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Find more Kappan articles in the What We Know and Don't Know About Improving Low-Performing Schools Recent studies of turnarounds of low-performing schools have focused on the factors that made their successes possible. Mr. Duke has realized that it would also be valuable to look at what made the schools decline in the first place and the factors that might hinder their transformation. EDUCATORS have long sought to understand the dynamics of turning around low-performing schools, but interest in the subject has clearly intensified in the past decade, largely because of state and federal accountability initiatives and the prospect of serious consequences for schools that continue to exhibit low academic achievement. A number of states have taken steps to provide direct assistance to low-performing schools. These steps range from dispatching assessment teams to identify sources of low performance to assigning veteran educators to work in tandem with the principals of low-performing schools. Indeed, Arizona recently launched a school turnaround program that calls for replacing principals of low-performing schools with highly experienced educational leaders. Virginia has probably done as much as any other state to implement interventions aimed at improving low-performing schools. Under the leadership of Gov. Mark Warner and state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jo Lynne DeMary, Virginia has created an academic review process to ascertain the causes of low performance and has established the Partnership for Achieving Successful Schools (PASS) program to provide ongoing instructional assistance to low-performing schools. Assessment tests, such as the Phonological Awareness and Literacy Screening (PALS) test and the Algebra Readiness Diagnostic Test, have been endorsed by the state as useful tools for identifying students who require special assistance. Most recently, the state has launched the Virginia School Turnaround Specialist Program, a joint venture between the Virginia Department of Education and the University of Virginia's Curry School of Education and Darden Graduate School of Business Administration. Begun in 2004, this program annually trains 10 "turnaround specialists" to take over schools that have not achieved state accreditation or have failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) as required by the No Child Left Behind Act. The turnaround specialists are experienced administrators who already have demonstrated their ability to promote school improvement and who receive a summer of advanced graduate training before they are sent to tackle a struggling school. If they succeed in turning around their schools, the specialists receive a credential and a bonus. A common feature of many of the efforts to turn around low-performing schools across the nation is their reliance on the experience of veteran educators. No one can dispute the value of firsthand experience when it comes to arresting the downward spiral of academic decline. Relying on experience alone, however, can be risky. Each veteran's experience is usually limited to a small number of school settings. Educators often claim that each school and community is characterized by idiosyncratic features that influence any effort to introduce change. Understanding the differences, as well as the similarities, across settings is the job of educational researchers. Combining experienced educators' in-depth knowledge of particular settings with the global perspective of educational researchers probably holds the greatest promise for effecting successful school turnarounds. That point brings me to my role as research director for the Darden-Curry Partnership for Leaders in Education, the umbrella organization that runs the Virginia School Turnaround Specialist Program. My colleagues and I are expected to identify what we know and what we don't know about the process of improving low-performing schools.1 As we combed the literature during the development of the training program for turnaround specialists, we came to appreciate how far the education profession has come in its awareness of key components of the school improvement process. Below, I focus first on a brief overview of this knowledge. But we also realized how much we still do not know, and in the remainder of this article I focus on some of the aspects of the school turnaround process for which more research is needed if we are to fulfill the promise of No Child Left Behind. Key Elements of School Turnarounds: What We Know Between 1999 and 2004, at least five important studies of school turnarounds were published: * Hope for Urban Education: A Study of Nine High-Performing, High-Poverty, Urban Elementary Schools, Charles A. Dana Center, University of Texas, 1999. * Dispelling the Myth: High-Poverty Schools Exceeding Expectations, Education Trust, 1999. * Genevieve Manset et al., Wisconsin's High-Performance/High-Poverty Schools, North Central Regional Laboratory, 2000. * Driven to Succeed: High-Performing, High-Poverty, Turnaround Middle Schools, Charles A. Dana Center and the STAR Center, University of Texas, 2002. * Glenn W. McGee, "Closing the Achievement Gap: Lessons from Illinois' Golden Spike High-Poverty High-Performing Schools," Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, vol. 9, no. 2, pp. 97-125, 2004. Each of these studies focused on schools serving large percentages of students from low-income families, and each school had managed to raise academic achievement to impressive levels. The methods used to study the schools ranged from mailed surveys to case studies involving extensive fieldwork. Each study produced a list of characteristics presumably associated in some way with the relative success of the schools being investigated. When we compared these lists, we identified a number of characteristics common to three or more of the studies. The items listed below were frequently associated with the process of improving low-performing schools. (The numbers in parentheses represent the number of studies, out of the five studies under review, that mentioned the item as a critical element in improving academic achievement.) * Assistance. Students experiencing problems with learning required content received prompt assistance. (4) * Collaboration. Teachers were expected to work together at various levels to plan, monitor student progress, and provide assistance to struggling students. (4) * Data-driven decision making. Data on student achievement were used on a regular basis to make decisions regarding resource allocation, student needs, teacher effectiveness, and other matters. (4) * Leadership. The actions of principals and teacher leaders set the tone for the school improvement process. (4) * Organizational structure. Aspects of school organization -- including roles, teams, and planning processes -- were adjusted to support efforts to raise student achievement. (4) * Staff development. Teachers received training on a continuing basis in order to support and sustain school improvement efforts. (4) * Alignment. Tests were aligned with curriculum content, and curriculum content was aligned with instruction. (3) * Assessment. Students were assessed on a regular basis to determine their progress in learning required content. (3) * High expectations. Teachers insisted that students were capable of doing high-quality academic work. (3) * Parent involvement. School personnel reached out to parents to keep them apprised of their children's progress and to enlist them in supporting school improvement efforts. (3) * Scheduling. Adjustments were made in the daily schedule in order to increase time for academic work, especially in the key areas of reading and mathematics. (3) Each of the five studies also identified some components of the school improvement process that were not reported in the other studies. Of course, it is possible that these unique components were simply overlooked and should be added to the list above. Still, it would be hard to argue that the 11 items that do appear in the list do not represent crucial elements of the school improvement process. If a low-performing school can be turned around without attending to alignment, assessment, assistance, and the other eight elements, it would be very surprising. So does the knowledge revealed in these recent studies constitute a sufficient basis for guaranteeing the success of school turnaround initiatives? If we have all 11 arrows in our quiver, are we assured of hitting the targets? Not necessarily. When members of the Darden-Curry Partnership for Leaders in Education set to work to design a curriculum for the preparation of school turnaround specialists, we uncovered some gaps in the knowledge base. While the 11 characteristics of successful school turnarounds are very important elements of any training program for specialists, the school turnaround process is sufficiently complex to warrant more than highly generalized prescriptions. Below, I discuss some of the aspects of low-performing schools and the school improvement process that require closer scrutiny. Gaps in the Knowledge Base on School Improvement Among the topics on which more research is needed, six stand out. They include the process of school decline, the nature of teamwork, the effectiveness of specific interventions, midcourse corrections, unanticipated consequences, and specific personnel issues. A brief discussion of each follows. Understanding school decline. We know far more about how schools improve than we know about how schools decline. Of what possible value is knowledge of the process of school decline? Most schools are not born low performers. Understanding how a school's academic achievement begins to slip can thus provide important insights into the adjustments needed to reverse the process. For example, we know it is misleading simply to attribute school decline to "changing demographics," which usually serves as a politically correct way of saying that a school has experienced an influx of poor, minority, and often non-English-speaking students. Many schools that serve poor, minority, and non-English-speaking students are doing quite well academically. These are the kinds of schools represented in the previously mentioned studies of successful turnarounds. So if "changing demographics" alone is not an adequate explanation for school decline, what other factors play a role? Is it teacher resistance to instructional adjustments, inappropriate resource allocation, parent reluctance to insist on help for their children, or something else that combines with changing demographics to undermine achievement? Knowing more about the factors that contribute to declining performance cannot help but provide a starting place for school turnaround efforts. In Confidence, a compendium of examples of organizational decline and ascent, Rosabeth Moss Kanter identifies nine "pathologies" of organizational decline: 1) communication decreases; 2) criticism and blame increase; 3) respect decreases; 4) isolation increases; 5) focus turns inward; 6) rifts widen and inequities grow; 7) initiative decreases; 8) aspirations diminish; 9) negativity spreads.2 Do these pathologies apply to schools as well as to the corporations and athletic teams that Kanter studied? Are the processes of decline and improvement symmetrical or asymmetrical? In other words, when schools improve, do they improve in the reverse order from the one by which they declined? If the first step in decline was the departure of a school's most talented teachers, for example, would the final step in school improvement be marked by the hiring of talented teachers? Or would that be the first step toward school turnaround? Examining teamwork. It is impossible to imagine school improvement without a substantial amount of collaboration involving teachers and other staff members. However, the fact remains that many low-performing schools are already characterized by teamwork and cooperation. Irving Janis, who coined the term groupthink, recognized the potential of teams to reinforce inadequate performance as well as to promote effectiveness.3 Educational researchers need to put high-performing and low-performing school teams under the microscope for extended periods of time. Do they function differently? Do teams in low-performing schools lack leadership? Do high-performing schools and low-performing schools have different kinds of teams? Or do the teams in high-performing schools simply operate differently? While some might argue that the real problem with teams in low-performing schools is the quality of their members, I wonder if this is true. I have seen examples in our Virginia School Turnaround Specialist Program in which the teachers who were on the teams when a school was doing poorly were still on the teams when the school raised its test scores. So what made the difference? Fifteen years ago I took a sabbatical to serve as director of staff development for a local school system. During this time, I observed team meetings in a number of schools.4 These meetings, referred to as "roundtables," were attended by teachers, specialists, and administrators and were designed to focus attention on students who were struggling academically. In some schools, nearly the entire 45 minutes of a roundtable was spent discussing the underlying reasons why particular students were struggling. Most of these reasons concerned problems at home and other problems over which the school exercised little or no control. Participants left these meetings feeling as if they had wasted their time. In other schools, however, student background information was shared before roundtables met. All 45 minutes of a meeting was then devoted to discussing how to make immediate instructional adjustments and how to provide more monitoring and support for individual students. Before these meetings concluded, individuals were assigned responsibility for implementing the agreed-upon interventions and reporting back on how they were working at the next roundtable. Participants attending these meetings felt strongly that the process was highly productive. Schools today are characterized by a variety of teams. There are grade-level teams, teams made up of teachers from different subject-matter areas who share the same group of students, vertical teams representing particular subject-matter areas, literacy teams that focus on interventions for students with reading problems, crisis intervention teams, diagnostic teams, teacher assistance teams in special education, school improvement teams, and leadership teams. Are certain teams more critical to the school turnaround process than others? Does the coordination of numerous teams itself become an organizational obstacle to improvement? Can gains in the achievement of individual students, groups of students, and entire programs be traced back to the work of particular teams? To answer these and other questions, it may be necessary to enlist the help of team members themselves. After all, they are onsite all the time. With appropriate training, staff members can monitor team activities and systematically collect data for subsequent analysis. This kind of inquiry, frequently called "action research," may be essential to unlocking the secrets of effective school-based teams. Assessing interventions. High-poverty schools typically offer a variety of interventions designed to help struggling students. There are supplementary reading and mathematics programs, extended learning time, student incentives, tutoring sessions, after-school homework centers, summer school programs, in-class grouping strategies, special counseling, mentors, and diagnostic testing. It is interesting to note, however, that these and other interventions are found in both low-performing schools and successful turnaround schools. The mere presence of interventions is obviously insufficient to ensure improved student achievement. But what is it that distinguishes effective from ineffective local interventions? Once again, the research does not offer a lot of practical advice on the subject. The closest we can get to useful data are evaluations of large-scale interventions such as Reading Recovery and comprehensive school reforms such as Success for All. These evaluations, however, tend to look at students in the aggregate. Schools are turned around one student at a time. What is needed is information regarding how individual students respond to locally developed interventions. In many low-achieving schools, students receive more than one intervention. Anyone who has had to take several medications simultaneously knows that they may interact in unexpected ways. Combinations of medications can interact in positive ways for some individuals and in unproductive ways for others. Instructional interventions have the same potential to affect different students in different ways. We need more research of the kind physicians refer to as "clinical." Unlike experimental research, where one treatment is isolated for study, clinical research often focuses on how individuals respond to various efforts to help them. Teachers are in a good position to conduct clinical studies of instructional interventions, but they are rarely trained or encouraged to do so. At best, they may share anecdotal information about what does and does not work for students. However, even this information could be of value if compiled and systematically reviewed. One possible deterrent to data gathering on individual students is the need to protect students' privacy rights, but surely ways can be found to collect data on the effectiveness of interventions without compromising these rights. A major step in the right direction would be for every school, as part of its commitment to data-driven decision making, to convene the faculty at the close of each school year and assess how low-performing students responded to the interventions provided for them. This information could then be cleansed of student names and made available to researchers looking at interventions across multiple sites, thereby creating a rich database and a source of practical advice for educators trying to turn around low-performing schools. Detecting midcourse corrections. Studies of school improvement often involve post-hoc surveys and interviews in which educators are asked to recall what the process of turning around low-performing schools was like. Memories being selective, what may be missed by such investigations are the subtle midcourse corrections that were made in order to respond to unanticipated problems and disappointments. Several students of organizational change have noted predictable pitfalls on the road to recovery. Kanter, for instance, contends that early successes constitute a threat to sustained improvement.5 People can feel such relief at the first signs of progress that they begin to ease up prematurely, thereby stalling the turnaround process. Michael Fullan warns of just the opposite problem. He has found that many improvement efforts encounter "implementation dips."6 In other words, things get worse before they get better. And an implementation dip can be so dispiriting that a recovery effort never recovers. If researchers track turnaround efforts from the get-go, they can provide "play-by-play" accounts that identify "false positives," implementation dips, and midcourse corrections. This information may not prevent problems from arising, but it can provide educators and their patrons with an understanding of what obstacles and detours to expect as they confront the challenges of school improvement. Those who undertake school improvement efforts need to know how others have responded to discouraging results, unexpected early successes, and unforeseen impediments. A related issue is the challenge of sustaining school turnarounds. As little as we know about the day-to-day process of effecting school recovery, we know even less about how educators sustain recovery. To use an analogy from space exploration, we know more about ignition and liftoff than we know about maintaining an orbit in order to keep from crashing back to Earth. Researchers should revisit turnaround schools several years after they were originally studied in order to determine whether improved levels of student achievement have been maintained. Better still, every turnaround school should designate staff members to keep running records of efforts to sustain success and the consequences of these efforts. If researchers had access to such records, they eventually might be able to predict the likely course of school improvement under particular circumstances. At present, we simply do not know whether the journey resembles a roller coaster ride, the long slow ascent of a high peak, or a trek consisting of slopes and plateaus. Identifying unanticipated consequences. Every education reform has the potential to incur unexpected costs as well as to produce desired benefits.7 Many studies of school improvement, however, focus exclusively on the intended goals of the improvement process and the extent to which they were achieved. As a consequence, relatively little is known about the unintended outcomes of the process. Unintended outcomes may be specific or general. A specific unintended outcome could be a regression effect in which the percentage of students with high standardized test scores drops as resources are shifted away from high-achieving students in order to provide extra assistance to low-achieving students. Few studies of the school turnaround process, however, contain detailed disaggregated data on student outcomes. A more general unintended consequence is the adverse impact of focusing too much attention in high-poverty schools on raising test scores. In The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, Jonathan Kozol warns that reforms based solely on improving scores on standardized tests risk turning low-income students into "examination soldiers" who are trained to recall facts rather than acquire and apply useful knowledge.8 In the long run, such a single-minded focus could work to the detriment of these young people, placing them at an even greater disadvantage in college or the job market. The only way to detect the unintended consequences of school improvement efforts is to conduct investigations that are not tied exclusively to such intended goals as making AYP or achieving state accreditation. Researchers need to open their aperture to take in all possible results of school turnarounds -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. If teachers are requiring students to do twice as much homework, does this reduce the time for parents and their children to enjoy one another's company? Are students becoming anxious and stressed because of the unrelenting pressure to do well on tests? Are teachers afraid to take time away from test preparation to build relationships with students? Unless we answer these and related questions, we will have only an incomplete picture of the school turnaround process. Pinpointing personnel problems. If teachers are a key to student achievement, they must also be a key to student failure. Yet relatively little is known about personnel issues in low-performing schools or how turnaround principals deal with them. Personnel matters are understandably delicate and subject to regulations regarding personal privacy, but it is impossible to grasp the full picture of the turnaround process without knowing about the staff. In Good to Great, Jim Collins asks several essential questions: Are the right people on the bus, and are they in the right seats?9 If not, what is being done about it? Case studies of school turnarounds often note in passing that principals had to reassign or remove some teachers.10 What is unclear, though, is how principals arrived at these decisions. How, for instance, does a principal determine that the reason for low student achievement is the instructor and not the instructional program or intervention strategy? At what point does a principal decide that efforts to rehabilitate an ineffective staff member can no longer be justified? Are there cases in which marginal teachers have experienced their own turnaround and become productive faculty members? If so, what did their improvement entail? Especially remarkable are school turnarounds in which the same teachers who were teaching during times of low student achievement are still teaching when achievement soars. We need to know more about how an entire staff becomes more effective. Do their beliefs about themselves and their students change first and eventually lead to improved teaching? Do they first become more skilled at teaching and then experience a shift in their beliefs? Were reassignments a key part of the process? Another personnel question concerns the specific factors that cause a group of teachers who have functioned for years as independent agents to become a highly collaborative body of professionals. The literature on school improvement tends to chalk up such dramatic reversals to inspired leadership, but leadership too often serves as a convenient catchall explanation for things that are not well understood. Why is it that research on school turnarounds rarely if ever mentions the role of power, threats, coercion, guilt, and in-your-face supervision? Narratives of school improvement often read like politically correct fairy tales in which hard work and commitment prevail. Is it possible that behind the scenes lurks a different story, one characterized by conflict, confrontation, and authoritarian measures? The Uphill Climb to Better Research Researching school improvement has always presented challenges, but recent years have witnessed a marked increase in the number of hurdles that must be jumped in order to gather high-quality information. First, funding for research has shrunk as foundations and government agencies focus more on the "D" than on the "R" of R & D. Second, the process of gaining approval for research from institutional review boards has become extremely difficult. It is ironic that university-based scholars are often not permitted to conduct inquiries that any newspaper's investigative reporter could pursue without constraint. Why newspaper reporters have a "right" to inquire about public schools while university researchers do not remains a mystery to me. The third problem is harder to label. Researchers, it seems, like to tell a good story. Naturally, people prefer reading about successes to reading about failures, and in the recent literature on school turnarounds, it is hard to locate studies of failed turnarounds. This could be the result of several factors. Perhaps officials in unsuccessful schools are reluctant to expose themselves to outside investigators. Or perhaps journals may prefer to publish research on successful school improvement projects. But whatever the reasons, we know relatively little about unsuccessful efforts to turn around low-performing schools. And until we know more about these endeavors, we can only guess at the reasons why some school turnaround efforts succeed while others fail. 1. Other members of the Darden-Curry research team are Pamela Tucker, Jennifer Higgins, Lesley Lanphear, Melissa Levy, and Michael Salmonowicz. 2. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Confidence (New York: Crown Business, 2004). 3. Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink (Boston: Houghton Muffin, 1972). 4. Daniel L. Duke, "How a Staff Development Plan Can Rescue At-Risk Students," Educational Leadership, December 1992, pp. 28-33. 5. Kanter, p. 180. 6. Michael Fullan, Leading in a Culture of Change (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001). 7. Daniel L. Duke, The Challenges of Educational Change (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2004), pp. 229-30. 8. Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (New York: Crown, 2005). 9. Jim Collins, Good to Great (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001). 10. Daniel L. Duke, "Keys to Successful School Turnarounds," unpublished manuscript, Darden-Curry Partnership for Leaders in Education, University of Virginia, 2005. DANIEL L. DUKE is a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Foundations, and Policy at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and research director for the Darden-Curry Partnership for Leaders in Education. He wishes to thank the Microsoft Corporation for its support in the development of this article, but the opinions expressed are his own.
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