School Turnaround Program Did Little To Boost Achievement: Study

NEW YORK — New York City's attempt to turn around struggling schools did little to improve student achievement despite its reportedly hefty price tag, a newly published study shows.

The RAND Corporation examined the first two full years of the city's so-called Renewal Schools program, which aimed to save 94 schools from closure by providing them with additional resources. City officials said in February that the program would not continue in its current form.

While the program helped improve attendance and reduce chronic absenteeism, it had no statistically significant impacts on measures of student achievement, the study found. The study was published Friday and its findings were first reported by Chalkbeat.

Though researchers said that the program had positive effects, the analysis gives evidence of its middling results despite the city reportedly spending more than three-quarters of a billion dollars on it.

Nevertheless, schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said the study showed "promising results" from Renewal's initial years and called the program "an important and necessary investment."The study did not include Renewal's last full school year in 2017-18.

"Renewal helped us understand what works and what doesn’t in school turnaround, and we’re using the lessons learned to improve schools citywide," Carranza said in a statement.

The Renewal initiative started in 2014 with 94 schools. About half of them closed, merged or made enough progress to graduate from the program, leaving 50 schools in the current academic year.

The RAND study, prepared for the chancellor's office, assessed the initiative's impact by comparing Renewal schools to similar schools that just missed the cutoff to be eligible for the program. The analysis focused on the 2015-16 and 2016-17 school years, the first two years in which Renewal was fully implemented.

While the program had a "positive" effect on the schools' scores on the state math and English exams, the difference was too small to be statistically significant, the study says.

Renewal schools also had a slightly worse dropout rate than similar schools, researchers found, and there weren't any statistically significant impacts on graduation rates or the rates of students taking Advanced Placement exams.

But there were some signs that the program helped in some ways. Renewal schools saw their attendance rates rise by about 1.5 percentage points, the study found, and the program led to a five-point reduction in the share of students who were chronically absent, meaning they missed school more than 10 percent of the time.

There was also a slight increase in the number of high school credits that students at Renewal schools earned, the study says.

Those metrics are classified as "leading indicators," which show early signs of progress toward improvement, while state test scores and graduation rates are examples of "lagging indicators" that show up later in time.

DOE figures suggest that Renewal has helped schools make greater progress than the study lets on. The share of students in Renewal schools who got proficient scores on the state English and math exams increased 17.2 and 10.8 percentage points, respectively, from the start of the program through the end of the 2017-18 school year, according to the department.

The schools also saw their overall graduation rate rise 19.6 percentage points, while their overall dropout rate fell 3.9 points, the DOE says.

The department also said that the study did not examine Renewal schools that were struggling the most at the program's start, some of which have made the biggest academic gains.