Turnarounds — the work of teaching

Fire the principal. Sack the teachers. Raise the bar. Bring in a charter. Close it down.

These “solutions” to chronically low-performing schools are all found in the guidelines for winning a piece of Race to the Top, the $4 billion pot of federal dollars intended to drive educational change and improvement across the country.

Consultants and management gurus are coming out of the woodwork, offering drastic transformation solutions like these and promising results-or-else, in exchange for a chunk of that federal change.

But many of their solutions are disheartening — not for their promises or their fervor, but for what they leave out of their prescriptions: teacher input.

Fixing the real problems

“The Japanese have a famous saying: ‘Fix the problem, not the blame,’’ writes Peter A. Paul, a former New York City teacher and co-author of “The Power of Teacher Networks” (Corwin Press, 2009).

“This is especially true for [schools in] disadvantaged, lower socioeconomic neighborhoods,” Paul says. “Rather than saddling such schools with ever-higher bars of standardized ‘expectations’ ... and subsequent penalties for failure to meet those expectations, we must focus on fixing the real problems: teacher isolationism, lack of meaningful support and intellectual opportunities, and an almost complete absence of teachers’ voice in education policy.”

Paul and lead author Ellen Meyers have led groups of teachers in New York and across the country in identifying difficult problems in their schools and proposing solutions. From how to change the way English language learners are tested to how to advise a young mother wanting to transfer to a GED program, these teachers struggle with ways to make their schools work for their students.

Their voices are real and their solutions seem insightful. But what emerges from these teachers’ accounts is that they are left out of school turnarounds in their own schools. The potential power of teachers to change the school is not harnessed.

“There was no history of teachers being invited to the table to express concerns, problems and offer ideas,” one New York City teacher wrote about her school, then in its third year of restructuring. “The restructuring that was done was planned and decided at the central office. ... [Yet] 70 percent of the teachers were at the school for more than five years. Teachers were very aware of the lack of progress on standardized tests. Among themselves they talked about why students were not improving,” she recounts. “Why are central education offices reluctant to involve teachers in the planning and restructuring of failing schools?”

They’ve got ideas

It’s not that involving teachers would be nice. It’s that the evidence suggests it works.

A new evaluation of a school turnaround program called Strategic Learning Initiatives (SLI) in Chicago showed schools can greatly improve outcomes for their students while keeping the current staff.

SLI, a nonprofit group, does not come into a school unless 80 percent of the faculty votes to adopt the model. Once it does, SLI describes a “process more than a program” where the school’s leadership becomes shared among the teachers and the principal, and the whole staff focuses tightly on improved instruction, formative assessments and continuous review of curriculum.

“We ask the teachers what they’d like and what would help them move ahead with their specific children,” SLI President John Simmons told Education Week in an interview that ran in its Jan. 6 issue. “They’ve got ideas and guess what, those ideas are exactly what a lot of people are talking about — differentiated instruction, professional learning communities, critical thinking, looking at student work. … So we say, ‘All right, where should we start?’ The power is always in their hands.”

Evidence that it works

Student results from Chicago’s 10 SLI schools are impressive. According to an evaluation by the Washington, D.C.-based American Institutes for Research, eight of the 10 schools improved student reading scores at greatly accelerated rates, clearly outpacing a group of matched, non-SLI schools.

But it’s not by just focusing on test-taking skills that SLI gets these results. Instead, coaches, who are experienced classroom teachers, work on issues in the school building and in classrooms. The school’s teachers and staff take the lead in discussing what works and what doesn’t and making necessary changes — both in their classrooms and schoolwide.

Because it doesn’t dismantle and restart the school, the SLI model is much less expensive, about 20 percent of the cost of more drastic school transformations.

“What we have discovered is that there is a huge reservoir of teachers and principals out there who are called ‘failing’ but in fact have great potential for improving and no one realized it. …Our expectations were too low of these people and these buildings,” Simmons told Ed Week.

This capacity-building approach to helping struggling schools has a solid history in New York as well as Chicago. The Chancellor’s District, jointly developed by the UFT and the Department of Education in the late 1990s, brought in resources and a similar coaching model — the UFT Teacher Centers — and succeeded in getting dozens of schools off the state’s “low-performing” lists. (The district was disbanded by Chancellor Klein when he first arrived.)

Recipe for success

Of course, there is no silver bullet for troubled schools. Many changes must take place along with improved teaching and learning.

But the formulas being touted in Washington — wholesale replacement of staff, obsessive attention to test results, merit pay or bringing in outside managers — have no track record. What worked in Chicago, according to those who are intimately familiar with that city’s schools, was encour­aging the existing staffs to grow and to take on responsibility for the school, and making sure everyone involved with the school was working together to solve problems.

Bypassing that work will mean inevitable failure.