By Rebeca Nieves Huffman, DFER Illinois State Director
On Monday, Education Reform Now hosted its inaugural Policy Forum focused on the School Turnaround Strategy: “Improving Chronically Low-Performing Schools.” Members of the community and elected officials gathered with school leaders as well as local and national turnaround strategy experts to look at the data, but most importantly, hear from the people on the front lines leading the transformation charge.
School turnaround isn’t a new strategy for school improvement in Chicago. When a chronically low performing school is ‘turned around’ an entirely new team — everyone from the custodian to the principal — is brought in and managed one of two ways: 1) by the district’s Office of School Improvement; or, 2) by contracting an outside school operator, like the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL).
Chicago Public Schools is in a dire situation. Between the $1 billion budget deficit, a long list of chronically low performing schools, and the underutilization of school buildings (there are 600K seats for about 400K students), “school actions” are on everyone’s minds. When a school is targeted for an “action” one of a few things can happen: 1) closure; 2) consolidation; 3) phase out; or, 4) turnaround. Since turnarounds are probably one of the most misunderstood school actions in the community we decided to hold this policy forum to have an honest conversation with leaders on what’s working and what needs to be improved.
Throughout the discussion, attendees touched on several key misconceptions on school turnarounds, such as:
- A turnaround school isn’t a school closure. The adults are replaced but the students stay;
- The staff that is let go can reapply for their positions; AND
- Turnaround schools across Chicago are filled with committed diverse staff and reflect the communities they serve. For example, the Academy for Urban School Leaders (AUSL), makes it a priority to develop a diverse, excellent team of educators. 90% of AUSL principals are African American and their school leaders in training are 84% people of color.
The biggest takeaway from the forum was that while the issues surrounding school turnarounds are complex there is a lot of promise.