'Turnaround specialists' help low-performing schools succeed

During her years as a teacher, she said, “people were always sending you these academic coaches. Quite frankly, they didn’t have a clue what they were doing. They weren’t even familiar with working in an urban school or with the student population you worked with.”

But Chartier, who was only in her second year as a principal at Northeastern Elementary School in Kalamazoo, Mich., had a good feeling when she met with Richard Wood and Helen L. Burz.

The pair were hired and quickly built a good rapport with the school faculty. They helped Chartier and her teachers brainstorm solutions to academic problems and a poor school climate.

As changes took hold, test scores began to rise. Finally, the 350-student school met its adequate yearly progress goals (AYP) for the first time in years.

“I think this coaching model is wonderful,” Chartier says. “Because of their expertise and the way that Rick and Helen developed relationships with the staff, they were able to make a big impact.”

That impact is exactly what the Alliance for Building Capacity in Schools (ABCS), a collaborative effort of several Michigan education organizations, had in mind.

Wood and Burz are among 50 or so turnaround specialists now working for ABCS. They have been trained to help principals and educators improve instruction and raise test scores.

The idea of turnaround specialists is hardly new. State intervention programs, private consultants, and ad hoc assistance teams from the central office have been around for years. But these resources are proving inadequate, particularly as more schools run afoul of the No Child Left Behind Act’s constantly rising standards.

So, in the last few years, a number of states, education associations, and universities have launched new programs to build up the cadre of turn­around specialists -- often modeled on the experiences of consultants in the corporate world.

For example, the academic coaches at ABCS were trained using a model by organizational development expert and professor emeritus Edgar H. Schein of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Barbara Markle, assistant dean for K-12 outreach at Michigan State University’s College of Education.

Most of the coaches are retired administrators. They undergo 15 days of intensive training on how to help principals and teachers analyze student demographic and achievement data, identify and prioritize school needs and goals, and develop a sustainable plan of improvement and new approaches to teaching, learning, and leadership.

“The idea is that turnaround specialists don’t go in with answers,” Markle said. “They go in with an attitude of inquiry. Issues can only be solved by the schools. What these coaches do is help the school identify the issues and identify areas of improvement, and through an inquiry-based process, they help school personnel think through what they’re doing and what they could do better.”

That’s how things work when Hunt and Burz arrive at their schools. “We go meet with the principals first, get to know them, and they get to know us,” Burz says. “Then we visit the classrooms, so teachers get to know us. We do an audit, just to analyze what we saw, and then we give feedback to the principal.”

At Northeastern, Hunt used his background in technology to help Chartier and teachers identify the data needed to determine where instructional changes were in order, Hunt said. Meanwhile, Burz provided professional development for teaching writing and helped teachers design a writing program to help boost standardized test scores.

An important advantage of bringing in a turnaround specialist is that, as long as they earn the faculty’s confidence, outside advice helps a principal push for change, Chartier says. “I could see what had to be done, but it was very difficult for teachers to always hear it from me. Having an outside person come in . . . validated what I knew had to be done. They were able to make a big impact, because they were respected by the staff.”

How much time a coach spends in a school varies depending on need, Markle said. Some can spend most of each week in a single school or visit occasionally once reforms are well under way.”

What’s important is that there’s a long-term commitment to the improvement process, Chartier said. “Being a principal can be a kind of lonely job. I don’t have an assistant, so it’s nice to have some of my professional feelings validated, to have someone to talk to about what was going on, and just have the moral support to hang in there.”

In Virginia, a two-year-old program overseen by the University of Virginia’s Darden/ Curry Partnership for Leaders in Education and funded by the state and Microsoft’s Partners in Learning Initiative, is taking a different tack. The Virginia School Turnaround Specialists Program is training principals to walk into troubled schools and lead the effort to turn them around.

Many program participants are administrators with some experience in turning around a school, while others are newly named principals being groomed to be a change agent, said LeAnn Buntrock, communications director for the program.

Principals spend a week learning about data-driven decision making, team building, motivation techniques, and the “art of influence” -- strategies modeled after techniques used by high-flying corporate turnaround specialists who overhaul floundering companies. Additional training and support is provided on a regular basis in the months and years that follow.

To participate, a school district must commit to providing the personnel, technical expertise, and other resources necessary to support the school improvement plan developed by each principal and his or her faculty, Buntrock said. Part of that support includes the naming of a district-office support team for each principal.

“We really believe, for this to be sustainable, that we’ve got to take a systemic approach right off the bat,” she said. “So, for the first two-and-a-half days, the district support team is involved in the training.”

One unique aspect of the program is that the turnaround specialist program won’t accept a principal who has been in a school for more than a year, Buntrock said. Turning around a school means bringing in a new change agent.

“That’s based partly on what we’ve learned from the business world,” she said. “A turnaround tends to be more successful with a new person in place. . . . A lot of time, you need to change the culture of expectations, and that can sometimes be hard to do with the same person who’s been there.”

But why bring in a local principal -- and not a high-flying specialist -- to do the turnaround and then move that expert to the next troubled school? That was the original intent, Buntrock says, when then-Gov. Mark R. Warner expressed interest in creating the Virginia program. But it quickly became apparent that the corporate model of a turnaround specialist wouldn’t work.

First, Buntrock said, it isn’t that easy to find administrators with the interest and basic talent to take on the task of turning around a troubled school. “And when you do, they’re not always willing to pick up and move to another school. That’s one difference between corporations and education -- our turnaround specialists aren’t getting multimillion-dollar contracts.”

But the approach is getting the desired results, Buntrock said. In the first year of the program, turnaround specialists helped seven out of 10 schools meet their AYP goals, while others showed gains. That success has been sustained in subsequent years, although principals are finding it takes longer to turn around secondary schools.

That success has garnered attention. This year’s group of turnaround-specialists-in-training includes administrators from Chicago, Philadelphia, and Broward County, Fla. And New Mexico officials have indicated their desire to participate.

How this approach works in the future will depend a lot on the structure of turnaround specialist programs.

A warning about how not to run a program was shared in a report by the Washington, D.C.-based Center on Education Policy. It found that turnaround efforts in the Prince George’s County, Md., school system were disappointing because school officials had given the turnaround duties to already-busy mid-level administrators instead of appointing full-time change agents.

Many principals met with their turnaround specialists no more than once or twice a week -- and some saw their specialists only occasionally.