Adriana Harrington is the Managing Director of Policy for ExcelinEd.
Focus schools. Priority schools. Comprehensive support and improvement schools. Level 1 schools.
Despite the sometimes euphemistic and otherwise bureaucratic names, all of these labels refer to one common element: turnaround schools. They represent the bottom 5% of low performing schools in each state and require some of the most drastic actions to ensure students do not perennially fall further behind.
All states have a responsibility for both mandating and supporting school turnarounds. One of the most powerful levers states have to do this is state and federal school improvement funding. Under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act, 7% of total Title I School Improvement funds must be used for turnaround efforts. For a state like Florida, that annually comes to $59 million; in Tennessee, it totals $22 million.
Title I funds can supplement (provide more to) at-risk students but not supplant (replace) what schools should be getting anyway in their state and local funds.
While this supplement vs. supplant rule is critical to ensuring states don’t shortchange schools on much-needed state dollars, it is also considered by local education leaders as an obstacle to holistic and need-based spending. Anything that is required to provide a basic education or listed in a state board policy cannot be funded with Title I School Improvement dollars. In practice this means schools and districts end up having to spend more of their flexible state/local funds on requirements and then—due to necessity—have to spend their Title I funds on other non-innovative items.
For example, if a state board passes a policy that is more restrictive than the federal law, such as requiring response to instruction and intervention, Title I funds can no longer be used to fund that policy. Or if a school needs new textbooks, they cannot be purchased with Title I funds because that is a foundational element of accessing an education.
The work of turning around persistently failing schools is difficult—and it requires flexibility to do well, including flexibility in spending. Yet local educators often struggle to understand where flexibility exists. One principal from Hamilton County, Tennessee summed it up this way: “As soon as we think outside the box and try to do it differently, we hit that barrier.”
Two states have adopted practices that do just that:
Access to additional funding is often key to school turnaround. And guidance and training to ensure that funds are spent in innovative ways that target the root cause of the challenge is imperative to helping turnaround efforts succeed. Now about those turnaround names…
