate, team builder, referee, counselor, pastor, - you name it, it’s all part of what a great Principal does each and every day.

District Office Support

Good schools depend upon a successful collaboration with the district office. The district office should live up to its role as a support system for each of its schools. Absent this assistance, what purpose does it serve? It should answer the question: In our daily work, “How can we add value to our schools?”

Year-Round Calendar with more days of instruction

When are we ever going to dispose of our agrarian calendar? In the farming days, this calendar made sense. So let’s move into the 21st century with a year-round calendar and increased days of instruction.

Enough said. These are my thoughts. Most have more funding and more time attached to them in some manner. The bottom line: All schools deserve the opportunity to achieve on behalf of its students. When will the will prevail?

I would refer readers to the practice guide on turnaround that was published by the Institute of Education Sciences. It is both practical and, most important, research-based. Here's a link.

http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/pdf/practiceguides/Turnaround_pg_04181.pdf

We've learned a good deal about improving elementary schools in the last decade. A focused leader, data driven instruction, and improved time on task can quickly boost lagging reading and math scores.

Secondary schools are a different matter. The only thing wrong with a failing high school is everything--course offering, instruction, student support, scale, structure, culture and community connections. Changing all these variables rapidly is a challenge.

The Department has laid out four improvement strategies. In order of severity, they include transformation, turnaround, restart, and closure. For low achievement, low attainment high schools, closure and replacement ('restart') is the only option for dramatic improvement. This strategy has been used successfully in New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and Philadelphia. It looks promising in LA.

Capacity is another consideration. There are dozens of charter management organizations with a track record of opening high performing secondary schools. There are few organizations that have a track record of turning around failing high schools (New Visions in NYC and MLA Partner Schools in LA are giving it a good run).

However, restarts require a good dose of political capital--more than most state or local superintendents are willing to spend. Perhaps the dangling billions of ARRA will bolster courage.

The U.S. Department of Education’s web site identifies four examples of successful school improvement strategies from Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles and Tennessee. Here is what catches my attention about each of the efforts identified. They were led by local educators and leaders who thought outside of the box to establish unique, creative, holistic approaches to creating excellent schools. These were not people who waited to see what piece-meal reform activity NCLB told them they had to implement this year. They developed new schools based on comprehensive models that included high standards, excellent teachers and staff, improved instruction, better use of data, and strong school culture. As the nation contemplates how to reauthorize NCLB, we should keep in mind that the most successful strategies are those that are developed locally and holistically, where the educators in a school feel ownership for the strategies that they are implementing, while they are simultaneously held accountable for academic outcomes.

Progress is being made and greater attention paid to several key reform areas-thanks in part to requirements in the stimulus-including placing a sharper focus on teacher effectiveness, developing more sophisticated data systems, and creating common academic standards. But to date, not nearly enough effort has gone into figuring out what to do with chronically low-performing schools.

As Education Week recently noted, the research base on effective turnarounds is thin. There aren't many examples of successful, sustained turnarounds in education, and as those who have tried it attest, this work is exceedingly difficult and not for the faint of heart. A key challenge is summoning the will to make tough, unpopular decisions and take significant action to turn around or close a failing school. Another primary challenge is the lack of sufficient leadership, expertise, and scalable solutions to turn around or replace thousands of failing schools-taking them not from dismal to mediocre, but dismal to great. That is why the school turnaround successes we've seen tend to be isolated-relatively few schools with dynamic leaders or promising models-and not systemic.

In many cases, closing down a school and starting fresh may be the best answer. In others, it may be a matter of reconstituting the staff or taking another significant, game-changing action to address the reason for the school's failure. But one thing is certain: the price of inaction-or ineffective action-is unacceptable. We as a nation cannot continue to consign millions of children to a fate of lost opportunity and second-class citizenry that leaves them unable to fully participate in their community and the workplace. We must do better.

That is why the Commission is holding a public hearing this Wednesday morning (September 2nd) at Howard University in Washington, DC to examine what we know about what works and what doesn't in school improvement, what levers exist for change, where we should go from here in helping NCLB more effectively address the problem, and what can be done now, particularly with the resources available through stimulus dollars. Members of the Commission, several of whom have hands-on experience with school improvement and turnarounds, will hear testimony and engage in in-depth dialogue with expert witnesses from around the country to inform the national debate as well as the Commission's upcoming report with recommendations for improving NCLB. Anyone can attend the hearing-just RSVP to nclb.commission@aspeninstitute.org(mailto:nclb.commission@aspeninstitute.org.)