Across the nation, educators are struggling to turn around troubled schools. In the District of Columbia, Chancellor Michelle Rhee has teams seeking to overhaul 27 schools targeted for “restructuring” by the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). 

This is hardly uncharted territory. Reformers have spent decades proposing new remedies for low-performing schools. Magnet programs, schools without walls, block scheduling, site-based management, and a litany of other popular ideas have emerged, only to disappoint.  

Today, NCLB’s mandated restructuring of schools that fail to make “adequate yearly progress” for five consecutive years has fueled extensive new efforts. NCLB spells out five options for such schools: reopening as a public charter school; replacing most staff; contracting out operations to a new organization; turning the keys over to the state; or adopting “any other major restructuring of the school’s governance.” Modest variations of the amorphous fifth option have proven the most popular, by far. 

More than 2,000 schools across the United States are currently in the process of restructuring, which has given rise to a nascent “turnaround” industry. The Louisiana School Turnaround Specialist Program is recruiting and grooming a cadre of school leaders. In New York, the Rensselaerville Institute runs a school turnaround program. At the University of Virginia, the graduate schools of education and business have partnered to train “turnaround specialists.” In Chicago, the Chicago International Charter School has launched ChicagoRise to provide management expertise and support for turnaround projects.

Republican and Democratic champions of NCLB promise that restructuring strategies combined with these efforts will help all schools meet ambitious performance targets. Unfortunately, as often happens with education reform, our enthusiasm may be getting ahead of us. School turnaround projects are enormously difficult and uncertain propositions. Research suggests that only one out of every five “restructured” schools is showing meaningful gains. 

Research suggests that only one out of every five ‘restructured’ schools is showing meaningful gains.

Indeed, the hope that we can systematically turn around most or all troubled schools is at odds with what we know about turnaround efforts in the corporate world. Arthur D. Little and McKinsey, two leading consulting firms, have studied efforts to implement “Total Quality Management” at hundreds of companies; they conclude that two-thirds of these efforts fall short. Scholars of the “corporate reengineering” movement report a success rate for Fortune 1000 companies of below 50 percent and possibly as low as 20 percent. As Peter Senge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has noted, “Failure to sustain significant change recurs again and again despite substantial resources committed to the change effort…[and] talented and committed people ‘driving the change.’” 

While turnaround strategies will doubtless work in some places some of the time, they are likely to prove even more challenging in the political, regulatory, and contractual morass of K-12 schooling. Turnaround strategies and specialists are not the sure-fire fix frequently touted by officials or imagined by anxious communities. In order to maximize the likelihood that they will succeed, reform projects must be guided by four basic realities. 

First, despite the fixation on training a new breed of leadership specialists, turnarounds are not just about leadership or technique; they frequently require fundamental change that stretches beyond the principal’s office to include accountability, staffing, curriculum, governance, and how business is done. 

Second, making turnarounds work is a niche discipline that requires particular skills. There is no sector where dozens of organizations have the ability to “turn around” troubled operations. It is impractical to expect scores of school districts to manage this task alongside their panoply of other responsibilities. In other sectors, a handful of specialized firms do this work and then move on. Large-scale restructuring will require a few public or private operators that can provide the requisite knowledge, oversight, personnel, and management in multiple cities. This indicates that Washington lawmakers should rethink how NCLB allocates restructuring dollars.  

Third, turning around troubled schools in troubled neighborhoods cannot be a school-only phenomenon. Sustaining turnarounds over the long term requires that they be coupled with local community development. In Sacramento, former NBA basketball star Kevin Johnson’s St. HOPE Development Company has offered a powerful illustration of how this can work. 

Finally, a successful turnaround requires transforming culture, expectations, and routines. That may not always be possible in schools burdened by anachronistic contract provisions, rickety district support, and years of administrative incompetence. Sometimes the best strategy may be to shut down a failing school and then allow an accomplished operator to start fresh. Happily, this is precisely what the District of Columbia is contemplating in discussions with providers such as Green Dot Public Schools. 

Acknowledging that thousands of schools are profoundly, and perhaps irrevocably, broken is a vital start. But it will amount to little unless education reformers embrace fresh thinking and show a willingness to challenge old nostrums.  

Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. His books include “No Remedy Left Behind: Lessons from a Half-Decade of NCLB.”

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