The U.S. Department of Education has prioritized “turning around” our nation’s chronically under-performing schools (Gewertz, 2009). However, some practitioners and scholars have argued that individual school turnaround efforts are unlikely to produce dramatic improvements. Instead, district-wide reforms are needed to create the conditions and capacity for their lowest-performing schools to succeed in the long-run (Zavadsky, 2013). While researchers have examined efforts to turnaround individual schools, such as the federally funded School Improvement Grants program (Dee, 2012) and Comprehensive School Reform models (Borman, Hewes, Overman, & Brown, 2003), less is known about the effects of district-wide reform.

Additionally, one potential strategy for school improvement is the implementation of practices employed by a select group of high-performing charter schools in low-performing, non-charter public schools. Skeptics of this approach argue that these charter practices may not be effective in a bureaucratic public school district setting. However, economist Roland Fryer finds that injecting some of these strategies into low-performing traditional public schools in Houston, Texas had a substantial positive effect on students’ mathematics achievement, but no discernable effect on reading (Fryer, 2013).   

Massachusetts’ Lawrence Public Schools (LPS) turnaround initiative provides a unique opportunity to examine the early effects of a district-wide effort to utilize high-performing charter school practices to turnaround chronically under-achieving traditional public schools. In the fall of 2011, due to poor performance, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education placed the LPS in state receivership and began implementing turnaround efforts in the 2012-13 school year. Their strategy included increased school-level autonomy, higher expectations, human capital improvements, a greater emphasis on data use, and increased learning time (Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2012).

We rely on student-level, administrative data on Massachusetts students from 2008 to 2013 to conduct a differences-in-differences analysis that allows us to compare the achievement trends of Lawrence students to the achievement trends of a comparable group of students who did not experience turnaround. Our preliminary results suggest that Lawrence students made substantial improvements in math achievement during the first year of the turnaround. This finding is robust to a number of different specifications. We do not find effects in reading. 

We also explore which aspects of the turnaround were associated with the largest improvements. First, we calculate achievement gains by school and compare these findings to data from interviews with senior district officials outlining which components of the turnaround were implemented in which schools (e.g., extended time, new leadership, tutoring). Second, we examine the effects of one particular component of the receiver’s expanded learning time efforts: the “Acceleration Academies.” This program provided struggling students with targeted, data-driven instruction delivered by a select group of educators over vacation breaks, and has potential for scalability. We find that participation in an ELA Acceleration Academy positively predicts gains on ELA achievement, and math participation predicts improved math performance. Going forward, we plan to utilize propensity score matching to further examine the effects of these Acceleration Academies.