The research on turnaround of failing schools reveals some scattered, individual successes, but very little enduring progress at scale. Most schools in Restructuring (the federal designation for chronic under-performance) are like organisms that have built immunities, over years of attempted intervention, to the “medicine” of incremental reform. Low-expectation culture, reformfatigued faculty, high-percentage staff turnover, inadequate leadership, and insufficient authority for fundamental change all contribute to a general lack of success, nationally, in turning failing schools around and the near-total lack of success in conducting successful turnaround at scale.

Turnaround vs. “School Improvement”
Most of what’s applied to under-performing schools today represents an incremental-change effort or an incomplete attempt at wholesale change. “Light-touch” efforts that redirect curriculum or provide leadership coaching may help some average-performing schools improve, but they are clearly not sufficient to produce successful turnaround of chronically poor-performing schools. This is not surprising, given that high-performing, high-poverty (HPHP) schools have evolved such fundamentally different strategies to achieve success, and that turnaround initiatives need additionally to break through existing inertia. Turnaround, as we are defining it here, is different from school improvement because it focuses on the most consistently underperforming schools and involves dramatic, transformative change. Change that, in fact, is propelled by imperative: the school must improve or it will be redefined or closed.

The Inadequate Response to Date
Our collective theory of change has been timid, compared to the nature and magnitude of the need. Most reform efforts focus on program change and limit themselves to providing help. Some also allow for changing people. A very few also focus on changing conditions and incentives, especially the degree of leadership authority over staff, time, and money. Analysis of school intervention efforts to date confirms that they are generally marked by: Inadequate design: lack of ambition, comprehensiveness, integration, and networking support Inadequate capacity: fragmented training initiatives, instead of an all-encompassing people strategy and strong, integrated partnerships that support the mission Inadequate incentive change: driven more by compliance than buy-in Inadequate political will: episodic and sometimes confusing policy design; under-funding; and inconsistent political support Focusing on program reform is safe. It produces little of the controversy that the more systemic reforms (human resource management, governance, budget control) can spark. NCLB, despite its intended objectives, has effectively endorsed and supported risk-averse turnaround strategies through its open-ended fifth option for schools entering Restructuring. The net result: little track record nationally – and that mostly at the district level, not the state – in comprehensive, system-focused, conditionchanging turnaround.

What Success Requires: A “Zone” for Effective Turnaround
States and districts can engineer more effective turnaround at scale by creating space that supports outsidethe- system approaches, focused inside the system. The high-performing, high-poverty schools we studied tend to reflect characteristics of highly entrepreneurial organizations. That makes sense. These schools are succeeding either by working outside of traditional public education structures (charters); or by working around those structures, internally (in-district charterlikes); or by operating exceptionally well against the system – with emphasis on exceptionally. Lessons from these schools indicate a need for the following elements in any school turnaround effort – all of which reflect characteristics that are not norms, broadly speaking, of traditional inside-the-system public schooling: Clearly defined authority to act based on what’s best for children and learning – i.e., flexibility and control over staffing, scheduling, budget, and curriculum Relentless focus on hiring and staff development as part of an overall “people strategy” to ensure the best possible teaching force Highly capable, distributed school leadership – i.e., not simply the principal, but an effective leadership team Additional time in the school day and across the school year Performance-based behavioral expectations for all stakeholders including teachers, students, and (often) parents Integrated, research-based programs and related social services that are specifically designed, personalized, and adjusted to address students’ academic and related psycho-social needs A handful of major school districts – Chicago, Miami-Dade, New York City, Philadelphia – are experimenting with turnaround zones in an effort to establish protected space for these kinds of approaches. The opportunity for states is to create this kind of protected space for turnarounds on behalf of all school districts. 

For the complete analysis, conclusions and framework from our turnaround research, click here for downloadable versions of our reports.