#34 Blog: Failure doesn't teach you anything about success: Why school turnaround research keeps missing the mark

A pathologist’s autopsy report can tell you exactly how a patient died. But it tells you absolutely nothing about how to live a long, vibrant life. For twenty years, K-12 education has been running an autopsy model. We call it "school turnaround." Between 2010 and 2016, the federal School Improvement Grants program poured roughly $7 billion into turning around struggling schools. The result? Null impacts on math, reading, and graduation rates. As Marcus Buckingham puts it: “Failure doesn't teach you anything about success.” Instead of spending all our energy auditing the bottom 5% and studying what broke, what if we systematically studied our "positive deviants"? What if we found the classrooms, schools, and districts that are already producing 5-star experiences with the exact same resources and engineered the conditions for those bright spots to spread? In our latest blog post and podcast episode, we break down why the turnaround industry keeps missing the mark, and share 3 moves district and state leaders can make right now to shift their strategy from deficit remediation to scaling what works.