The Impact of Turnaround Reform on Student Outcomes: Evidence and Insights from the Los Angeles Unified School District

Abstract

We examine the Los Angeles Unified School District's Public School Choice Initiative (PSCI), which sought to turnaround the district's lowest-performing schools. We ask whether school turnaround impacted student outcomes, and what explains variations in outcomes across reform cohorts. We use a Comparative Interrupted Time Series approach using administrative studentlevel data, following students in the first (1.0), second (2.0), and third (3.0) cohorts of PSCI schools. We find that students in 1.0 turnaround schools saw no significant improvements in outcomes, whereas students enrolled in 2.0 schools saw significant gains in English Language Arts in both years of the reform. Students in 3.0 schools experienced significant decreases in achievement. Qualitative and survey data suggest that increased support and assistance and the use of reconstitution and restart as the sole turnaround methods contributed to gains in 2.0, whereas policy changes in 3.0 caused difficulties and confusion in implementation, leading to poor student performance. U n c o r r e c t e d P r o o f Impact of Turnaround on Student Outcomes A BRIEF REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON SCHOOL TURNAROUND REFORMSSchool turnaround takes many forms, incorporating a variety of strategies that range from dramatic (e.g., school closure and reopening under a new operator or the hiring of new leadership and faculty) to relatively modest (e.g., changes in professional development or curriculum). Under the SIG program, turnaround is given a narrower definition as one of four possible interventions for improving low-performing schools in which schools must replace the principal, fire all of the school staff and rehire no more than half of them, and grant the new principal sufficient flexibility to implement a comprehensive approach to improve student outcomes. The remaining SIG models include "restart", "transformation", and "closure" (USDOE 2010b). 2 Regardless of label, all school turnarounds focus "on the most consistently underperforming schools and involve dramatic, transformative change" quickly-within two to three years (Calkins et al. 2007, p. 10; also see Herman et al. 2008; Villavicencio and Grayman 2012).To date, little evidence exists regarding the efficacy of school turnaround efforts. The U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences What Works practice guide on school turnaround (Herman et al. 2008) found no empirical studies of requisite rigor demonstrating intervention effects. The one notable exception is a recent study that uses a regression discontinuity approach to isolate the impact of SIG-funded reforms on student achievement (Dee 2012). That study finds evidence that SIG-funded school reforms led to significant improvements in the performance of California's lowest-performing schools in their first year of SIG implementation. Importantly, Dee finds the SIG turnaround (often labeled "reconstitution") model drives the positive results and other models are less effective in improving school performance.Much of the remaining rese...

Will Decentralization Affect Educational Inequity? The Every Student Succeeds Act

“…Evidence from California's turnaround efforts indicates that dramatic turnaround models that bring in new leadership and staff, implement new instructional practices, and rely on outcomes-based teacher evaluation systems are particularly effective (T. Dee, 2012). Furthermore, school turnaround evidence from Massachusetts (Schueler, Goodman, & Deming, 2016) points to the efficacy of intensive small-group instruction and evidence from Los Angeles (Strunk, Marsh, Hashim, Bush-Mecenas, & Weinstein, 2016) serves as a cautionary tale about avoiding policy confusion, which could have a negative influence on implementation. Thus, the research base exists to inform policy and practice, but what approach to adopt and how to fund it remains highly controversial.…”

School District Reform in Newark: Within- and Between-School Changes in Achievement Growth

“…Our paper adds to a growing literature on school and district turnarounds (e.g., Abdulkadiroglu, Angrist, Hull & Pathak, 2016;Dee, 2012;Fryer, 2014;Gill, Zimmer, Christman & Blanc, 2007;Harris and Larsen, 2016;Heissel & Ladd, 2016;Papay & Hannon, 2015;Schueler, Goodman & Deming, 2017;Strunk, Marsh, Hashim, Bush & Weinstein, 2016;Young et al, 2009;Zimmer, Kho, Henry & Viano, 2015). As other research has begun to show, turnaround efforts can produce both positive and negative externalities for student achievement growth.…”

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“…And the broader research on school turnaround efforts is not particularly encouraging either. While there have been a few successes (Ruble, ; Schueler, Goodman, & Deming, ), in many instances state and district efforts have failed to produce any notable improvement in student performance (Heissel & Ladd, ; Strunk et al., ; Zimmer, Henry, & Kho, ).…”