"You need to change the culture and chemistry of the school so that everyday everyone in that school is very cognizant of what they are doing, what is working, what isn't working and they are striving to improve."
For the February 2010 Executive Briefing, we spoke with Dr. Sam Redding, Executive Director of the Academic Development Institute and Director of the National Center on Innovation & Improvement in Lincoln, IL and co-author of the report Turning Around Chronically Underperforming Schools, published by the What Works Clearinghouse for the Institute for Education Sciences. The following is an abridged version of our interview with Dr. Redding.
Q: The biggest question today in education seems to be what can school administrators, boards of education and superintendents do with the underperforming schools in their district?
Dr. Sam Redding:Right now there is a particular emphasis on looking at those bottom 5% of schools — chronically low-performing with too many students that year-after-year are being under-served. We’re looking at more dramatic attempts to turn these schools around. There’s been a shift toward the need to do something systemically as a state, but also to give particular attention to those most poorly performing schools and see how we turn them around.
There has also been recognition from the state perspective that this is not a problem that can be solved by federal regulation and state intervention. There just aren’t the resources to be able to give that kind of attention at a local level, and so the districts need to play a stronger role.
Q: No Child Left Behind listed five basic remedies. What do you see most school districts and boards doing as a response to turn things around?
Dr. Sam Redding: I am sure NCLB did help schools get more serious about improvement in general. When schools got to this point, the NCLB options did indicate that something fairly dramatic needed to happen. The district had the responsibility to restructure the school, possibly converting it to a charter school; getting contracted out to an external management organization; the state taking it over; a good portion of the staff getting replaced. But NCLB also gave the option of “other” which meant that the district could apply its own remedy. And the last I looked, I think that was the option chosen in over 90% of the cases, and so, that really became an out to take milder courses of action.
The new direction coming from the federal Title I dollars and other incentives from the Department of Education is that a turnaround needs a significant replacement of staff. The approach now is that at a minimum you would replace a principal and maybe 50% of other personnel.