The persistence of underperforming schools is one of the most significant challenges in American K-12 education today. Policymakers have long worked to overcome this issue by putting into place “school turnaround” initiatives, which often focus on restructuring classrooms and replacing staff in the hopes of producing improved student learning outcomes.
“According to state legislation, schools that have been underperforming for a long time need to restructure their school and their instruction to meet certain state academic standards. One practice for restructuring the school system is called school turnaround. [During this process] a lot of change happens within the school,” explains senior researcher, Haibin Jiang, of the Mary E. Walsh Center for Thriving Children. Jiang comes with a strong background in Economics and statistical methodology. The majority of his research involves using applied econometric methods to analyze policies impacting children.
Jiang explains, “The turnaround process can introduce dramatic changes to a school, which may leave already vulnerable students feeling even more disoriented. Students in turnaround schools are mostly high-need and belong to historically marginalized subgroups, and thus are the students who need support the most. For those students, [comprehensive] services play an important role. Having an additional support staff member who is equipped with knowledge about student support and a systemic approach can help mitigate the impact of these changes.”
Students in schools undergoing turnaround often face multifaceted challenges that extend far beyond changes in the classroom, such as poverty, food insecurity, and inadequate access to health care. There is growing evidence pointing to the important role that addressing critical out-of-school factors play in yielding lasting improvements for schools and student achievement.
“There’s evidence that for schools undergoing a school turnaround process, it is really important to have a systematic intervention with support for students to address their out-of-school barriers,” Jiang says.
His latest research, which he developed alongside co-authors Yan Leigh and Mary E. Walsh, “The Role of Comprehensive Student Support Interventions during School Turnaround,” investigates this crucial gap by examining how a targeted comprehensive support system impacts academic achievement during the turnaround process.
The findings provide valuable insight for education leaders, emphasizing the capacity of comprehensive student support to promote and enhance the success of school turnaround.
The study focuses on the City Connects model, an integrated student support practice grounded in developmental science that aims to address the out-of-school factors that can impact a student’s readiness to learn.
City Connects addresses these challenges by identifying both strengths and needs of each student and ensuring that students are referred to a customized set of supports, services, and opportunities. A City Connects Coordinator, a member of the school’s student support staff, works to leverage school- and community-resources and partnerships to connect these services and opportunities to the right student at the right time.
In essence, City Connects weaves supportive relationships and resources around each student, and creates a proactive, responsive system of support that functions like a shock absorber during times of change. During periods of dramatic school turnaround restructuring, City Connects can ensure that each student is seen and supported, and that important relationships, resources, and opportunities that keep students engaged, provide a sense of belonging, and meet their out-of-school needs are in place.
The research employs a quasi-experimental design to analyze data from a large school district in Massachusetts. The study compares standardized test scores in Math and English Language Arts (ELA) for students in grades 3-8 across two groups of underperforming schools undergoing turnaround. This included schools that implemented City Connects and schools that did not implement City Connects in order to measure the role of comprehensive student support during school turnaround.
The findings pointed to a positive link between turnaround schools that implemented City Connects and greater student academic achievement compared to those that did not implement City Connects.
Specifically, the findings from the most conservative estimates show that receiving City Connects during turnaround was associated with an increase of:
- 0.163 standard deviations in Math.
- 0.139 standard deviations in ELA.
“This can be translated to about one quarter to one third of a school year’s instruction,” says Jiang.
This research strongly suggests that while instructional reforms are essential components of school turnaround improvement, they are most effective when paired with comprehensive student support efforts.
For policymakers and schools, these results hold significant implications for implementing effective turnaround strategies.
“For policymakers that intend to improve schools and address achievement gaps, it’s important for them to know that in order for schools to have effective restructuring, they have to combine this effort with interventions that can address student out-of-school factors. A multi-tiered intervention tailored to a student’s specific needs is very important to achieve the academic goals of restructuring,” explains Jiang.
Though many school turnaround efforts have been challenged to produce improved educational outcomes for students, these research findings point to the complementary role that comprehensive systems of student support can play in efforts to improve instruction and restructure a school, so that every student is supported to learn and thrive.
