Thompson: Turnarounds as Snake Oil This Week In Education

This Week In Education

Thompson: Turnarounds as Snake Oil

by john thompson

The Brookings Institute's Tom Loveless argues that "much of the rhetoric on turnarounds is pie in the sky." His study "suggests that people who say we know how to make failing schools into successful schools but merely lack the will to do so are selling snake oil ... Examples of large scale, system-wide turnarounds are nonexistent."
Loveless reports that "the statistics are eye-popping and, in a way depressing. School achievement appears astonishingly persistent. Nearly two thirds of low-performing schools in 1989 are still low performers two decades later." Although about 1/3rd of the schools he studied showed improvement, the chances of one of those low-performing schools becoming a high-performing school are "less than one out of seventy."
So what's the lesson from Loveless' findings? A little more caution -- but not inaction, either.
Nothing in Loveless' study needs to reflect badly upon serious turnaround specialists such as those at Mass Insight. In fact, Loveless echoes their findings when he identifies "the