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Shocking news! You can turn around a struggling school without firing all or even most staff. You can even keep the principal. All you need is a little--or a lot of--help from your friends.

This is one of the big lessons I draw from a new study (PDF) of work by Strategic Learning Initiatives (SLI) to turn around 10 troubled schools in Chicago. SLI worked with existing school principals and teachers to improve instruction, and student performance gains accelerated by a factor of six. And SLI did this work without resorting to the slash-and-burn turnaround techniques that are all the vogue these days.

Here's an excerpt from Education Week's report on the study:

"The results that SLI has achieved, and that [the American Institutes for Research] has validated, are very impressive and suggest that well before decisions are made to reconstitute schools under the mandates of [the federal No Child Left Behind Act], school districts would be wise to consider far less drastic, but clearly powerful, interventions such as the Focused Instruction Process," write AIR analysts Steven Leinwand and Sarah Edwards in their July evaluation.

The U.S. Department of Education's four models for turning around low-achieving schools using federal stimulus money all require the principal to be fired; one calls for the school to be closed. But [SRI CEO John] Simmons argues that it's less expensive, and often more effective, to invest in the people already working in the schools. With the right tools, he says, school staffers can produce different results....

"That is the heart of our story--the application of research to the work of improving schools. High-performance schools aren't just born, they are trained and coached."

This story flies in the face of many current policy trends. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that great teachers are born, not bred. Why else spend all our time on figuring out how to fire the bad ones, hire the good ones, and pay the really good ones?

But SLI focuses on school capacity by creating a better working environment and improving instruction. That approach, which seems like a no-brainer, gets precious little attention these days.

I guess I understand the thinking that motivates the slash-and-burn camp. When heads roll, at least something has changed. Without a big shakeup, schools may embrace change in name only. Let's face it, the slash and burners have a point.

That's why the SLI story is interesting. Their transformation model is substantive. It gets people to change their practice. It helps teachers, principals and communities become the primary agents of change. Most important, it focuses on what actually happens in the classroom. And it does all this without the big disruptions that can wreak havoc in poor neighborhoods.

So if we want the kinder, gentler turnaround model, we had better be prepared to promote a specific and substantive vision of change. If your looking for ideas, follow the SLI story.

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