Too little research to support school "turnarounds"

If only we would concentrate on [insert educational idea] we could turn public schools around. Public education critics suggest this from every area of the political and public spectrum.

Unlike any other thing in American life, public education inspires more critics, even with the irony that many of the critics owe their ability to formulate a proper criticism to having received a free public education.

The truth is that public education was never considered a failure until society changed what it was designed to do (prepare America's classes color designated stations in society).

Once the expectation that public schools would need to educate all children equally as if they were all capable of making it to the master class, success turned to failure.

The structure has been reeling ever since. No Child Left Behind only aggravated the problem by requiring States to spotlight the achievement of classes of students that previously were an afterthought.

So, we struggle to catch up quadrants of the nation populated by formerly disposable students. Generations of performance gaps between the races, predicated on previous notions that it was at once genetic, natural, and biblical for those gaps to exist, now should be closed with the swipe of an intellectual pen and the imperfect agency of educational science.

Suddenly, because we will it so, advantage and disadvantage now must achieve similar ends.

The failure to do what everyone thinks can be done (but few can point to a credible strategy of how to do) is the fertile ground for critics. They want change, now. I want change, now. However, change uninformed will only make tithe to the scandalous pile of obsolete interventions that have undermined the potential of children for decades.

Now, with the golden carrot of "stimulus" money dangling before us, education leaders lust for data and research that might inspire the improvements demanded by Federal and State governments, legislators, think tanks, parents, and community members.

The hope is that massive funding targeted at evidence-based interventions will stimulate a system-wide turnaround in public education. Excuse me if the faith-based premise appears comparable to a rain dance.

According to the Ed Week story below we might need to wait a while to get the solid "turnaround" research called for in this new push for forced innovation. Until then we might concern ourselves less with the "turnaround" concept, and think more about the few, proven levers that relate to achievement: equitable distribution of resources, quality instructional leadership, quality instruction, and aligned curriculum.

Research Doesn’t Offer Much Guidance on Turnarounds
By Debra Viadero

Ever since U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called for turning around 5,000 of the nation’s worst-performing schools, the phone has been ringing steadily at the University of Virginia’s School Turnaround Specialist Program. Most of the calls are from educators looking for expert advice on how to go about transforming failing schools into success stories.

But if research-tested prescriptions for success are what those callers want, neither the center’s experts nor any other scholar may have much to offer. That’s because rigorous research on how to engineer the kind of dramatic transformation that Mr. Duncan is advocating is a scarce commodity, according to many scholars.

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