Public Impact

Turnarounds

Learning from Tennessee: Growing High-Quality Charter Schools

In just five years, Tennessee went from 29 charter schools and six charter management organizations (CMOs) serving 5,500 kids to 98 schools and 24 CMOs serving 29,000 students—while emphasizing the need to replicate high-performing and high-potential charters in underserved communities. How did Tennessee do it, and what lessons can other education leaders learn from this state?

As we document in Public Impact’s new report for the Charter School Growth Fund, Growing a High-Quality Charter Sector: Lessons from Tennessee, the state benefitted from the convergence of favorable policy conditions, political leadership, public-private grants, and an existing supply of local high-quality charter operators. That created an environment for the Tennessee Charter School Incubator and the Charter School Growth Fund to carry out unique philanthropically supported strategies focused on identifying and developing promising new school leaders and expanding high-performing CMOs in Memphis and Nashville. Though the state has too little data yet to fully judge the impact on student achievement, early academic results are promising, and the newest charter schools are predominantly run by organizations with a record of success.

School Turnarounds: How Successful Principals Use Teacher Leadership

As the Opportunity Culture initiative was beginning, three principals signed on to lead low-performing, high-poverty schools in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Metropolitan Nashville districts. The odds were stacked against them and their students—one school, for example, has student transiency rates of 70 percent and higher. But within a few short years, their schools all showed very […]

Hiring Turnaround Leaders Under ESSA–New Training

What makes school turnaround leaders special? State and district leaders can understand how to identify, select, and retain great leaders using the research-based competencies specific to successful turnaround leaders, with a new, free three-part professional learning module.

Developed through a partnership between the Center on Great Teachers and Leaders, the Center on School Turnaround, Public Impact, and the University of Virginia Darden/Curry Partnership for Leaders in Education, these tools build on the strong cross-sector research base on competencies in the workplace and the school-turnaround-specific work of Public Impact, the University of Virginia, and others.

Under the new Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), states must still identify their lowest-performing schools, but how to turn them around will largely be left up to state and district leaders. Selecting the right leaders is critical to turnaround success, making training such as this module ever more important.

“Whether in the business world or in schools, turnarounds remain a challenging task even for inspired, inspiring leaders,” says Bryan C. Hassel, co-director of Public Impact. “But years of research have pointed the way toward hiring the school leaders most equipped to take on all the challenges of a persistently failing school. This module builds on that work to provide tools useful for many education leaders.”

Using detailed facilitator guides, PowerPoint presentations, and handouts, the three two-hour sessions cover:

Creating a Statewide Turnaround District: Lessons from Tennessee

When Louisiana and Tennessee wanted to focus on their lowest-performing schools, they created statewide turnaround districts, which pull individual schools under state control. As detailed in The Achievement School District: Lessons from Tennessee, written by Public Impact for New Schools for New Orleans, Tennessee’s Achievement School District (ASD), though modeled on Louisiana’s Recovery School District, has forged its own path and offers useful insights for other states.

After Hurricane Katrina, most New Orleans schools entered the Recovery School District en masse. But the ASD has taken a more staged approach in Memphis, which has the state’s highest concentration of low-performing schools. And while New Orleans uses an all-choice, charter school enrollment system, the ASD strategy preserves the traditional public school model of community-based, neighborhood schools.

The Achievement School District: Lessons from Tennessee looks at the ASD’s strategies and implementation in Memphis in six areas:

  1. Public school governance. Collaboration coupled with competition has resulted in positive student outcomes for ASD schools and district-run turnaround schools in the Memphis Innovation Zone (iZone). Shelby County Schools, which encompasses Memphis, has become an urban school district where nearly one-third of schools operate autonomously from the traditional district governance model.
  2. Schools and operators. The ASD focused on ensuring high-quality school options for all students, using neighborhood-based enrollment—betting that autonomous schools will drive school improvement faster than traditional district efforts and show that charters can succeed with zoned enrollment. The ASD uses a diverse portfolio of local and national charter school operators within neighborhood-based school feeder patterns.
  3. Educator talent. The ASD has worked to increase the retention of its most effective teachers and leaders in its Achievement Schools, which it runs directly, and to recruit local leaders and operators for its charter schools. But a growing market of charter, ASD, and iZone schools is taxing the talent supply. The ASD is partnering with Shelby County Schools and local funders to develop a citywide strategy for recruiting, training, and retaining effective teachers and leaders to ensure a long-term, sustainable talent pipeline.
  4. Funding education reform. Aligned support between local and national funders has enhanced the ASD’s ability to carry out its work. The ASD has benefitted from partnerships between the state education agency and philanthropy to recruit charter operators and develop a sustainable talent pipeline.
  5. Equitable access to quality schools. The ASD relies on its increasingly diverse portfolio of neighborhood schools to ensure that all students, especially those with special needs, have equal access to high-quality schools. The ASD uses its authorizing authority to hold schools accountable for meeting the needs of all students.
  6. Community engagement and participation. With a core belief that community engagement must start early and be the joint responsibility of all levels—district, operator, and school—for turnaround efforts to gain traction and credibility, the ASD worked early to build trust with families and community members. It works with operators to implement strategic community engagement, and has aligned its neighborhood school selection process with its strategy for eliciting community engagement in the school selection and matching process.

Charters in the ASD show initial signs of success, but at only three years into implementation, the ASD’s full impact remains to be seen.

Though they vary widely in policy and practice, experience in the Achievement School District, the Recovery School District, and other statewide turnaround districts points to the central importance of both a sufficient and sustainable talent pipeline and clear, honest communication with students, parents, and communities affected by the changes. Tennessee also shows that statewide districts can affect district-led turnaround efforts, as seen in how Shelby County Schools have made a strong effort to address its low-performing schools.

Leadership Keys: How to Get Great Principals, Use Teacher-Leaders

Lacking Leaders: The Challenges of Principal Recruitment, Selection, and Placement, which Public Impact’s Daniela Doyle and Gillian Locke wrote for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, put a needed focus on the importance of finding the best principal for each school. By getting an inside look at the hiring processes of five urban districts around the country, Doyle and Locke highlighted how far short those processes fall, even in districts they deem “ahead of the curve.”

In response, the authors offer six recommendations for district leaders seeking to improve their recruitment, selection, and placement of school principals:

  1. Make the job more appealing—and manageable. Give principals the power to lead, including authority over key staffing decisions, operations, and resources. And give them a cadre of teacher-leaders to share the load today—and fill the pipeline for tomorrow (more on that below).
  2. Pay great leaders what they’re worth. Compensation must be commensurate with the demands, responsibilities, and risks of the job. Principals should earn considerably more than other school staff with less responsibility and should be duly compensated for producing success.
  3. Take an active approach to recruitment. Develop criteria to identify promising candidates inside and outside of the district. Actively seek out those individuals. Woo them when necessary. Identify and prepare internal candidates systematically—and early—and eliminate barriers that discourage high-potential candidates.
  4. Evaluate candidates against the competencies and skills that research shows successful principals demonstrate. Then create rubrics for judging candidates against those competencies. Train raters to use the rubrics effectively.
  5. Design the placement process to match particular schools’ needs with particular candidates’ strengths. Assess schools’ priorities and leadership needs, and develop criteria to assess a candidate’s fit.
  6. Continually evaluate hiring efforts. Develop metrics to assess each stage of the process, particularly in relation to the school results that follow.

(See Education Week‘s look at the report here.)

Public Impact has long focused on the importance of school leadership, especially when districts attempt to turn around failing schools—check our list of resources below.

And we see real promise for bettering the conditions for principals—making the role more appealing and strengthening the much-discussed, truly important pipeline of future leaders—through our Opportunity Culture work. Opportunity Culture schools extend the reach of excellent teachers to more students, for more pay, within budget. One way to do this is by creating the multi-classroom leader (MCL) role—in which an excellent teacher continues to teach while leading a team of teachers, with plenty of school-day time for planning, collaboration, and providing daily on-the-job professional learning to the team.

MCLs can help principals tremendously. These teacher-leaders mean principals no longer bear sole responsibility for the leadership and evaluation of all teachers in the building. And while most MCLs take the job because they want to continue teaching, some will find the principal role appealing, creating a pipeline of future principals experienced as instructional leaders.

We all know how much school leaders matter. Let’s put some remedies into action—starting with these.

See more about Multi-Classroom Leaders:

Creating a Statewide Turnaround District: Early Lessons from 5 States

When states consider taking over chronically underperforming schools or districts by creating “extraordinary authority districts,” they have few examples to follow. Since Louisiana first established a statewide turnaround district in 2003, though, a small but increasing number of states have created “EADs,” providing lessons others can follow in planning their own turnaround approach.

A wide-ranging discussion at a 2013 convening of leaders of five early-implementing EADs–Connecticut, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Tennessee–yielded many lessons, as well as demonstrating the variety of options available to states thinking about an EAD. In “Extraordinary Authority Districts”: Design Considerations—Framework and Takeaways, Public Impact, in partnership with America Achieves, offers these EADs’ key takeaways. States just contemplating an EAD will find insights into policy areas to pursue; states implementing EADs now will find practical lessons on operations and strategies.

The brief considers a four-part framework of EAD design choices: political and legislative context; strategies for using takeover authority, timelines, and sustainability; structure of the EAD’s “central office” and within the state’s education authority; and the capacity needed within the EAD and from external partners to carry out the turnaround.

Read the full report for the many suggestions, including: