Ed Week's Article, “A Kentucky High School Gears Up Amid Building Pressure for Change”, is the first report in a series that will chronicle the transformation of Shawnee High School in Louisville, KY over the 2010-11 school year. While the principal was retained, at least 50% of the HS staff must be replaced as defined by the Dept. of Education’s turnaround model. Despite the possibly obvious challenges of finding and hiring quality teaching candidates, raising expectations for student achievement, and managing the lofty district expectations of “working miracles”, the new staff at Shawnee will do all these things while not having a clear understanding of what the finish line may look like.

In the race to raising student achievement, many states and districts are failing to clearly articulate what success will look like for turnarounds beyond student outcomes; and even these benchmarks are not clearly defined. As articulated by the EdWeek article, how much progress Shawnee must make, and how fast it must demonstrate those gains, is still not clearly defined. To some extent, the schools themselves will define their progress when they propose goals in the improvement plans they must submit to the state education department….however, there’s not a ‘very clear-cut measure of what success is.’ It’s being defined as ‘considerable progress’ toward the goals that the schools outline in their applications.”

Districts and their partners are quite invested in supporting and strengthening the effectiveness of school reform levers (teacher effectiveness, curriculum and assessment, school culture and climate, etc), however, until schools are able to articulate and are clear about what their expected growth and change should be across all areas, comprehensive school reform efforts will continue to literally shoot arrows in the dark. How will school leaders allocate resources effectively or make decisions about programming and strategy if they are unclear about what success looks like? And if the only metric for success is higher student outcomes, how will school leaders know which contributing factor was more effective at producing those outcomes? Was it the teacher professional development, longer school day, greater parent and community member involvement? Without these additional proxies for success and an understanding of what success really means for each school, school leaders will continue to throw resources at all reform levers rather than intentionally aligning strategies to produce each school’s definition of success.