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Florida: State Policy Brief on School Turnaround

Culture Shift

Florida: State Policy Brief on School Turnaround

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The State Policy Brief Series highlights state policies, regulations, practices, laws, or other tools intended to create the necessary conditions for school and/or district turnaround. Each brief includes a tool overview, its development process, its impact, and lessons learned that could assist other education agencies interested in enacting something similar.

This brief highlights a 2012 Florida state policy that requires the 100 elementary schools (called the Low-100) with the lowest reading scores to add an additional hour of literacy instruction to their regular school day. The statute requires that the additional time be used for literacy, and the schools and districts have considerable flexibility in how they implement the policy, including the timing, approach, and professional development of staff. The state recently expanded the program to the 300 lowest-performing (in reading) elementary schools, but this brief focuses on the design and impact of the initial policy.

State-Initiated School Turnaround Strategies: Leveraging the State Education Agency to Drive Meaningful Change

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Executive Summary Excerpt
Turning around low-performing schools remains a persistent challenge for education policymakers and practitioners. Because the factors that contribute to low performance are multifaceted, elective and sustainable solutions must address not only a wide array of systemic issues, but must also focus on specific practices within individual schools. To be successful and sustainable, these efforts must engage local districts and broader state education systems. In partnership with the University of Virginia (UVA), Darden/Curry Partnership for Leaders in Education (PLE) School Turnaround Specialist Program (STSP), eight states have implemented a strategy entailing the State Education Agencies (SEAs) assuming a leadership role to drive, manage, and support a targeted approach to turning around low-performing schools—a model which continues to evolve…

This monograph presents findings from an analysis, sponsored by the PLE, that examined eight states’ approaches to initiating a turnaround model and identified lessons learned to inform future practice for the PLE and for the field. While this analysis focuses on states that directly collaborated with the PLE, the emerging lessons have implications for any state interested in more proactively implementing and supporting targeted school turnaround efforts. As SEAs assume a more significant role in school reform under initiatives such as the federal Race to the Top, the School Improvement Grant program, and Elementary and Secondary Education Act Flexibility Waivers, findings from these states’ turnaround work can hone the efficacy of future efforts.

Four key themes emerged from interviews with state, regional, district, and school personnel actively engaged in school turnaround efforts in Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Utah:

  • State education agencies can align resources, structures, and support systems to compel action at the local level.
  • District ownership and school-level buy-in is critical to success.
  • Intermediary and external entities introduce a breadth and depth of expertise, which can be critical to building capacity.
  • Intentionally identifying qualified school leaders and holding them accountable for meeting high expectations is the fuel that drives school turnaround.

 

About the Author
Lauren Morando Rhim is president of LMR Consulting, an education policy, research, and evaluation consulting firm dedicated to leveraging research to inform practice in K–12 education. She consults with state departments of education, school districts, and nonprofits committed to creating high quality public schools for all students. A significant portion of her research, technical assistance, and writing focuses on characteristics of successful school turnarounds. She provides strategic program development, leads research inquiries, and conducts site visits for the University of Virginia’s School Turnaround Specialist Program. She is also a strategic partner and member of the leadership team of the Center on School Turnaround based at WestEd.

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.

School Quality Indicators Scan

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The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires states to reconsider their accountability systems for schools and districts. Many of the accountability requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act are continued under ESSA, including judging schools by such academic measures as students’ proficiency on annual assessments, graduation rates, and English learners’ progress toward attaining English proficiency. But ESSA also requires states to adopt at least one additional indicator of school quality or student success, and it gives states flexibility in choosing that indicator.

In meeting this new requirement, states may choose non-traditional indicators, adding to their accountability system one or more measures of student engagement, educator engagement, student access to and completion of advanced coursework, postsecondary readiness, school climate and safety, or any other indicator they choose. The selected measure(s) must meaningfully differentiate between and among schools, based on performance, and be valid, reliable, comparable, and available for schools statewide.

These alternate indicators attempt to measure the learning conditions, supports, and/or opportunities for students. Included are a number of possible indicators states may consider as they revise and reconstruct their state accountability system.

A First Look at State Responses to ESSA and Low-Performing Schools: Center on School Turnaround Survey of State Supports for School Turnaround

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The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of December 2015 identifies important new responsibilities and opportunities for state education agencies (SEAs) as their leaders work to turn around low-performing schools. This report reveals important information about these SEA leaders’ early reactions to ESSA as it applies to school improvement.

The report is part of an evaluation of the federal Center on School Turnaround (CST), conducted by Education Northwest, a nonprofit research, evaluation, and technical assistance organization. Education Northwest administered a survey between February 25 and March 18, 2016, to all of the CST’s SEA contacts. Ultimately, the sample included responses from at least one contact in all 50 states plus Puerto Rico. Almost two thirds of respondents worked in offices of school turnaround or improvement, about a fifth worked in Title I offices, almost a tenth worked in accountability, and the rest had roles in such offices as outreach or grants.

We limited the analysis to a single average response from each SEA, to provide a national view with each state represented equally, regardless of the number of participants from that state.

Promising Leadership Practices for Rapid School Improvement That Lasts

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Achieving rapid school improvement — most commonly referred to as “school turnaround” — is a complex undertaking. Equally challenging is the work of sustaining and even expanding on a school’s initial improvements so that the school can more fully become a vibrant learning organization.

There is much to learn from schools that demonstrate sustained improvement and those who lead them. But because there has not been a broad effort to identify and highlight such schools, their successes have heretofore yielded little practice-based guidance for other leaders who aspire to the same outcomes for the schools they lead. There is also much to learn from other fields, such as business, where research has focused on organizational turnaround.

This report, conceived to help fill a knowledge gap, presents promising practices for how to sustain the advances made in schools that have demonstrated rapid improvement. The promising practices presented here are derived from a comprehensive review of relevant literature, both within and beyond the field of education, and from the experience of five school principals who not only facilitated school turnaround but also catalyzed considerable ongoing growth in student achievement for at least four years following their school’s initial turnaround. The continued growth at these schools contrasts with the achievement plateaus or regressions that more commonly follow a school’s turnaround.

The five principals are often referred to herein as “leaders of sustained improvement” because, as that designation implies, they did not undertake this essential work alone. Their most important contribution may have been that they clearly ascertained the realms needing
attention and then prompted and supported positive contributions from others in order to collectively pursue improved outcomes for students.

At the school level, principals and leadership teams can use these promising practices to guide their teacher- and community-directed efforts and also to guide reflection on their own practices and their specific actions related to the practices. At the district level, principal supervisors can use them to design their support and coaching efforts. Superintendents or other district leaders can consider how to build the structures and interactions that are needed in order to enact these practices and related actions in district schools. For their part, state education agency (SEA) staff can consider these practices in thinking about how to encourage local education agencies to better support principals and schools.