Turnarounds Rarely Work; Close Dysfunctional Schools Instead

“Winners never quit and quitters never win.” There's a lot of truth in that cliché, but it doesn't seem to apply to education. When it comes to chronically low-performing schools, in many cases, the better – and more courageous – course is to “quit” and close a school that is simply beyond repair.

In recent years, attempts to turn around failing schools are most closely linked to the Obama Administration’s supercharged School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. Between 2010 and 2015, the federal government spent $7 billion in efforts to turnaround low-performing schools. In exchange for these funds, grantee schools pledged to implement prescribed interventions, such as replacing personnel or changing instructional practices.

The returns: Not much—or perhaps not clear—according to a massive study by Mathematica and the American Institutes for Research (AIR). The study examined schools in the 2010 SIG cohort and tracked pupil outcomes through three years of implementation. Using data from twenty-two states, their analysis found that SIG had no significant impact on students’ state math or reading test scores. Nor did they find any evidence that SIG increased pupils’ likelihood of high school graduation or college enrollment. Further, the analysts didn’t even uncover an effect of SIG on the practices of participating schools.

Even with large sums of new money tied to well-meaning mandates, SIG turnaround schools could not appreciably move the achievement needle.

Now, what to do? One option is to keep trying to fix bad schools. We’ve been down that road with precious little to show for the time, effort and dollars spent.

Another approach is to close low-performing schools, while also launching excellent new schools to replace them. Andy Smarick, arguably the staunchest proponent of this view, writes:

We’ve tried to fix these deeply troubled schools for eons to no avail. … The wiser course of action is to make persistently underperforming institutions go away and then start new institutions in their place.

His position has been criticized as a “crusade” against SIG, and perhaps it is. Interestingly, though, in SIG’s own program design, one possible “intervention” was to close the school and have students enroll in another one. Predictably, almost no SIG schools took up the offer to voluntarily go out of business. But what if SIG had somehow induced the closure of more low-performing schools, and instead diverted billions of dollars to new school formation? Would kids’ outcomes have been any different?

We certainly don’t know the answer to this counterfactual. But a growing body of research (unrelated to SIG) suggests that students might have benefitted had their low-performing schools closed. In The 74, Matt Barnum highlights recent research from New Orleans that finds students made academic gains when low-performing schools closed. This mirrors Fordham’s own research, conducted by Deven Carlson and Stéphane Lavertu, which found displaced students from Ohio’s urban areas made significant gains on state exams, post-closure. Another study, this one from New York City, revealed that closing low-performing high schools increased the likelihood of students graduating from high school. Though closures may be politically difficult, studies now indicate that students benefit when a low-performing school closes and they relocate to a better one.

The Obama Administration’s parlay on intervention mandates and school turnarounds yielded little pay off for many thousands of children attending low-performing SIG schools. That demands some different thinking on how to lift outcomes in America’s neediest communities. Of course, it would be naïve to think that we can simply close our way to success. Done judiciously, shutting the lowest-performing schools while focusing resources on promising startups, might be our surest bet.

Aaron Churchill is the Ohio research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute