When school turnarounds backfire: North Carolina’s effort offers a cautionary tale
A few years ago, North Carolina school officials looked at a group of its struggling schools and decided: we need to help.
State officials designed a turnaround strategy for those 75 schools, which were largely rural and served mostly low-income students of color. They dispatched education department staffers to analyze what was going wrong and make a plan, and then sent coaches to work with teachers and principals to improve instruction.
It’s an approach that would seem innocuous at worst and genuinely helpful at best.
But the results look quite different. The program actually caused test scores to fall modestly and teacher turnover to rise sharply at those schools, according to new research.
To Gary Henry of Vanderbilt, one of the researchers, it underscores that intervening in schools can backfire, and it’s not always obvious what schools need to improve.
“‘I always thought that it was better to do something than to do nothing,’” Henry said a North Carolina policymaker recently told him. “But it appears from this,” Henry said, “it actually sometimes could be worse to do something.”
The research adds to the current state of confusion about how best to improve struggling schools at a moment where the strategies states are using are in flux. Under the Obama administration’s federal turnaround program, states’ lowest-performing schools were required to fire the principal, and in some cases half the CONTINUE READING: When school turnarounds backfire: North Carolina’s effort offers a cautionary tale