Turn Around: You Might Like What You See

Turnaround models aim to radically alter the educational landscape of the worst-performing schools. While turnaround schools have received a great deal of attention, there has been little research into whether these schools work: Do they improve student performance?  If so, are the improvements sustained over time? Do the schools even serve the same students as before the “turnaround”?

In their recent report Turning Around Low-Performing Schools in Chicago, the Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR) examines five models for turnaround schools in Chicago: Reconstitution, School Closure and Restart, the School Turnaround Specialist Program (STSP), the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL), and the Office of School Improvement (OSI).

Each of these models employs a slightly different turnaround strategy. Some rely on changes in school staff, while others replace both staff and leadership, training principals to be “turnaround specialists.”  The School Closure and Restart model is perhaps the most dramatic: the school is closed for a year, during which time students are sent to other schools, and then is reopened as a charter school.  Enrollment changes from a residency-based system to an application and lottery-based system.

CCSR finds that elementary and middle school students in turnaround schools made major, sustained improvements. But the report emphasizes that these improvements should be viewed as the result of “a process, rather than an event.”  On average, elementary schools did not improve test scores in the first year, but four years later:

[T]he gap in test scores between reformed elementary/middle schools and the system average decreased by nearly half in reading and by almost two-thirds in mathematics.

However, high school students in turnaround schools failed to make improvements: they performed no differently than similar students who were not in turnaround high schools. (Notably, because of testing inconsistencies, on-track rates and absentee rates were used instead of test scores to gauge high school achievement.)

The study draws two other important conclusions: 1) except for the School Closure and Restart model, schools serve the same population of students pre- and post-reform; and 2) in all models, the teachers post-reform were more likely to be younger, to be white, to be less experienced, and “to have provisional certification” compared to the teachers pre-intervention.

The report does not examine student progress after the first four years post-reform, nor does it investigate why high school turnaround schools do not see the gains that elementary and middle school turnaround schools do, providing fodder for future research.