Winter is coming and anyone who has been in New Hampshire for any length of time has probably helped someone retrieve their errant car from a snowbank. When in that predicament, some are expert drivers and accelerate just right to get the car moving; others, however, put their foot on the accelerator, spinning their tires, and actually dig a deeper hole. Undeterred, they just keep at it, spinning the tires in the same spot, imagining – or simply hoping – that the car will somehow start to make progress. It rarely does.
Educational improvement efforts reflect many of the characteristics of this second driver.
For at least a century, New Hampshire and nearly every other state have been developing plans to help turnaround low-performing schools. In his 1922 book, Samuel Brooks, then the school superintendent in Winchester, NH, suggested standardized testing as a way to improve low performing schools.
This trend, toward the development of plans to turn around low performing schools, continues today.
Substantial federal funding – upwards of $15.7 billion in 2018 – is committed to helping improve student achievement each year. Funding in this area has been around at least since 1965 with the original enactment of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The result of big dollars being spent has been the emergence of a “school improvement industry” and considerable growth in the number of school turnaround consultants. Every year, new providers open up shop to sell their services. However, some appear to have little or no expertise or experience in rapidly turning around persistently low-performing schools, noted then-education reporter for the New York Times, Sam Dillon, in 2010.
Under the Every School Succeeds Act (ESSA), New Hampshire receives approximately $40 million per year under Title I to help improve student achievement. This year, the New Hampshire Department of Education will hire consultants at the state level to help schools diagnose academic growth challenges and build innovative turnaround plans. Last month, I read about 200 pages of proposals for turnaround consulting services for our low-performing schools. When I completed the review of the proposals, I mentioned to my colleagues that I could summarize the various vendor proposals in one sentence – “We’ve been turning around the same schools for the past 40 years.”
Of course, this sentence incorporates a degree of humor. And rest assured, we will focus on contracting with a firm that will deliver results for New Hampshire. However, two professors from the University of Virginia released a study this month that seems to indicate that my statement is not too far from the truth.
In their study, So Many Educational Service Providers, So Little Evidence, Coby Meyers and Bryan VanGronigen analyzed the effectiveness of these “so called” education turnaround consulting firms. The results are not pretty.
Meyers and VanGronigen evaluated 151 school-turnaround providers across 13 states (New Hampshire was not one of the states in the evaluation but many of the providers are working in multiple states). “Of the 151 providers identified in this study, only 17 (11 percent) had evidence of impact – experimental or quasi experimental research showing significant student achievement outcomes such as test scores and attendance, graduation, and dropout rates. Of those, only 7 (5 percent) had evidence of impact on student outcomes in samples focused on low-performing schools.”
Let that sink in for a minute.
States are hiring consulting firms to turnaround low performing schools and less than 5 percent of those firms have actually demonstrated that they have ever successfully done the work.
Like that driver that gets stuck in a snowbank and lets rip on the accelerator but just spins their tires and digs a deeper hole, education turnaround efforts for low performing schools seem stuck. While our educators work really hard to overcome the barriers, even here in New Hampshire, we see some of the same schools appear on the low performing list, again and again.
There are some who will read this and view it as a criticism of our education system. It is not. It is a call to self-reflection and a willingness to step out of our comfort zone. We can keep doing the same thing and imagine – even hope – that it will result in a different outcome. But I think we would all agree that the students and teachers in under-performing schools deserve better. We, as a state, and as a community, need to be willing to try something different and get education improvement efforts unstuck.
Frank Edelblut is the commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Education.
