Presidential Essay - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Presidential Essay

Martin Orland

Evaluation and Policy Research

WestEd
1350 Connecticut Avenue NW,

Suite 1050

Washington, DC 20036

morland@wested.org

THE SUPPLY’S THE LIMIT:

MEETING THE CHALLENGE OF

KNOWLEDGE AND CAPACITY

CONSTRAINTS TO SIGNIFICANT

EDUCATIONAL IMPROVEMENT

INTRODUCTION
The Obama administration’s Race to the Top program
and related recent educational reform initiatives repre-
sent a new milestone for federal efforts intended to fos-
ter signiﬁcant K–12 reform. Starting with the publication
of A Nation at Risk (NCEE 1983), the federal government
has a roughly twenty-ﬁve-year history of attempting to
advance major system improvements in K–12 education.
Tuttavia, the aggressiveness of the federal role has in-
exorably increased over this period. What began largely
as bully pulpit exhortations stoked by appeals to national
security in the 1980s gradually gave way to subsidizing
national standards and national testing programs in the
1990S, and then in the past decade to mandating require-
ments for school performance nationwide through the
No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Signiﬁcantly, these ef-
forts have occurred in both Democratic and Republican
administrations and have enjoyed greater levels of bipar-
tisan support than most other areas of federal domestic
policy (per esempio., health care, energy, the environment).

The current federal K–12 education reform agenda
has been catalyzed by the unprecedented opportunity for
new federal education spending afforded by the “Great
Recession” of 2008–9. The passage of the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) provided the

C(cid:2) 2011 Association for Education Finance and Policy

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THE SUPPLY’S THE LIMIT

Obama administration with the opportunity to design and administer major
new domestic program initiatives without needing to obtain congressional
approval. In the area of education, the administration made two signiﬁcant
decisions early in 2009. Primo, it decided that spending in the education arena
would be ﬁscally signiﬁcant by targeting about $100 billion of ARRA fund- ing for education (USDOE 2009a). Secondo, the nature of federal education spending would not be restricted only to traditional ﬁscal economic stabi- lization objectives but would also serve substantive educational reform goals (Dillon 2010; USDOE 2009b). Speciﬁcally, ARRA spending would be targeted to promote educational reform in four distinct areas: standards and assessments, teacher quality, ed- ucational data systems, and turning around our lowest-performing schools (USDOE 2009c). These areas constitute the four pillars undergirding require- ments and programmatic initiatives across the different components of ARRA. Showing satisfactory progress under each pillar will determine states’ contin- ued eligibility to receive up to a total of $48.6 billion in FY 2010 state ﬁscal
stabilization funds (USDOE 2009c, 2009D). Inoltre, ambitious and inno-
vative proposals under each pillar constitute the review criteria for awarding
state grants under the $4.35 billion Race to the Top innovation grants com- petition. The reform agenda also includes targeted grant programs for the separate pillars, including the $3.5 billion school improvement grants pro-
gram (USDOE 2009c) to be competitively awarded by states to school districts
and the $4 billion Race to the Top state assessment grants competition. The ad- ministration has also made clear that these four areas and the ARRA initiatives will form the foundation behind its proposal for reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (Dillon 2010). Taken together, the administration’s reform program represents the most ambitious attempt in U.S. history to use the federal grant-in-aid mechanism to upgrade the quality of standards, testing, teaching, dati, and interventions in our lowest-performing schools. The question, Ovviamente, is the likelihood of these efforts leading to major improvements in student performance. My con- tention is that to make truly signiﬁcant inroads in raising student achievement, major shortages in the current supply of requisite knowledge and capacity— including evidence-informed guidance about “what works” and adequate social and human capital, as well as ﬁnancial resources—will need to be successfully addressed. These, in turn, will require modesty in conceding what we don’t yet know, wisdom in rejecting “silver bullet” solutions, patience in not expecting too much too soon, and persistence in supporting systematic experimentation and long-term stable commitments to knowledge and capacity enhancements. In the balance of this article I support this premise by focusing particu- larly on one of the four current pillars of federal education reform, that of 2 l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / F / e d u e d p a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / / 6 1 1 1 6 8 9 2 2 6 e d p _ e _ 0 0 0 2 1 p d . f f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 Mar tin Orland turning around the nation’s lowest-performing schools. I begin by describing the administration’s reform initiatives in this area along with the implicit and explicit assumptions that appear to underlie this improvement thrust. Next I turn to some of the major knowledge and capacity challenges to overcome for turnaround reform expectations to be realized. I conclude with a discussion of the nature of potential investments that I see as holding promise for meeting these challenges, and the critical role of political leadership and the education research community in moving educational policy reform discussions in a more fruitful direction. THE FEDERAL SCHOOL TURNAROUND AGENDA On 26 agosto 2009 NOI. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced a new $3.5 billion grant program under ARRA designed to turn around the
nation’s lowest-performing schools:

If we are to put an end to stubborn cycles of poverty and social failure,
and put our country on track for long-term economic prosperity, we
must address the needs of children who have long been ignored and
marginalized in chronically low-achieving schools. . . . States and school
districts have an opportunity to put unprecedented resources toward
reforms that would increase graduation rates, reduce dropout rates and
improve teacher quality for all students, and particularly for children
who most need good teaching in order to catch up. (USDOE 2009b)

The program offers formula grants to state education agencies that are required
to identify their “persistently lowest achieving schools” and then administer
subgrants to local education agencies to improve these schools by employing
one of three generic school improvement models:

Turnaround model: Replaces the principal and rehires no more than
50 percent of the preexisting staff, and grants the principal sufﬁcient
ﬂexibility to implement a comprehensive approach to substantially
improve student outcomes.
Restart model: Converts a school to a charter school managed by an op-
erator, charter management organization, or education management
organization selected through a rigorous review process.
Transformation model: Replaces the principal, takes steps to in-
crease teacher and school
institutes com-
prehensive instructional reforms, increases learning time, creates

leader effectiveness,

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THE SUPPLY’S THE LIMIT

community-oriented schools, and provides operational ﬂexibility and
sustained support.1 (EducationNews 2009)

Funding priority is to go to the lowest achieving 5 percent of Title 1 schools
and high schools whose graduation rate has persistently fallen below 60 per-
cent (EducationNews 2009). In addition to the school improvement grants
program, the state Race to the Top grants competition requires applicants to
indicate how they will support local educational agencies in turning around
their lowest performing schools by implementing one of the school interven-
tion models (Federal Register 2009).

This is not the ﬁrst concerted federal attempt to stimulate school im-
provement in low-achieving schools by requiring the adoption of a school
improvement model. Just one decade ago Congress passed the Comprehen-
sive School Reform Demonstration Program (CSRD), later incorporated into
NCLB. That program required schools to embrace eleven components of com-
prehensive reform, including developing measurable goals for student perfor-
mance, developing a comprehensive design for effective school functioning
that integrates instruction, assessment, classroom management, and profes-
sional development, and adopting improvement strategies consistent with sci-
entiﬁcally based research models of effectiveness. Between 1998 E 2006 IL
program provided three-year comprehensive school improvement awards to
some 7,000 low-achieving schools nationwide (Orland, Hoffman, and Vaughn
2010).

Three aspects of the current school turnaround program distinguish it from
the CSRD. Primo, the current models all require that speciﬁc large-scale struc-
tural changes take place in the target school, such as replacing existing staff,
providing school leaders with greater ﬂexibility and autonomy, or converting to
a charter school. Secondo, while the CSRD focused on low-performing schools,
it did not speciﬁcally target schools that were the very lowest performers. Fi-
nally, the scale of support to be provided under the school improvement grant
program (initial spending of $3.5 billion for FY 2009) dwarfs that of the CSRD (approximately $1 billion spent over eight years). Despite these differences, IL
types of programs and behaviors that are assumed to characterize “successful”
turnaround schools under the school improvement grants program look very
similar to the desired features of “reformed” schools under the CSRD.2 In
fatto, school characteristics, such as an academically challenging curriculum,

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There is also a fourth model labeled “school closure” that I do not classify as a school improvement
model for purposes of this discussion because it closes a low-performing school and disperses its
students to other schools in the district that are higher achieving.

2. Title I, Part F (CSR) legislation and Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended,

Title I, Part A, Sezione 1003(G).

Mar tin Orland

a culture supporting high expectations for all students, a strong evaluation
program, and active levels of parental and community support, have been con-
sistently identiﬁed as components of high-performing schools for over three
decades (Edmonds 1979). The difﬁculty has not been in identifying these suc-
cessful school characteristics, but rather in identifying those policies that are
most appropriate to yield more schools possessing them.

THE TURNAROUND SUPPLY CHALLENGE
To understand the magnitude of the turnaround supply challenge, it is ﬁrst im-
portant to appreciate how unusual it is for low-achieving schools to dramatically
improve their performance and then sustain such improvement. The literature
on school turnaround has generally been imprecise in deﬁning (1) what con-
stitutes a low-performing school, (2) how much improvement in such a school
over what time period would constitute a successful school turnaround, E
(3) for how long such improvement should be sustained (Herman et al. 2008).
This makes it easier for both policy makers and analysts to underestimate
the difﬁculty in turning around large numbers of low-performing schools,
preferring instead to cite infrequent but highly visible examples of successful
turnaround.

The relatively recent development of state longitudinal school ﬁles makes it
possible to empirically model the prevalence of successful school turnarounds
by making reasonable and transparent assumptions about what constitutes
low prior achievement, substantial levels of improvement from such a base,
and appropriate time horizons for both obtaining and sustaining improve-
ment. I recently did this with a database of 1,098 schools nationwide that
received comprehensive school reform grants in 1998, 1999, O 2000.3 UN
school was ﬁrst deﬁned as low performing if one of these schools’ 1999–2000
test performances in both reading and mathematics was at least 1 standard
deviation below its state’s average.4 This criterion resulted in the identiﬁcation
Di 262 of the original 1,098 schools whose performance was subsequently
tracked.

From these, I deﬁned a school as having successfully turned around if:

1. By the year 2001–2 (cioè., two years after the base year), its test performance
in both reading and mathematics improved by at least .5 standard deviation
relative to its state;5

3. My thanks to Dr. Joe McCrary of WestEd for his valued assistance in conducting this analysis.
4. One standard deviation below state average achievement corresponds roughly to the 16th percentile,

though there is some variability across the states.
This constitutes signiﬁcant but not extraordinary school improvement roughly equivalent to a 15
percentage point gain in performance relative to its state.

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THE SUPPLY’S THE LIMIT

It did not experience a change of 20 percent or more by 2001–2 in either
the percent of students eligible for free and reduced price lunch, per cento
black, or percent Hispanic;6 E
Its test performance in both reading and math declined by no more than
.1 standard deviation (relative to its state) one year later (cioè., in the 2002–3
school year).

Though not heroic criteria, this analysis yielded a total of only twelve successful
school turnarounds, O 4.6 percent of the cohort.

One might consider the expectations for two-year turnaround to be too
ambitious and that in fact a more prevalent pattern is one of slow and steady
school progress over a longer time period. Unfortunately, modeling this im-
provement trajectory yields an even smaller number of turnaround schools.
Taking the same 2000 cohort of 262 initially low-achieving schools, I assumed
that it had made slow and steady progress if:

1. Four years later, its gains in reading and mathematics resulted in perfor-

mance at or above the state average;
It did not experience any one-year declines in reading or mathematics
during the four-year period;
Its test performance in both reading and math declined by no more than
.1 standard deviation (relative to its state average) one year later (cioè., in the
2004–5 school year),
It did not experience a change of 20 percent over the four-year period in
either the percent of students eligible for free and reduced price lunch,
percent black, or percent Hispanic; E
It was not included in the other list of rapid, successful turnarounds.

The process resulted in identifying only seven additional schools, representing
just 2.7 percent of the cohort.

Ovviamente,

these meager
the administration might well argue that
turnaround percentages reﬂect “business as usual,” which is why fundamen-
tal school restructurings that lie at the core of its school turnaround initiative
are needed. Replacing current principals with new dynamic school leaders,
hiring large cadres of new teachers possessing the skills and motivation to
work successfully with low-achieving students and contribute to a positive
school climate, and converting existing schools to charters with the ﬂexibility
to change all aspects of schools operations are what is needed to turn these

6. This is important because substantial changes in school demographics rather than school factors

can make inordinate contributions to school improvement.

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Mar tin Orland

dismal percentages around. It is this argument that leads directly to questions
of supply adequacy.

THE KNOWLEDGE SHORTFALL
The ﬁrst question concerns adequate knowledge supply—in particular, what
prescriptions can be recommended with conﬁdence based on high-quality re-
search regarding how to turn around a persistently low-performing school. Pol-
icy maker, analyst, and school improvement entrepreneur assertions notwith-
standing, the empirical evidence base on this question is weak. In 2008, IL
Institute of Education Sciences published a practice guide on turning around
chronically low-performing schools that included the most comprehensive
and methodologically rigorous review of research ever conducted on school
turnaround. The report concluded that the quality of current evidence was low
to support four common school turnaround prescriptions: (1) signaling the
need for dramatic change with strong leadership, (2) maintaining a consistent
focus on improving instruction, (3) making visible improvements early in the
school turnaround process (cioè., quick wins), E (4) building a committed
staff (Herman et al. 2008).

This research literature suffers from both methodological and concep-
tual limitations. Methodologically, the studies examined to ascertain common
turnaround success factors consist almost exclusively of multiple case studies
in which characteristics of successful turnaround strategies are aggregated.
This work is useful for understanding the phenomenon of school turnaround
and generating hypotheses about causal mechanisms. Tuttavia, it should not
be viewed as constituting evidence of effective practices because it fails to
control for the counterfactual—that is, the prevalence of these same factors in
what may well be instances of unsuccessful turnaround attempts. Controlling
for the counterfactual is a minimal condition for establishing internal validity
to make appropriate causal inferences, but as the Institute of Education Sci-
enze (IES) study by Herman et al. points out, it is absent from the school
turnaround literature base. Because of this absence we simply have no idea
of the extent to which, Per esempio, new strong leaders put in low-performing
schools failed to achieve turnaround, or the number of instances in which
visible school improvements early in the turnaround process did not lead to
improved school performance. Infatti, clear and consistent operational def-
initions of concepts like “dramatic change,” “quick wins,” and “committed
staff” in the turnaround literature are lacking, making assertions about the
presence of such success factors susceptible to exercises in circular logic (per esempio.,
if the turnaround was successful, then the change was sufﬁciently dramatic,
otherwise it wasn’t) rather than well-grounded research inferences.

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THE SUPPLY’S THE LIMIT

Conceptual limitations in the school turnaround literature and knowledge
base derive paradoxically from much of this same case study literature. It sug-
gests that efforts to reduce the phenomenon of school turnaround to lists of
success factor “ingredients” severely oversimplify what are inherently idiosyn-
cratic and codependent processes. As the aforementioned IES review points
fuori:

The case research on school turnarounds and the business research
clearly indicates that there is no speciﬁc set of actions that applies
equally well to every turnaround situation. Every school described in
the case studies examined for this guide applied actions and practices
tailored to the school and local community. (Herman et al. 2008, P. 7)

A recent examination of eleven initially low-performing schools that subse-
quently witnessed dramatic improvement, conducted for the U.S. Department
of Education by WestEd and American Institutes for Research (AIR), under-
scores these points. The study found that, at a macro level, each of these
schools adopted new leadership styles, practices to improve school climate,
new instructional strategies, and strategies to secure external support. How-
ever, the strategies varied signiﬁcantly across the schools. So, Per esempio,
while some dramatically improved schools hired new principals who became
change leaders throughout the turnaround process, others had multiple prin-
cipals over their improvement period but instituted distributed leadership
practices in which school staff shared leadership responsibilities. Inoltre,
the schools combined improvement practices in very different ways, empha-
sizing different strategies (Aladjem et al. 2010, pag. xviii–xix):

Reform strategies interacted in multiple ways, suggesting that the same
reforms may be more or less successful depending on differences
in leadership, staff capacity, community support, and other factors.
Schools engaged in varying combinations of reforms that they often
adapted and changed to meet their evolving circumstances. The energy,
experience, and stability of leadership and teachers also inﬂuenced the
interplay of reforms, and this interplay appeared to require ongoing
monitoring and ﬁne-tuning.

The implications of these ﬁndings for developing a sufﬁcient supply of knowl-
edge that could be employed to drive successful turnaround strategies are
profound. In addition to undertaking more methodologically advanced stud-
ies of school turnaround that address the issue of the counterfactual, we must
also develop and eventually test much more sophisticated and contextually

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Mar tin Orland

nuanced theories of change around this issue. This will require sustained
nontrivial research and development (R&D) investments in this area for a
generation or more.

THE CAPACITY CHALLENGE
Ovviamente, even if a robust R&D agenda on school turnaround were forth-
coming and could eventually yield much higher quality evidence to inform
policy decisions, policy makers are not waiting until such knowledge bears
fruit. Invece, they are looking now for ways to replicate visible turnaround
successes—particularly those apparently taking place in schools run by some
charter management organizations (CMOs)—on a grander scale. Research
evidence aside, what is the likelihood that adequate system capacity currently
exists to support such replication and scale up?

Through the current school improvement grants program, the federal gov-
ernment is attempting to mitigate at least one short-term capacity challenge—
that of ﬁnancial resources. As noted previously, the monies now being targeted
for the persistently lowest-performing schools under the school improvement
grant program is unprecedented. Three and one half billion dollars allocated
to ﬁve thousand (Duncan 2009) schools yields an average of approximately
$700,000 in additional revenue per school, O $1,400 per student in a school
with an enrollment of ﬁve hundred. In the short term at least, the availability
of these funds to states and school districts may well reverse the dynamics of
the relationship between charter management organizations and sources of
revenue. In the past, CMOs as well as smaller “mom and pop” charters have
had to spend substantial portions of their time and efforts chasing the funds
needed to support and expand their operations (Education Sector 2009). IL
most successful have invariably turned to philanthropic support to compensate
for both lower public subsidies and higher resource demands compared with
the traditional school sector. Now, Tuttavia, many states and school districts
looking to implement “restart” turnaround models are likely to be chasing suc-
cessful CMOs, attempting to persuade them to take over their failing schools
with attractive ﬁnancing offers. Allo stesso modo, systems looking to implement the
other federally designated turnaround models will have, at least for the time
being, signiﬁcant dedicated funding streams supporting their efforts.

This school improvement grant windfall from ARRA funds will not con-
tinue indeﬁnitely. IL 2011 presidential budget asks for only $900 million for school improvement grants. Pressures for federal budget cuts through this decade make it unlikely that large federal subsidies for the lowest-performing schools can be sustained. And judging by the costs that must be incurred to achieve successful turnaround, these added resources are likely necessary. As l D o w n o a d e d f r o m h t t p : / / d i r e c t . m i t . / F / e d u e d p a r t i c e – p d l f / / / / / 6 1 1 1 6 8 9 2 2 6 e d p _ e _ 0 0 0 2 1 p d f . f b y g u e s t t o n 0 7 S e p e m b e r 2 0 2 3 9 THE SUPPLY’S THE LIMIT Tom Toch has pointed out, “As much as anything, the labor-intensive work of the best CMOs over the past decade makes a strong case for increasing funding for disadvantaged students” (Education Week 2009, pag. 26–27). The Educa- tion Sector report “Growing Pains” (2009) discusses how the most successful charter school programs are also the most resource intensive. The additional resources are used to create smaller, more personalized learning environ- menti, longer school days, and the greater sense of community considered essential to overcome conditions of severe educational and economic disad- vantage. More comprehensive neighborhood-based programs like the Harlem Children’s Zone require even larger resource investments.7 The school ﬁnance research community has largely moved away from debates over “Does money matter?” to more ﬁne-grained hypotheses and investigations that focus on both the size and nature of resource investments likely to make a difference in enhancing student outcomes (Ladd and Fiske 2007). Successful charters in particular are beginning to yield new insights on this question, and the prelimi- nary evidence at least suggests that adequate ﬁnancial resources are a necessary if not sufﬁcient condition for fostering successful school turnaround. An even more daunting challenge than ﬁnancial resource supply is obtain- ing the requisite human and social capital necessary to replicate and expand successful school turnaround models. A shortage in the number of high- quality staff needed to meet the learning needs of our student population has been a consistent refrain of analysts in recent years (NCES 2004; Clotfelter et al. 2007).8 The problem is of course especially severe in our lowest-achieving schools, where student needs are most acute and the knowledge, skill, and com- mitment demands on teachers and school leaders are consequently greatest. Assuming the 5,000 lowest-performing schools in the country employ about 100,000 teachers and 10,000 school administrators,9 what is the likelihood that an adequate supply of human capital currently exists to meet the school turnaround challenge? Once again the experiences of charter schools having noteworthy successes in serving disadvantaged populations are illustrative. The typical commitments of teachers and administrators in these schools far exceed the current norm. They work longer days and often longer school years than their traditional public school counterparts. They also have signiﬁcant added responsibilities with respect to parent and community involvement, providing more personal- ized student attention, working with their colleagues on school improvement For example, preschool services are estimated at $17,000–$19,000 per year per student.
7.
Vedere, in particular, NCES tables 24-1 A 24-4. These ﬁgures are based on 1999–2000 data, Tuttavia.
8.
9. This estimate is based on an assumption of an average of 640 students and two administrators per
school. It was derived by calculating average school size and pupil-teacher ratio data for 2006 from
the Digest of Education Statistics 2008, tables 63, 80, 99, E 100.

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strategies, and participating in team-building activities related to creating and
sustaining a positive school climate conducive to academic achievement. Given
the demands, it is no wonder that turnover rates in these schools appear to be
signiﬁcantly higher than average (Education Sector 2009). In his recent exam-
ination of eight highly successful “no excuses” charter schools in the Boston
area, Wilson (2009) found that these schools’ faculty hailed disproportionately
from elite higher education institutions and that the schools battled ﬁercely
among each other for the scarce teacher supply pool. If such schools struggle
so mightily now to attract and retain the extraordinary talent needed to achieve
successful school turnaround, the prospects seem remote that a talent pool
literally hundreds of times larger can be successfully identiﬁed and recruited.
Having substantially higher levels of ﬁnancial and human capital within
schools than is likely to be available for successful turnaround would not be
such a problem if parental and community characteristics did not reinforce
these shortfalls. Infatti, one could argue that if sufﬁcient social capital already
existed to support students from low-income families, there would be a consid-
erably smaller school turnaround challenge in the ﬁrst place. It is an empirical
fact that family and community characteristics are important predictors of
student achievement independent of school and classroom factors (Parcel and
Menaghan 1994). This does not mean, Ovviamente, that schools don’t matter.
What it does mean is that the challenges faced by schools are heavily inﬂuenced
by the presence or absence of social capital existing outside classroom walls.

What is social capital? James Coleman’s classic article, “Social Capital in
the Creation of Human Capital,” deﬁnes it as, like other forms of capital, UN
productive asset, “making possible the achievement of certain ends that in its
absence would not be possible” (Coleman 1988, P. S98). He goes on to say that
social capital both within and outside families plays an especially important role
in creating “human capital in the rising generation” (P. S109). Within families,
social capital is represented by the relationship of parents to offspring in order
to transfer their own (cioè., parental) human capital to further (among other
things) their children’s educational development. Allo stesso modo, close reinforcing
relationships between parents and the staff of their children’s schools, E
staff with each other, are forms of social capital that can foster children’s
educational growth.

Strong relationships between low academic achievement and poverty and
both low achievement and poverty with family and community characteristics
underscore the importance of both parental human capital and social capital
in school turnaround. The impacts of these factors on student achievement
appear to be signiﬁcant (in both the statistical and substantive sense) anche
as cumulative. This can be illustrated by data from the National Center for
Education Statistics’ Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey Kindergarten cohort

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THE SUPPLY’S THE LIMIT

study (ECLS-K), which tracked student achievement growth from kindergarten
through grade 5 (Rathbun and West 2004). ECLS-K classiﬁed students by the
presence or absence of four speciﬁc student nonschool risk factors—poverty,
mother’s highest education, living in a single-parent household, and speaking
a language other than English in the home—and then analyzed growth in
student achievement by the number of risk factors present (zero, one, two, O
more).

The data reveal that the gap in reading achievement between kindergarten
and ﬁfth-grade students widens signiﬁcantly over time based on the number
of risk factors present, from a seven-point gap in the fall of the kindergarten
year to a twenty-ﬁve-point gap by the spring of ﬁfth grade (Digest of Educa-
tion Statistics 2008, table 115). In a separate multivariate regression analysis
examining the relationship between student reading growth and the number
of risk factors, the NCES concluded:

As the number of children’s family risk factors . . . increased, children
made smaller gains in both [reading and mathematics] subjects, af-
ter controlling for [IL] other child, family, and school characteristics.
(Rathbun and West 2004, P. 23)

Leaders of successful turnaround schools in both the charter and traditional
public school sectors seem to recognize the need to develop both human and
social capital outside the classroom as key components of their programs. Questo
is why the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) has a “baby college” to help train
parents in parenting skills (HCZ 2009) and is why KIPP schools (Knowledge
Is Power Program) require that parents sign a contract indicating their com-
mitment to working as partners in their child’s education (KIPP 2010). It is also
why the Mass Insight school turnaround model is centered on overcoming the
reinforcing conditions of individual and family risk factors, and community
and environment, along with resource inequality (Calkins et al. 2007).

For all their enormous challenges, successful charter schools with these
types of programs and services have one intrinsic advantage in building fam-
ily and community supports relative to the vast majority of low-performing
schools that are the targets of the current federal school improvement initia-
tive: they are voluntarily subscribed to. No parents are forced to send their child
to a charter school. The parents signing on to these programs agree to the sig-
niﬁcant participation requirements and expectations that are foundational to
these schools’ improvement models. Such commitments to both their child’s
education and the building of a robust school community make these schools’
success more likely. (It is also this circumstance that makes straight-line
inferences about the impact of these models at scale so problematic because
the voluntary nature of participation severely compromises external validity.)

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The preliminary evidence suggests that sustaining such signiﬁcant com-
mitment levels on the part of parents and children is a major challenge for
school faculty and administrators, and one that is not always successfully met.
SRI International researchers, Per esempio, found that student attrition at four
Bay Area KIPP middle schools between ﬁfth and eighth grades was 60 per-
cent (Woodworth et al. 2008). If charters like KIPP already struggle mightily
against attrition in order to maintain the levels of commitment needed for
success, what is the likelihood that these models can be dramatically scaled
up amid conditions where parental and community supports will usually be
much more limited? Once again, supply—in this case, the requisite supply of
social capital needed to replicate successful school turnarounds—is the limit.

SUMMARY AND IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE POLICY
I have attempted in this essay to indicate critical knowledge and capacity
challenges for successfully turning around the vast majority of the nation’s
lowest-performing schools. In so doing I have relied on three primary sources.
Primo, I looked at data from the federally funded comprehensive school reform
program to show both the rarity of successful and sustained turnaround and
the complex and varying constellation of factors that appear to be associated
with dramatic school improvement. Secondo, I examined the research base
on the effectiveness of school turnaround strategies and found it to be both
methodologically and conceptually weak. Finalmente, I extrapolated some early
lessons from highly successful charter school models to argue that the extraor-
dinary investments in human and social capital that appear to be hallmarks of
successful turnaround in these instances cannot reasonably be expected to be
replicated on a large scale.

I see three major implications from this thesis for future policy directions.
Primo, develop a positive but realistic perspective on the role of successful char-
ter school models in fostering school turnaround. Much like Al Shanker’s
original vision for public schools to be innovative and have greater autonomy
to meet the diverse needs of students, some charter schools have indeed shown
themselves to be successful engines of innovation and reform (Shanker 1988).
These achievements should be embraced both for what they have accomplished
in educating many students who would otherwise likely have ﬂoundered and
for the lessons they provide the school improvement community more gen-
erally about keys to successful school reform. Speciﬁcally, policies should be
adopted at all levels of government to sustain singularly successful charters,
and artiﬁcial barriers to their expansion should be identiﬁed and reduced.

Tuttavia, to expand successful charters beyond the available supply
of needed ﬁnancial, human, and social capital is unrealistic and perhaps

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THE SUPPLY’S THE LIMIT

counterproductive. Policies attempting to do so pose a serious danger of in-
ducing successful charters to dilute the very elements that were responsible
for these schools’ noteworthy achievement in the ﬁrst place. Both the federal
government and successful CMOs should be deliberate and cautious in scaling
up successful CMO models beyond current limitations in ﬁnancial, human,
and social capital needed to support them (Smith et al. 2009; Education Sector
2009).

Secondo, create more policies and programs that focus directly on cur-
rent knowledge limitations and ﬁnancial, human, and social capital shortfalls
that inhibit taking successful school turnarounds to scale. Efforts to enhance
capital supply should focus less on school reform delivery mechanisms (cioè.,
charter schools versus traditional public schools) and more on capital supply
enhancements that need to be addressed independent of sector. This means
recognizing the signiﬁcant long-term resource investments that are a neces-
sary (though not sufﬁcient) condition for large-scale successful turnaround.
It also means prioritizing investments that hold promise for signiﬁcantly en-
hancing the quality of teaching in our lowest-performing schools as well as
securing the family and community supports that will contribute to successful
outcomes.

Such efforts should be multiple and reinforcing. In the area of teaching,
quality supply enhancement, Per esempio, should include new teacher incen-
tive mechanisms, new models that more tightly couple the pipeline between
teacher preparation and the human capital requirements for speciﬁc school
turnaround models (as is beginning to occur in some high-quality CMOs),
and professional development approaches (both pre-service and in-service)
that hold promise for imparting dramatically improved knowledge and skills
among teachers, to name just a few. A similar agenda should be developed and
implemented around increasing the supply of effective school leaders in our
lowest-performing schools, and in family and community development efforts
in neighborhoods hosting our lowest-performing schools. Inoltre, these
investments need to be integrated with a robust R&D agenda examining spe-
ciﬁc mechanisms for addressing capital supply shortfalls. While we should not
wait until research provides better guidance than is currently available about
what works in school turnaround, we should also not ignore this opportunity to
begin to build a much stronger knowledge base on how to meet the challenges
of underperforming schools that can make future investments more efﬁcient
and effective. Both analysts and policy makers from the AEFA/AEFP10 should
be leaders in these critical knowledge-building efforts.

10. At its June 2010 meeting, the board of directors of the American Education Finance Association
(AEFA) changed the organization’s name to the Association for Education Finance and Policy
(AEFP).

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Mar tin Orland

Finalmente, policy makers should recognize that success in turning around sig-
niﬁcant percentages of the nation’s lowest-performing schools will resemble a
marathon and not a sprint. It is imperative that the school turnaround at scale
be seen as a long-term agenda that will not be accomplished simply or quickly.
The supposition that if truly signiﬁcant successes in school turnaround can be
achieved in some places there is no reason why they cannot easily be replicated
in many more is fundamentally ﬂawed. It trivializes efforts needed to achieve
major school improvements at scale. Infatti, understanding the experiences
of places attaining some degree of success in school turnaround should tem-
per the views of anyone believing that achieving such results at scale will be
anything other than a long and arduous struggle.

No challenge in education reform has proven more vexing than how to
convert extraordinary islands of educational excellence into ordinary “busi-
ness as usual” accomplishments of the educational system as a whole. For
decades, achieving robust improvements at scale has been a preoccupation
of educational leaders, whether the focus is improving reading, math, or sci-
ence achievement, lowering the dropout rate, making better use of technology,
improving teaching quality, or turning around schools. Consistently, over the
years promises of dramatic improvements at scale in any of these areas through
speciﬁc policy actions have fallen short. There are of course many explanations
for these failures. Tuttavia, I would argue that at the core, it is because policy
makers (at least in their rhetoric) overestimate the power of singular policy
reforms rather than the sustained long-term investments in capital supply and
systemic change needed to penetrate deep-seated and multifaceted educational
problems.

It would be highly beneﬁcial if the present generation of educational leaders
could break this unproductive and cynicism-inducing “hopes raised−hopes
dashed” cycle. We in the education ﬁnance and policy communities can make
a signiﬁcant contribution to this end by promoting in our own work and
interactions with policy leaders the value of such a “rhetorical turnaround.”

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