Failing to Learn From Failure
Can a low-performing school be turned around without knowing why it was low-performing in the first place?
Failure often courts success. Learning from past mistakes informs future innovation and achievement. Transportation accidents, building collapses, business failures, natural disasters, and even deaths warrant investigations, commissions, and autopsies. Regulators and practitioners study the cause or antecedents of a dire event with the hope of preventing future failures by gaining knowledge that alters existing rules and procedures. But despite the inherent logic and benefit of such inquiries, the field of public education has yet to adopt similar practices.
Instead, the fulcrum of many school reform policies and turnaround strategies has relied on leveraging the elusive notion of “better.” Such school improvement plans focus on better recruiting, training, and pay of school personnel, better use of academic time, implementation of better curricula, access to better early-childhood education, or the betterment of various factors thought to be detrimental to student learning. Proponents of such reforms believe increasing efficiency and effectiveness in these areas will improve troubled school performance. And yet, although some of these initiatives and efforts have dramatically improved once chronically low-performing schools, no single strategy has proven reliably replicable or sustainable.
If the nation is to meet U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s goal of eradicating chronically low-performing schools, then education practitioners, researchers, and policymakers must adopt the probing attitudes and practices of our colleagues from other disciplines. In addition to designing potential turnaround strategies and techniques, educators and researchers need to investigate how and why chronic low performance develops in the first place. Increased understanding of the factors and processes responsible for initiating and facilitating declining school performance will enable the design of more effective...
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