Students gather outside of a campus that’s part of Tennessee's Achievement School District during the school turnaround program's early years in Memphis. (Kyle Kurlick for Chalkbeat)
New research shows middle school students exiting Tennessee’s two primary school turnaround models experienced few educational gains in high school, raising new questions about the much-scrutinized strategies.
In fact, there’s evidence that assignment to a school operated by the state-run Achievement School District, the more ambitious and aggressive of the two models, generally worsened high school test scores.
And assignment to a middle school campus in the Innovation Zone, a locally run school improvement program in Memphis and other cities, led to worse math scores in high school.
Neither initiative made a significant dent on ACT scores or high school graduation rates. Data related to attendance, chronic absenteeism, and disciplinary actions wasn’t encouraging, either.
The research, published by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute, offers the biggest indictment so far of the Achievement School District, where most students didn’t show short-term gains either.
And it fills a crucial gap in data about the Innovation Zone, where early achievement gains faded as middle school students moved on to non-iZone high schools that offered fewer interventions and support.
“Our findings suggest that reform policies may need to be designed in a way that is connected across school levels to support students throughout their K-12 educational experience,” the paper says.
Long-term effects of school turnaround reforms have been understudied
Both of Tennessee’s turnaround programs launched in 2012 during the Obama administration’s push for systemic reforms to improve teaching and learning in America’s public schools.
But so far, most research on their effectiveness has focused on short-term results such as annual standardized test scores.
The latest analysis looked at how students performed in high school after attending a turnaround middle school up through the 2017-18 school year. It’s based on data from test scores, attendance, chronic absenteeism, disciplinary actions, dropouts, and graduation.
The research should inform imminent state and local decisions about changes to turnaround work across Tennessee. It also has national implications for reforms aimed at making swift and dramatic improvement to persistently low-performing schools. The models pioneered in Tennessee, with Memphis as their hub, overlap with ongoing turnaround work in states such as Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, and North Carolina.
Such reforms have received billions of dollars in federal funding through the Race to the Top competition and school improvement grants, plus from philanthropic groups. Their success is especially important to students of color and from low-income families, who are disproportionately served by those campuses. These students also experienced the largest decreases in student achievement as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
