This is some of the hardest work in education.
That was Chris Barbic's message in July when he said he'd be stepping down as superintendent of a special Tennessee school district responsible for fixing the state's worst schools.
Barbic's resignation comes as legislators in states across the country - including Pennsylvania - consider creating similar special districts for their lowest performers. So-called turnaround districts are already up and running in three states: Louisiana, Michigan, and Tennessee. They share many strategies: converting some schools into charters; replacing teachers and administrators; giving staff more freedom when it comes to curriculum, hiring and budgeting; and, in some cases, pumping in more money.
But, more than a decade after the first such district was founded in Louisiana, the results remain mixed. Turning around high schools - where the stakes are arguably highest as students prepare to head out into the real world - has proven to be particularly frustrating for reformers.
A Pennsylvania district, like the Tennessee one, would be taking on the hardest cases - focusing on schools that rank in the state's bottom 5 percent. Kelly Phenicie, executive director of the Pennsylvania Senate Education Committee, said she imagines that the district would work almost exclusively with the bottom 1 percent. According to Senate staffers, there are 28 such schools (including six high schools). The majority are in Philadelphia.
Phenicie said they know that it won't be easy to turn around the state's worst schools, which in some cases have been struggling for more than a decade, but she added that Pennsylvania's district would benefit from the lessons learned in Louisiana, Michigan, and Tennessee. One such lesson is that success in turnaround districts isn't cheap or easy, especially at the high school level.
Julie Corbett, a consultant who specializes in turnaround strategies, said that high school turnarounds, especially, need more than a new curriculum and higher expectations: "Educators need to be thinking about dental care, health care, weekend jobs, child care for young moms, and the list goes on. It is key to figure out early on all the wraparound supports the school needs."
Louisiana's Recovery School District, the largest of the three, has been grappling with these issues since it was founded in 2003. The RSD ballooned in size in 2005 after state legislators handed over nearly all of New Orleans' public schools to the RSD in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina - eventually, all of those schools were converted into charters.
Ten years later, it's hotly debated how well the RSD has worked. Graduation rates are up and nearly 60 percent of RSD third- through eighth-graders now pass state tests - but more than half of high school students fail. ACT average scores have improved, but at 16.6 out of 36 (around the 25th percentile) remain far below Louisiana's already low statewide average. The results in Tennessee and Michigan have similarly been both encouraging and disheartening.
In Louisiana, Collegiate Academies are often seen as a bright spot. One of their schools, Sci Academy, has sent poor black students to elite colleges such as Grinnell and Middlebury and was named the second best high school in Louisiana by U.S News and World Report in 2014.
But Ben Marcovitz, who founded Sci Academy when he was 28 years old, cautions that the network's success is very difficult to replicate.
"Once you get to high school, there's so many more years a student could be behind, it's not unusual for ninth graders to be reading at a fourth-grade level," he said. "But even beyond those kinds of challenges, there is this growing mistrust that young people have for adults at that age. That's for a lot of teenagers, but particularly so for kids in poverty."
Unlike Louisiana and Tennessee, Michigan didn't benefit from millions of dollars in federal funds and many attribute some of the district's initial problems to that fact. Phenicie, the executive director of Pennsylvania's Senate Education Committee, said they hope to get $4 million to set up the Pennsylvania district and plan to start looking for good charter operators as soon as the legislature approves the district.
This article was produced by the Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.