High School Turnaround: From Hope to Despair in Providence

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Turning around struggling high schools has been much in the news lately across the nation. Providence, Rhode Island, the Annenberg Institute’s hometown, is no exception.

In last Monday’s edition of the Providence Journal, Linda Borg described an all-too-familiar occurrence in high school reform in urban communities. The Providence School Department (PSD), with support from the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE), is once again setting a new course for reform at Hope High School — a chronically underperforming school that has been serving as a laboratory for reforms by RIDE, PSD, colleges and universities, philanthropies, and community groups for much of the past two decades.

In the early 1990s, Hope became the home of an Essential School, a small learning community established by the Coalition of Essential of Schools to reflect their principles for school design. Later that decade, RIDE lead an effort to restructure Hope into three small learning communities designed to support teacher and student collaboration, rich and rigorous learning opportunities, and meaningful community engagement. These endeavors, undertaken with the support of multiple partners and funders, were designed to reflect the needs and aspirations of the community, as well as research on best practice. In spite of this tremendous investment in reform, Hope has been unable to remove the label of failure from its mantle.

But does this failure reside solely within the school, as the label and interventions imply? And why is this pattern so prevalent among urban high schools, given the range of research that describes a consistent set of best practices like these found in schools that have succeeded in improving in New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia?¹ In these studies, improving schools:

• offered high-quality college preparatory courses;
  
  
• provided networks of timely supports based on regular data monitoring by faculty and administrators;
  
  
• delivered meaningful, ongoing professional development within the school and individual classrooms, led by teacher leaders and other specialists;
  
  
• structured the school day and year to extend time and supports for student, parent, and educator learning and development, supported by external partnerships with colleges and universities, arts and cultural groups, businesses, faith institutions, etc.;
  
  
• collaborated with researchers, parents, and practitioners to strengthen school and community capacity to use research and data to identify problems and develop solutions;
  
  
• worked with students, parents, external partners, and civic agencies to create a climate of safety, trust, and reciprocal accountability rather than blame and finger-pointing.

These studies illuminate common features of school success. But they often fail to address the role districts and, to a lesser extent, state education agencies can play in sustaining or undermining these efforts.

The “school” reforms depend on districts’ capacity to develop evaluations and assessments that reinforce and incentivize these practices, rather than encourage behaviors that are irrelevant or unrelated to them. Districts must also develop educator and administrator recruitment, induction, and assignment policies that foster professional learning communities in schools. Failing schools often experience a constant churn of practitioners and administrators that undermines trust, knowledge, and shared accountability among educators and between educators, parents, students, and external partners. This churn is produced by factors within the school — but it is also aggravated by district policies that should be scrutinized and changed.

In addition to creating a trusting and accountable professional community, successful schools use research and other forms of data to guide and improve their practice. Here again, the district and external partners have an important role to play in developing the training, research partnerships, and data systems needed to help school-based practitioners and their partners become effective and discerning users of research and data.

Finally, in successful schools, partnerships with parents, youth, and external organizations provide essential supports that enrich learning and development. These partnerships work best when they align with and augment curriculum and instruction and focus on the needs of students and practitioners, rather than the interests of particular partners. Developing the capacities needed to form these relationships and ensure that they are distributed equitably within and across schools is the joint responsibility of the district and the school. Yet, few studies report how districts support these efforts. For the most part, these studies point to school and community leaders who become celebrated for warding off district efforts that undermine school success rather than support it.

In short, this research demonstrates that sustaining high school reform requires a heroic, aligned, and sustained effort on the part of schools, communities, partners, and districts. All of these partners deserve credit when these efforts succeed, and all deserve scrutiny and blame when well-intentioned and research-based reforms fail to take root. We are all responsible for Hope’s despair — and we must make the effort to understand how we need to alter our relations and work to fulfill Hope’s promise.

FOOTNOTE
See C. Ascher and C. Maguire, Beating the Odds: How Thirteen NYC Schools Bring Low-Performing Ninth-Graders to Timely Graduation and College Enrollment (Providence, RI: Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, 2009; A. S. Bryk, P. B. Sebring, E. Allensworth, S. Luppescu, and J. Q. Easton, Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Public Citizens for Children and Youth, From At-Risk to On-Track: Lessons from Philadelphia Schools that Beat The Odds (Philadelphia, PA: PCCY, 2008).

PREPARED BY
Warren Simmons
Executive Director
Annenberg Institute for School Reform
Warren_Simmons@brown.edu