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School Boards Driving Turnaround: New Haven Public Schools

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School Boards Driving Turnaround: New Haven Public Schools

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Many schools are not preparing students for success in the 21st century. Far too many students are dropping out, and many of those who do graduate lack the key skills to succeed in college or the advanced economy. Successfully initiating, implementing, and sustaining the transformation of the lowest-performing public schools is a pressing challenge for policy leaders and practitioners nationwide. Public schools governed by elected local school boards are one of the cornerstones of our nation’s democracy, and local school boards sit at the junction of policy and effective implementation of targeted turnaround efforts. Yet ongoing efforts to improve public education focus primarily on the role of teachers, principals, and superintendents and, to a lesser extent, on state and federal policymakers. Missing from the work is a substantive role for local school boards.

In line with the Center on School Turnaround’s charge to support states’ efforts, we sought to highlight districts engaged in focused turnaround efforts where their respective boards played a key role in catalyzing, shaping, and supporting targeted improvement efforts. Our goal in developing these case studies was to present information-rich cases that can inform state and district efforts to optimize the board’s role in school turnaround. These case studies may be used independently, but they are designed to be part of a year-long training program for local school boards.

School Boards Driving Turnaround: Wichita Public Schools

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Many schools are not preparing students for success in the 21st century. Far too many students are dropping out, and many of those who do graduate lack the key skills to succeed in college or the advanced economy. Successfully initiating, implementing, and sustaining the transformation of the lowest-performing public schools is a pressing challenge for policy leaders and practitioners nationwide. Public schools governed by elected local school boards are one of the cornerstones of our nation’s democracy, and local school boards sit at the junction of policy and effective implementation of targeted turnaround efforts. Yet ongoing efforts to improve public education focus primarily on the role of teachers, principals, and superintendents and, to a lesser extent, on state and federal policymakers. Missing from the work is a substantive role for local school boards.

In line with the Center on School Turnaround’s charge to support states’ efforts, we sought to highlight districts engaged in focused turnaround efforts where their respective boards played a key role in catalyzing, shaping, and supporting targeted improvement efforts. Our goal in developing these case studies was to present information-rich cases that can inform state and district efforts to optimize the board’s role in school turnaround. These case studies may be used independently, but they are designed to be part of a year-long training program for local school boards.

Snapshots of School Turnaround: How Three Schools Used School Improvement Grants to Improve Student Learning Outcomes

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The CST developed profiles of three schools that received Cohort 1 SIG funding in the 2009–10 school year. Each of these schools increased student outcomes by the end of the third year of its SIG funding. This document highlights findings from these successful turnaround cases to provide examples to state, district, and school-level educators working to strengthen struggling schools.

In addition to highlighting turnaround strategies, this report documents the extremely important role that the district and state played in each turnaround. Although no silver bullet strategy exists, we found many similarities among the schools in terms of district and state support. For example, all three states helped develop each school’s initial SIG turnaround plan and provided effective monitoring throughout the grant period.

Special Education in the Turnaround Context: Green Dot Public Schools in Los Angeles

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Responding to concerns about the poor academic results in Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), in 1999 Steve Barr founded Green Dot Public Schools. The charter management organization (CMO) started small, initially opening a single autonomous charter high school. Then, between 2000 and 2008, Green Dot opened an additional nine schools, many of them serving some of the city’s most challenged neighborhoods (Green Dot Public Schools, n.d.a).

This exploratory Green Dot mini-case illustrates strategies that one charter management organization (CMO) implemented, in the course of its broader school turnaround efforts at individual schools, to improve special education and related services for students with disabilities. Green Dot and its school-specific efforts highlighted in this brief were chosen based on the following criteria:

The organization had embarked on an explicit turnaround effort and was able to show evidence of positive growth for all students.

The school in question enrolled a significant population (i.e., 15 percent or more) of students with disabilities.
The organization’s staff implemented an intentional plan to examine and improve special education and related services for students with disabilities.

Special Education in the Turnaround Context: UP Education Network Schools in Massachusetts

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UP Education Network (UP) is a school management organization that has been leading school turnaround efforts in Massachusetts since 2010. Its approach to improving services for students with disabilities in two local districts — Lawrence Public Schools (LPS) and Boston Public Schools (BPS) — demonstrates how intentional efforts to improve special education can contribute to broader school turnaround initiatives. This brief introduces the state of Massachusetts’s overall framework for school turnaround and details UP’s special education strategy as it has been applied in two schools that were restarted under the framework.

These exploratory UP mini-cases illustrate strategies that one charter school management organization has implemented, in the course of its broader school turnaround efforts at individual schools, to improve special education and related services for students with disabilities. UP and its school-specific efforts highlighted in this brief were chosen as the subject of these mini-cases on the basis of the following criteria:

  • The organization had embarked on an explicit turnaround effort and was able to show evidence of positive growth for all students;
  • The school enrolled a significant population (i.e., 15 percent or more) of students with disabilities; and
  • The organization’s staff had implemented an intentional plan to examine and improve special education and related services for students with disabilities.

The authors sought nominations from key state-level stakeholders engaged in school turnaround efforts across the country. After identifying a sample of schools that met their criteria, the authors collected additional data from public sources (e.g., state and district websites, newspapers), sought assistance from a school liaison to conduct the exploratory mini-cases, and conducted telephone interviews with key stakeholders leading and implementing the turnaround efforts.

The Missing Link: How States Work with Districts to Support School Turnaround

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Over the last several years federal initiatives have called on states to improve the nation’s lowest performing schools. States’ efforts to turn around these low-performing schools have met with mixed success. Districts may be the missing link between federal and state desires to improve schools and actual, demonstrable changes that improve learning for students. This descriptive, mixed-methods analysis uses survey data from state-level turnaround leaders in all 50 states and interviews with eight intentionally selected state leaders to launch a discussion about how states support districts in school-turnaround efforts.

The CST leadership and evaluators wanted to know more about how SEAs were currently supporting districts in improving their capacity to assist with school turnaround efforts and how that support could be improved. We suspected that systematic district support might be the missing link between federal and state desires to improve schools and actual, demonstrable changes that improve learning outcomes for students. Therefore, this analysis posed the following questions:

  • How do states support districts in turning around low-performing schools?
  • How, if at all, do states work differently with rural versus urban districts on school turnaround, and is this differentiation important?
  • How have federal policies influenced the schools and districts with which states work on school turnaround?

While some of the logistics for school turnaround efforts will be changing in various ways under ESSA, many of the details, insights, and strategies provided by SEAs through these surveys and interviews are still relevant to helping SEAs think about how to provide high-quality support to districts on school turnaround.