Measuring the Performance of Turnaround Schools
Education Secretary Arne Duncan has announced an ambitious goal: To turn around the nation’s lowest-performing schools. The Learning First Alliance (LFA), which sponsors Public School Insights, applauds that goal. Today, the Alliance released a set of principles for tracking the progress of the nation’s school turnaround efforts. Principles for Measuring the Performance of Turnaround Schools outlines how education agencies and communities can determine whether those efforts are leading to both swift improvement and sustained change in persistently struggling schools.
This statement offers a framework for aligning turnaround efforts with a vision for giving every child access to an excellent public school. The proposed principles can help policymakers, educators and communities identify schools in need of intervention, reliably gauge the progress and staying power of turnaround efforts, and guide effective improvement strategies.
You can read the LFA press release here or read the entire statement here.
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The Long Turnaround
According to the numbers, Central Elementary School in Roundup, Montana, seems to fit the currently fashionable definition of a “turnaround” school. After many years of below-average test scores, the school has recently made double-digit gains in the number of its students meeting proficiency on the statewide assessment. In true turnaround fashion, that improvement appears to have happened in a very short period of time. As recently as the 2005–2006 school year, for example, Central’s math score was nearly 20 percentage points below the state average. In 2009 it was at the state average.
But ask current principal Vicki Begin about the school’s success and she’ll insist that it’s been anything but a quick turnaround. Begin, who is in her third year at Central, gives much of the credit not only to the school’s veteran teaching staff, which averages 23 years of experience, but also to her predecessor, Joe Ingalls, who guided the school from 1994–1995 to 2006–2007. Obviously, this is not a case of overnight success or of cleaning house and starting over. Read more...
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LFA is to be congratulated
LFA is to be congratulated for its perceptive analysis of what it really takes to measure the success of a school and those who work there. I suspect this clarity comes from the mix of stakeholder organizations that make up LFA (teachers, parents, admnistrators, boards, policymakers). I hope this helps us push forward a more thoughtful discussion at national and local levels of how we can know when our schools are being successful and how to sustain that success past grant or election cycles.
Thanks for the kind comment,
Thanks for the kind comment, Renee. We certainly hope that the mix of stakeholder groups coming together around a common cause helps us come to valuable insights.
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