In my last post, responding to Holly Korbey’s call to study successful schools more closely, I argued that education’s deeper problem isn’t discovering success. It’s sustaining it. Again and again, we celebrate high-performing schools at their peak, only to watch—or more pertinently fail to notice—when they drift, decline, or disappear altogether within a decade. This raises a significant and uncomfortable question: If the high-fliers we celebrate and seek to emulate don’t stay aloft, were they really that good to begin with?
When successful schools lose their momentum, the usual suspects are leadership turnover, staff churn, demographic change, political conflict, or the quiet assumption that the success was fragile all along. But many of these factors, particularly staff and leadership changes, are not flaws in our system, they’re features.
The average superintendent typically lasts little more than a single contract cycle. Principals tend to remain only about four years in a given school, with even shorter stints in high-poverty settings. Roughly a third of teachers leave the classroom within five years. Any school improvement model that only works if the adults stay in place isn’t a model—it’s catching lighting in a bottle. What ultimately distinguishes the schools that endure is not whether turnover happens, but whether effective practices have been institutionalized strongly enough to survive it.
Read more at Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
