Schools that educate large numbers of students of color and children from low-income families are far more likely than others to be identified as the lowest-performing in their state, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative arm.
One eye-popping data point: For every 5% increase in the percentage of students living in poverty, a school had a corresponding 42% increased risk of getting flagged as seriously low-performing (a designation called “comprehensive support and improvement” school under the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, the primary federal school accountability and funding law).
That finding is the result of decades of neglect of schools and communities most in need of resources to help their students succeed, said Nicholas Munyan-Penney, assistant director of P-12 policy at EdTrust, an advocacy and equity-focused organization that has tracked ESSA implementation with an emphasis on the law’s impact on marginalized students.
“This really underscores a lack of fundamental resource equity and funding equity in our schools, a consequence of generations upon generations of underinvestment in these communities,” he said. “That’s why we’re seeing this. It’s not because these students are less capable, it’s because we’re not investing in them properly.”
Some factors identified by the GAO made schools less likely to be flagged as low-performing.
For instance, suburban schools were 24% less likely to be identified as seriously struggling, even controlling for other factors, the GAO found. And large schools were 46% less likely than small schools to be singled out as very low-performing.
Schools with fewer students per teacher were also less likely to make the lowest performers list. If a school gained five more students without adding more teachers, its odds of being identified as low-performing increased by 2%, the GAO found.
What’s more, academic performance in these struggling schools appears to have taken an even larger hit from the COVID-19 pandemic than in other schools.
Average proficiency rates in low-performing schools fell by 23% on math tests and 11% on reading tests between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years. That’s compared to 13% and 7%, respectively, for other schools.
Are there specific ingredients for strong school turnarounds?
The positive news from the GAO report and a separate school improvement analysis conducted by EdTrust: There are clear strategies for helping the lowest-performing schools get better, including getting staff buy-in for transformational change, creating a culture of high expectations, and using data to adjust and inform instruction.
“We had to have some honest and tough conversations around ‘all means all,’” one elementary principal told GAO investigators. “All students can learn regardless of who they are or where they come from.”
Under ESSA, districts with the lowest-performing schools must work with teachers and staff to craft and implement an improvement plan grounded in evidence. States must monitor that work. If a school fails to make sufficient progress after a certain number of years (no more than four), the state must step in with its own plan.
That system, outlined in the law, doesn’t always lead to real academic progress.
Fewer than half of district plans for improving the bottom 5% of schools in each state dubbed “dropout factories”—high schools where fewer than two-thirds of students graduate—meet even the bare minimum federal requirements, even though the plans received their state’s seal of approval, according to a separate GAO report, released in 2024. That report considered academic results in the 2019-20 school year, as well as turnaround plans available in 2022.
What’s more, in many cases, low-performing schools did not receive any more funding per pupil to implement turnaround plans, according to a separate analysis by All4Ed, an equity-focused research and advocacy organization, released around the same time. That analysis looked at schools identified as low-performing in the 2018-19 school year.
What set apart schools that managed to leave low-performing status?
Educators in schools that got out from under the lowest-performing status said in the latest GAO report that they were able to improve academic performance by focusing on school culture, getting staff on board with improvement efforts, fostering staff collaboration, relying on student data to inform teaching and learning, and figuring out ways to sustain improvement.
GAO spoke with state leaders in Georgia, Ohio, and Virginia, and interviewed educators at 14 low-performing schools in eight districts in those states to inform its recommendations.
Educators at one school talked about the importance of crafting lessons around grade-level content, even for students who had fallen behind and were missing foundational skills.
Another school leader observed each teacher in their building for 20 minutes each week to determine which instructors needed additional support—and then ensured they received it.
And one leader had teachers observe their peers and offer suggestions to improve their practice.
A separate EdTrust report on school improvement, released this month, also highlighted the importance of leadership and data at the state level in helping struggling schools improve, as well as building trust with school staff.
State leaders working on support for struggling schools also touted the importance of being given autonomy by state education agency leadership and able to pick their own team members.
In the past, states have sometimes focused primarily on ensuring that districts with low-performing schools are checking all of the school improvement boxes required by ESSA, state leaders acknowledged.
But the system works best when they focus on sharing the most promising practices for school improvement and “creating the systems to actually put those practices into schools,” a state school improvement official told EdTrust.
