America’s worst schools have been languishing for decades, and the prospects for reforming them often seem grim. But at a recent American Enterprise Institute conference held in partnership with the Boston-based Mass Insight Education & Research Institute, experts offered a mix of innovative ideas that could show the way to greater progress. 

As President Bush might put it, failing schools don’t need “small-ball” reforms; they need a dramatic overhaul. “Incremental change isn’t going to get you there,” said Kirk Kramer of the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consultancy. In a similar vein, Kevin Johnson, the former NBA basketball star turned education activist, described his strategy to revamp a California high school as a “big bang approach.” The stakes are high, stressed Steven Adamowski, superintendent of the public schools in Hartford, Connecticut. “To take a high poverty school and make it into a high performing school is in fact the last, best hope.” 

There are examples of successful school turnarounds. And many of the speakers at the AEI conference, including Johnson and District of Columbia school principal Michelle Pierre-Farid, spoke from firsthand experience. But the challenge is daunting. Doug Mesecar of the U.S. Department of Education came armed with the numbers: under the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), nearly 11,000 schools are deemed in need of improvement. Of those schools, over 2,000 have failed to improve test scores for five straight years, making them subject to a mandated turnaround or massive restructuring. 

The hardest question concerns human capital: how can schools attract and retain teachers and leaders who are skilled in carrying out turnarounds? As Mass Insight President William Guenther lamented, “We have spent 25 years in education reform focused first on programs; we need to focus on people first.” 

While Andrew Rotherham of Education Sector, a think tank, noted that “the overwhelming majority of educators live and work within 100 miles of where they grew up,” Adamowski emphasized the increasing mobility of the U.S. workforce. “I don’t know if it’s realistic anymore,” he said, “for us to think that we’re going to take a 21-year-old off into the ranks of teaching and somehow keep him for 35 years.” It is time “to build on the front end of the career, the back end of the career, [and] have some type of service that is not lifetime in nature but rather transitional.” 

School turnaround work is not for the faint-hearted. Even in the private sector, turnaround strategies are successful only one-third of the time.

Removing ineffective teachers—another key element of any turnaround strategy—is no small task. Turnaround leaders must have the power “to remove the culture-killing individuals,” said Seth Reynolds of the Parthenon Group, a consulting firm. In the education field, this can be a frustratingly slow process. 

Even if reformers overcome human capital hurdles, they face many obstacles. You can’t have “leaders being dropped into conditions where they can’t succeed,” Guenther said. Community engagement is crucial. “Schools are the center of neighborhoods,” Johnson noted, which means “it’s very hard to improve public education in poor neighborhoods unless economic development and community revitalization are part of the equation.” However, Andrew Calkins, a senior vice president at Mass Insight, cautioned that “most communities don’t have the will to undertake the fundamental, transformative kind of reform that we’re talking about.”

Perhaps the most hopeful strategy lies outside the traditional public school system. As those with firsthand turnaround experience were quick to note, backing from the private sector is key to effective restructuring. Garth Harries, a senior official at the New York City Department of Education, explained that private sector partners bring “three really important things to the table”: capacity, higher standards, and protection during the period of administrative change. Adamowski added that “significant public-private partnerships in the design, the operation, and the governance in the turnaround school creates a much more robust school environment and helps protect new approaches from encroaching institutional influences.” 

But Michele Cahill of the Carnegie Corporation cautioned that school partners must be “partners from the design phase.” Doug Sears, speaking from his experience managing the Boston University/Chelsea Public Schools alliance, agreed: having clearly defined responsibilities from the outset was an essential factor in his partnership’s success. In that instance, the university was able to offer funding support as well as fiscal and labor relations expertise. 

All conference participants agreed that school turnaround work is not for the faint-hearted. Frederick M. Hess, AEI’s director of education policy studies, offered a telling statistic: even in the private sector, experts estimate that common turnaround strategies in companies are successful only one-third of the time. Kramer, who hails from the private consulting world, echoed this sentiment, saying that “turnarounds in the public education space are far harder than any turnaround I’ve ever seen in the for-profit space.” In Johnson’s opinion, “education is the most politicized thing in America.” 

With that in mind, school turnaround leaders must manage expectations and anticipate dramatic pushback. Harries said that certain New York City turnarounds “took an act of massive political will,” and he warned that “you have to be willing to take on community controversy.” Pierre-Farid, speaking from her experience in the nation’s capital, argued that all turnaround leaders must learn “how to direct people who don’t want to change.” 

Rosemary Kendrick is a research associate at the American Enterprise Institute.