I experienced the power of data analysis in the summer of 2020 when the then-CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, Janice Jackson, endorsed the importance of findings on high-churn schools.
Dr. Jackson’s response was a step toward bringing system attention to school-level challenges and needs that the educational community—with its singular focus on instructional improvement—typically does not recognize, understand or prioritize. This omission has profound implications for equity and is evident in school leadership training, as well as other areas of educational policy and practice, notably including accountability systems. Meanwhile, research and evaluation studies are accumulating powerful findings that support attention to the challenges and needs of high-churn schools.
The pandemic experience drives home the need for educational policy makers, administrators and researchers to finally recognize the distinctiveness of high-churn schools and to tailor supports and accountability policies that are responsive to their specific characteristics, conditions and student populations.
An opinion piece I wrote for Education Week with a Chapin Hall colleague when turnaround schools were “hot” and NCLB-style accountability reigned puts Dr. Jackson’s response in perspective. We argued that it is essential that education policy makers attend to the needs of vulnerable students. But according to Chapin Hall researchers, this population is too often dismissed or overlooked as a small subgroup. Data analysis on high-churn schools shifts the argument from a “smallish student subgroup” to the large number of schools serving vulnerable students. I found a pattern in Chicago that elementary schools with high rates of student mobility, homeless students and chronic absenteeism tend to perform in the bottom half of the accountability system. They are 30% of Chicago’s elementary schools and most serve predominately Black student populations. Almost all schools that are stable in their enrollment and attendance, including those that serve Black students, perform in the upper half of the accountability system and are in Good Standing. The lowest performing schools on the CPS accountability system are overwhelmingly high-churn schools.
In 2010, weI wrote: The lives of vulnerable children and youth and the performance of their schools are intertwined. High-churn schools and their performance on the accountability system is evidence of this observation.