Strategies to Fix Failing Schools and Districts

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At least 5,000 public schools, serving more than 3 million children, are considered failing in the United States because they have failed to meet their academic achievement targets for at least five consecutive years. A new issue brief released today by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) offers states ideas to fix failing schools and districts.

State Strategies for Fixing Failing Schools and Districts looks at ways to cope with the underlying causes of failing schools including: weak leadership; inadequate skill levels among teachers; and insufficient, high-quality teaching materials.

"The underlying causes of school failure are similar, regardless of whether the schools are located in urban, rural or suburban communities," said John Thomasian, director of the NGA Center. "In a time when states and localities must maximize their investments, this brief describes what states can do to move these schools quickly and permanently out of the failing category."

In 2009, the NGA Center awarded competitive grants to four states to participate in the State Strategies to Improve Chronically Low-Performing Schools project. The project provided Colorado, Maryland, Massachusetts and Mississippi with grant funds and consulting services to develop policies and plans that create the conditions to turn around chronically low-performing schools and districts. It yielded valuable lessons and suggested strategies that states and territories can use to fix failing schools and districts.

States can use the lessons learned from the NGA Center's project, along with new federal funding, to step up their efforts to fix failing schools and districts in these ways:

- Build state capacity to support the turnaround of failing schools and districts;
- Engage external partners to manage school and district turnarounds;
- Set ambitious but realistic goals for school improvement that incorporate multiple measures;
- Develop a human capital strategy to improve the quality of leadership and teaching; and
- Increase state authority to intervene in failing schools and districts, if other approaches prove insufficient.

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