Another indictment of “turnarounds”

Anyone interested in what to do about America’s most persistently failing schools–and especially those caught up in today’s turnaround craze–should consider Part II of this report a must-read. A MUST-read.

Every year, the Brown Center at Brookings releases a study on a number of issues important to K-12 schooling. Tom Loveless, the author, is one of my favorite scholars. He is an honest broker through and through.

The question at the heart of the 2010 report’s second section is “do schools ever change their performance?” The results are eye-popping and–please forgive me for the immodesty–support the argument I made in The Turnaround Fallacy.

Loveless looked at the nearly 1,200 California schools with an 8th grade in 1989 and 2009 to see how their performance changed over two decades. Of the schools in the lowest quartile in 1989, nearly two-thirds of them were still in the lowest quartile 20 years later. continue….