Leading underperforming schools

Abstract

Like underperforming companies, relationships or governments, the judgments on underperforming schools are often swift and ruthless. Underperforming school chools are frequently polarised as good or bad, and those schools that fail to hit the mark are fair game for media attention and ripe for some sort of public, external intervention. Yet, the whole idea of underperforming schools is so contextually bound, that to group them generically as ‘underperforming’ is meaningless and ultimately, counterproductive. They are far from the same. The fact remains that most schools labelled as underperforming tend to be located in areas of significant disadvantage, whether in rural, coastal, or urban locations. Their poverty levels may be similar, but other contextual factors can vary dramatically. Even so, their performance is weighed and measured in standard ways that assume that contextual factors are unimportant or do not affect the daily lives of the leaders and teachers that work in such settings. This is not to suggest that we accept low standards because of disadvantages but there must be some acknowledgement and acceptance that this is far from a level playing field. Without question, underperformance is a highly sensitive issue. Despite the sensitivities and complexities, in many countries, there is now renewed policy interest in improving schools that are deemed to be underperforming. From various vantage points, underperforming schools are judged as failing to deliver a good educational experience for most students in their care over time. Clearly, this must be addressed, but the measures are taken to ‘improve’ such schools often are intrusive, invasive, and top-down. International evidence suggests that there is no single, comprehensive, definition of an underperforming school, as the contextual factors and influences vary considerably from school to school and from context-to-context (Leithwood, Harris, and Strauss 2010). Whether categorised as schools in difficulty, schools facing challenging circumstances, failing schools, turnaround schools, and schools in special measures, the fact remain that there is no uniformity about underperformance and no silver bullet to address it. Also, the labels do not help. Categorising schools this way is simply a way of devaluing and demeaning them, rendering them publicly as unfit for duty, in some imperfect and unpalatable way. It negates what these schools can do into a negative discourse of what they cannot do. The research tells us that underperforming schools will have moved through various stages of decline, which will be clearly visible to all supporting them, where their ability to accomplish their primary goals steadily diminishes. School failure tends to be a steady and often predictable downward spiral rather than a sudden plummet in performance. Yet, in most cases, only at the point of abject failure does the rescue cavalry come over the hill. Disruption of a steady decline is always perfectly possible given the early warning systems that such schools display, yet often interventions only occur when the school is failing so badly that the situation cannot be ignored any longer (Leithwood, Harris, and Strauss 2013).