HOW ONE HISTORICALLY UNDERPERFORMING DIVERSE RURAL HIGH SCHOOL ACHIEVED A SUCCESSFUL TURNAROUND

Abstract

“Central High School,” a rural school composed largely of students of color from low income homes, experienced a quick, remarkable turnaround of student academic success, measured by State and Federal accountability standards. This turnaround began with an external restructuring grant initiative that required a state-approved external consultant. A qualitative study of this turnaround reveals that a minimally implemented Accelerated Schools Project was followed by a much stronger Professional Learning Community model developed by the external consultant. The professional literature regarding these two models is reviewed and applied, providing context for a description of the turnaround process at this diverse rural school. The triangulated, chain-sampled interviews are analyzed and supported by student achievement data. Central High School was a historically underperforming rural high school located in the Southern United States with a population of approximately 350 students. Community apathy and unrest, due primarily to racial strife in the school and community, coupled with an entrenched attitude of failure, prevailed throughout both the school and the community. This environment was compounded when the high school was labeled “Unacceptable” by the state accountability system and cited as not having met “Adequate Yearly Progress” or AYP by the federal accountability system during the 2005–2006 and 2006–2007 school years. Additionally, Central High School had not met AYP in 2004–2005. However, in spite of several factors—including the low achievement scores, the deficit attitude within the community and on campus, and shifting demographics of higher percentages of students from low income homes—student performance (as evidenced by substantial gains in the state accountability scores) improved fairly rapidly. This “turnaround” was evidenced most notably when the percentage passing the state assessment scores in math for African-American students, as one selected subgroup, went from 11% passing in the 2002–2003 school year to 71% passing in 2007–2008. Similar results were evidenced in science with African American students’ scores increasing from 5% passing in 2002–2003 to 75% passing in 2007–2008. Thus, Central High stands out as one example of a successful rural turnaround school.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 8 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.