Five percent or 5,000 of America’s one hundred thousand public schools, representing more than 2,500,000 students, are on track to fall into the most extreme federal designation for failure by 2009-10. Many more schools will be placed in less extreme categories; in some states, the percentage will significantly exceed 50%. But a good portion of these schools will be so designated because of lagging gains in one or more student subgroups, under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. These schools face challenges that may be solved by fairly modest forms of assistance. But the 1,100 schools already in Restructuring – the most extreme designation – as well as those likely soon to reach it represent a level of persistent failure that commands swift, dramatic intervention. 

Why Schools Fail
These schools fail because the challenges they face are substantial; because they themselves are dysfunctional; and because the system of which they are a part is not responsive to the needs of the high-poverty student populations they tend to serve. The school model our society provides to urban, high-poverty, highly diverse student populations facing 21st-century skill expectations is largely the same as that used throughout American public education, a model unchanged from its origins in the early 20th century. This highly challenged student demographic requires something significantly different – particularly at the high school level. 

Turnaround: A New Response
Standards, testing, and accountability enable us, for the first time, to identify with conviction our most chronically under-performing schools. Turnaround is the emerging response to an entirely new dynamic in public education: the threat of closure for underperformance. Dramatic change requires urgency and an atmosphere of crisis. The indefensibly poor performance records at these schools – compared to achievement outcomes at model schools serving serving similar student populations – should ignite exactly the public, policymaker, and professional outrage needed to justify dramatic action. If status-quo thinking continues to shield the dysfunctions that afflict these schools, there can be little hope for truly substantial reform throughout the system. Turnaround schools, in other words, represent both our greatest challenge – and an opportunity for significant, enduring change that we cannot afford to pass up. 

The Benchmark
A small but growing number of high-performing, highpoverty (HPHP) schools are demonstrating that different approaches can bring highly challenged student populations to high achievement. How do they do it? Extensive analysis of HPHP school practice and effective schools research revealed nine strategies that turn the daily turbulence and challenges of high-poverty settings into design factors that increase the effectiveness with which these schools promote learning and achievement. These strategies enable the schools to acknowledge and foster students’ Readiness to Learn, enhance and focus staff’s Readiness to Teach, and expand teachers’ and administrators’ Readiness to Act in dramatically different ways than more traditional schools.  

A “New-World” Approach
As understanding of these Readiness elements grows, it becomes clear that HPHP schools are not making the traditional model of education work better; they are reinventing what schools do. We call this “New- World” schooling, in contrast to the “Old-World” model – a linear, curriculum-driven “conveyor belt” that students and schools try (with little success in high-poverty settings) to keep up with. The New-World model evokes instead the sense of a medical team rallying to each student, backed by a whole system of skilled professionals, processes, and technologies organized and ready to analyze, diagnose, and serve the goal of learning. The converging arrows symbolizing this "New-World" model of education lie at the center of the Readiness Triangle. What happens in classrooms between teacher and student is the most critical moment in the delivery of the education service. But the quality of that moment depends entirely on the readiness of the system and the people who are part of it to teach, learn, and act effectively and in accordance with the mission.

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