Low-performing Schools Research Articles

Changing roles in sustaining successful charter school leadership in high poverty schools: Voices from the field

ABSTRACTEffective educational leadership is essential for the success of schools and ultimately student achievement. The impact of school leadership may be even more pronounced in charter schools. Due to current and unprecedented growth, unique design, and complexities of political, financial, and governance issues they face, there is a need for more highly qualified charter school leaders and perhaps even “differently” prepared leaders. In this qualitative study, the authors documented the characteristics and skills of two successful, sustained charter school leaders who retrospectively described their evolved and evolving roles over twenty five years. Each transformed high-poverty, low-performing schools with at-risk populations and led with vision, passion, and a relentless desire to positively influence their organizations and ultimately improve student success in their communities. Although many of their skills and characteristics fall within existing theories, such as situational leadership, transformational leadership, and distributive leadership, they embodied a level of dedication and commitment to the original communities in which they founded charters lasting over a quarter of a century. The findings suggest that founding a charter school and seeing it through to success over time may more closely resemble missionary work than traditional school leadership.

Lessons in charter school accountability: evidence from California

ABSTRACTRecent advocacy and legislation across states calls for stricter accountability measures and closure of low-performing charter schools. As charter schools try to meet the multiple accountability standards they face from federal, state, local authorities, and their own associations, it is important to understand how these numerous frameworks intersect. Important lessons may be gleaned from previous accountability efforts as states redesign accountability under the Every Student Succeeds Act. This article analyzes the numerous frameworks faced by California charter school, home to nearly 20% of the nations charter school tpdel students, during the No Child Left Behind era. These frameworks use measures of test score levels, test score growth, and relative performance to determine which charter schools should be closed. Our analysis of how charter schools measure up provides some cautions about using test-based accountability metrics in high-stakes decisions. Notably, we find greater variation in test score performance for charter schools than traditional public schools, greater instability in test scores for small schools compared to large schools, and that many measures disproportionately identify schools serving large concentrations of socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Further, we find substantial overlap between the multiple frameworks, suggesting advocacy organizations’ efforts to improve accountability may be better focused on encouraging clarity and enforcement of existing accountability mechanisms rather than developing new frameworks.

Do students benefit from longer school days? Regression discontinuity evidence from Florida's additional hour of literacy instruction

Instructional time is a fundamental educational input, yet we have little causal evidence about the effect of longer school days on student achievement. This paper uses a sharp regression discontinuity design to estimate the effects of lengthening the school day for low-performing schools in Florida by exploiting an administrative cutoff for eligibility. Our results indicate significant positive effects of additional literacy instruction on student reading achievement. In particular, we find effects of 0.05 standard deviations of improvement in reading test scores for program assignment in the first year, though long-run effects are difficult to assess.

The relationship between emotional intelligence of school principals in managing change and teacher attitudes towards change

The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between principal change leadership emotional intelligence (PCLEI) and teacher attitudes towards change (TATC) in Malaysian High-Performing Secondary School (HPSS), Mediocre-Performing Secondary School (MPSS) and Low-Performing Secondary School (LPSS). A total of 1,195 teachers completed the survey. The findings revealed that (a) there was a positive correlation between PCLEI and TATC across HPSS, MPSS and LPSS; (b) the relationship between PCLEI and TATC were strong in HPSS and MPSS and moderate in LPSS; and (c) there were marked differences in the ability of school principals exercising their PCLEI on TATC across HPSS, MPSS and LPSS. The interplay of school principals, teachers and school culture contributed to the above phenomenon. Attention should be given to the emotional dimension of educational leadership as rational models of leadership simply do not reflect the contemporary educational landscape, and is inadequate to help school principals handle complicated problems in today’s school environment of high-level stress due to multiple and changing demands. School leadership skills have to include emotional management as leadership is about emotional engagement and involvement. Change can only be realised and sustained if school principals emotionally and intellectually engaged themselves in the leadership terrain.

How Does School Accountability Affect Teachers? Evidence from New York City

Does holding schools accountable for student performance cause good teachers to leave low-performing schools? Using data from New York City, which assigns accountability grades to schools based on student achievement, I perform a regression discontinuity analysis and find evidence of the opposite effect. At the bottom end of the school grade distribution, I find that a lower accountability grade decreases teacher turnover and increases joining teachers’ quality. A likely channel is that accountability pressures induce increases in principal effort at lower-graded schools, especially among high-quality principals, and teachers value these changes. In contrast, at the top end of the school grade distribution, where accountability pressures are lower, low accountability grades may negatively impact joining teachers’ quality.

Perceived collective teacher efficacy in low performing schools

The challenge of low performing schools continues to rear its ugly head in many countries, including South Africa. The responses to low performance differ from country to country, but none of these have included the enhancement of collective teacher efficacy in their repertoire. Research shows that collective teacher efficacy is positively related to improved academic performance of learners. Schools with a higher sense of collective efficacy outperform schools with a lower sense of collective efficacy. Schools with high efficacy are characterised by strong work ethic, and teachers who persist in the face of difficulty. Moreover, teachers in these schools are more persistent in their efforts, plan more, and view failure as a temporary set-back that does not discourage them. Therefore, if principals and their management teams could find a way to enhance collective teacher efficacy, the challenge of low-performing schools may be overcome. In view of this, quantitative research was conducted with the aim of determining the strength of collective teacher efficacy in low performing schools. Ten randomly selected schools in the Kenneth Kaunda Education District were involved in the research and in each selected school all the teachers were involved (N = 217). Data was collected using a questionnaire (The Collective Teacher Efficacy Scale: short version). The questionnaires were delivered and collected in schools by the researchers. Data was analysed using descriptive statistics, frequencies, percentages and mean scores. The results show that collective teacher efficacy in these schools is medium to high pertaining to group competence, but lower in task analysis. Keywords : collective teacher efficacy; low-performing school; management; principal; school; teacher efficacy

Exploring Traits of High-Performing, High-Poverty Schools

Over the past decade, there has been a significant increase in pressure placed on schools across the nation due to high-stakes accountability policies (Klar, 2014). It comes as no surprise that low performing schools feel constant pressure to raise the measured academic performance of all students. Rarely, do low-performing schools who have overcome challenging circumstances in order to increase academic achievement, get spotlighted. Educators need to identify the common factors attributed to increased student achievement. This can be achieved by examining the lessons and examples of high-performing schools so that all schools can succeed regardless of circumstances.

“My Progress Comes From the Kids”: Portraits of Four Teachers in an Urban Turnaround School

This article uses elements of narrative and portraiture to acknowledge the voices of four teachers who participated in a 3-year effort to turn around an urban elementary school. Turnaround is a sanctioned reform effort intended to produce rapid, dramatic improvement in student academic achievement in a low-performing school. We present the teacher portraits as descriptive testimony to the individuals’ work under turnaround conditions. We conclude by offering some educational improvement solutions tailored to address specific issues reflected in our participants’ portraits.

Backtalk

In its guidelines for turning around low-performing schools, the Every Student Succeeds Act requires states to choose interventions that have already been shown to be effective. However, other sections of the law allow investments in Tier 4 strategies: programs and practices that are informed by research but which haven’t yet been fully developed and evaluated. In short, state leaders don’t have to pick a school improvement strategy off the shelf — ESSA gives them a valuable opportunity to design, implement, and refine their own programs and practices.

Making Waves in Riverside: A Superintendent/Principal Partnership for Dramatic School Turnaround

This case was written for use in educational leadership programs preparing superintendents, central office leaders, and school principals. This case requires students to draw from knowledge of successful school turnaround, effective school leadership, and system-wide reform strategies to consider how a first year superintendent and a newly hired principal implement turnaround strategies in a persistently low-performing school amid increasing pressure and scrutiny from the surrounding business and civic community. The case begins with the history and context of the community and school district and then explores the significant events and challenges during the first year of implementation.

The Every Student Succeeds Act and Multicultural Education: A Critical Race Theory Analysis

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is now the educational law of the land. It replaced and revised what was known as No Child Left Behind (NCLB). ESSA represents a movement from more federal oversight to more state and local control. Although this transitional time period is one of great potential and excitement, educators and policy makers might also want to remain cautious. This next educational era of ESSA is still plagued by the problems of the past era. Teachers and administrators are still struggling to turn around low-performing schools in many U.S. urban areas; many urban educational issues, like high-dropout rates, gang influence, and low student engagement, are still inextricably linked to the socioeconomic problems that exist in local communities. This analysis first seeks to explain the purpose of ESSA. It then outlines the current plight of many students of color in the United States. Next, critical race theory is used to contextualize and categorize persistent problems that face the implementation of ESSA for these students of color. Finally, the author proposes ways to address the stated problems for school leaders and policy makers.

Citizen Satisfaction and the Kaleidoscope of Government Performance: How Multiple Stakeholders See Government Performance

Performance assessment is a central issue for modern governments; however, little attention has been paid to the similarities and differences among various performance indicators. This study investigates how different performance assessments relate to each other by incorporating multiple stakeholders’ perspectives on performance at the individual level. Combining three different surveys and archival data on secondary education, we analyze how academic performance indicators are associated with service users’ (parents’ and students’) and service providers’ (teachers’) judgments of school quality. Our findings suggest that parents, students, and teachers provide similar assessments of school performance, and these assessments reflect the actual quality of the schools. Their evaluations are more closely aligned to archival performance indicators in high-performing schools than low-performing schools. In addition to the convergent validity of the various performance measures, we also find indirect evidence that the perceptual measures have discriminant validity relative to archival measures. The consistency of performance indicators in a centralized regime (South Korea) also contributes to the generalizability of existing theory.

The Relative Impact of Aligning Tier 2 Intervention Materials with Classroom Core Reading Materials in Grades K–2

AbstractThis randomized controlled trial in 55 low-performing schools across Florida compared 2 early literacy interventions—1 using stand-alone materials and 1 using materials embedded in the exis...

Planning for school turnaround in the United States: an analysis of the quality of principal-developed quick wins

ABSTRACTResearch suggests that high-quality school improvement planning reflective of the school’s needs and objectives is central to a principal’s success in leading a school. Some American scholars contend that successfully planned and executed “quick wins” are critically important to launching high-level organizational change processes necessary to turn around low-performing schools. Yet, lack of research suggests that the concept of quick wins may be built more on assumptions than evidence. In this study, we evaluate formal quick wins as planned by school principals participating in a turnaround leadership program in the United States. Our results suggest that principals struggle to develop high-quality quick wins despite their relative simplicity as an improvement planning starting point, especially in comparison with the development of traditional annual improvement or development plans. Finally, we consider the implications of these results in relation to traditional school improvement planning, especially in response to low-performing school contexts.

Miles from Home: Transforming the Poorest, Most Expansive School Districts in New Mexico

What specific actions can a school district take to spur dramatic improvement? This case details a partnership between the school board of one of the poorest-performing educational districts in New Mexico and the University of Virginia's Darden/Curry Partnership for Leaders in Education (Darden/Curry PLE). The Darden/Curry PLE turnaround approach helps transform low-performing schools into high-performing schools and allows administrators to identify and contextualize their most pressing issues and focus on cultivating sustainable change. In the Gallup-McKinley school district, the turnaround process faced challenges and resistance, even from stakeholders within the district. But administrators were motivated to identify the root cause of the district's struggles through data-driven instruction and committed to making the turnaround initiative work. Four years after the start of the Darden/Curry PLE intervention, Gallup-McKinley was number one among the largest New Mexico districts in English language arts two-year proficiency growth and number three in math two-year proficiency growth. What could school administrators around the country learn about the leadership and instruction changes necessary to overcome the challenges and barriers confronting low-performing school districts? Excerpt UVA-BC-0266 Rev. Feb. 28, 2019 Miles from Home: Transforming the Poorest, Most Expansive School Districts in New Mexico Mike Hyatt's mentor was out. It was 2016, and Gallup-McKinley County Schools (Gallup-McKinley) district superintendent Frank Chiapetti, who'd made Hyatt his assistant superintendent just two years earlier, had clashed with several members of the local school board. The superintendent who'd come in to shake everything up in the struggling New Mexico school district was being let go. . . .

Leadership Perceptions of Principals with and without Special Education Backgrounds

This study investigated the perceptions of leadership by public school principals with and without special education backgrounds. Utilizing Q-sort methodology, principals sorted 47 leadership statements. Findings indicated prior special education experience was not a predictor of subsequent leadership perceptions. Instead, two factors emerged where one was composed of younger, less educated, less experienced principals in lower-performing schools who valued instructional and transactional leadership and the other was composed of older, more educated, more experienced, and more ethnically diverse principals who worked in higher-performing schools who valued transformational-collaborative leadership. The results suggest principals with and without special education backgrounds follow a developmental path.

Principal Competencies that Make a Difference

Literature in the field of school leadership substantiates principals‘ influence on student achievement. Less clarity is available concerning principals’ influence on school turnaround or the competencies needed for principals to effectively engage in and sustain the turnaround of low-performing schools. This study seeks to illuminate principal competencies that support an individual's ability to influence turnaround as evidenced by increased student achievement. We analyzed behavioral event interviews conducted with 19 principals whose schools experienced a rapid increase in student achievement. This sample is the successful 10% of a population of 200 principals who each attempted to lead a turnaround. From the interview data, we derived seven competencies that capture the specific characteristics and actions of principals leading turnaround. Our research provides an initial framework for the actions, behaviors, and dispositions of successful turnaround principals. Results of this study suggest ways to improve the selection and development of turnaround principals.

The Effects of the Louisiana Scholarship Program On Student Achievement after Two Years

The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) is a statewide initiative offering publicly-funded vouchers to enroll in local private schools to students in low-performing schools with family income no greater than 250 percent of the poverty line. Initially established in 2008 as a pilot program in New Orleans, the LSP was expanded statewide in 2012. This paper examines the experimental effects of using an LSP scholarship to enroll in a private school on student achievement in the first two years following the program’s expansion. Our results indicate that the use of an LSP scholarship has negatively impacted both ELA and math achievement, although only the latter estimates are statistically significant. Moreover, we observe less negative effect estimates in the second year of the program.

The Impact of Using Coherent Curriculum on Students’ Understanding of Core Ideas in Chemistry

A coherent curriculum that clearly defines sets of ideas that build upon one another to meet desired learning goals can successfully support the development of meaningful understanding across time. This study explores the influence of a coherent curriculum as a systematic approach to aligning and sequencing specific ideas to support students in developing deeper knowledge of chemistry core ideas by comparing students in classrooms that used coherent instructional materials with those that used more traditional materials. We followed approximately 1225 middle school students from 6 schools in 4 different states over 4 time points, across 2 school years, and across 3 grade levels. 165 assessment items were used to measure student understanding along a learning progression, which provides a guide for how students may move toward more sophisticated understanding over time. Students’ estimated ability parameters obtained from item response theory analysis were used to compare the achievement between the coherent and traditional curriculum groups. Hierarchical linear model analysis was employed to examine students’ learning growth rates between different curriculum materials by grade and school. The results revealed that there are differences in the trends of learning between the coherent and traditional group by grade and school performance level. The coherent curriculum shows a promising effect on student learning, particularly in high- and middle-performing schools. However, there are limits to using coherent curriculum on a low-performing school. This study concluded with a discussion of challenges and promises for using coherent curriculum materials to support student learning.

Beyond turnaround: a synthesis of relevant frameworks for leaders of sustained improvement in previously low-performing schools

ABSTRACTWe understand very little about what is special that leaders do to facilitate improvement that is both transformational and lasting in previously persistently failing schools in the United States. Relatively little is understood about change not just during the initial turnaround stage, but that endures on the larger journey as the school becomes a healthy organisation for adults and students. This lack of understanding is likely due to the lack of data sources because schools struggle to attain turnaround, let alone maintain the improvement and continue to grow. We conducted a literature review of frameworks implicated in leading a sustained school turnaround. This study synthesises existing frameworks relevant to implicated constructs of (1) school turnaround, (2) effective educational leadership, (3) turnaround external to education, and (4) sustained improvement external to education through developing a cohesive set of practices to inform the work of researchers and practitioners. We end by suggesting that this framework be tested and refined through examination of principal data so that it more robustly represents the work that leaders of sustained improvement undertake.