Chapter 2: The Failure Fallacy: Examining the Rate of School Turnaround

For a variety of reasons, the efforts to turn around persistently low-achieving (PLA) schools have received a substantial amount of criticism. Since 2008, the federal government has allocated billions of dollars to support the turnaround of PLA schools (CGCS, 2015). In addition, thousands of educators have been terminated or transferred under the auspices of school turnaround policies and initiatives (Hochbein & Carpenter, 2016). Despite these expenditures and alterations, the overwhelming number of schools identified as PLA have not demonstrated even modest improvement (Stuit, 2012; Trujillo & Renee, 2015).

Citing the lack of PLA schools that improved under school turnaround efforts, critics have declared school turnaround a failed educational reform. In addition, advocates of competing school reforms have utilized the poor rate of turnaround as a “causal story” to justify alternative educational reforms (Stone, 1989). For instance, proponents of school closure and charter schools have advocated for their positions by citing turnaround failure rates: “When conscientiously applied strategies fail to drastically improve America’s lowest-performing schools, we need to close them” (Smar- ick, 2010, p. 21). However, judging school turnaround reform by the failure rate relies on faulty reasoning and ignores evidence.