What are the lowest-performing schools doing to improve?

According to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, nearly half of America's lowest-performing schools managed to improve enough to shed their struggling status within three years, according to a new government report — but the overall number of schools in crisis is still climbing, driven by deepening poverty and chronic absenteeism that shows no sign of easing.

No public school wants to be labelled as failing. Across the country, states identify their weakest performers, pull them into improvement programmes and direct extra resources their way. The stakes are high — what happens inside these buildings shapes the futures of some of the most vulnerable children in the country. Decades of reform efforts have shown just how difficult it is to turn things around, yet some schools have managed to do exactly that.

Schools earn the Comprehensive Support and Improvement designation, known as CSI, when they rank among the bottom five percent of Title I schools in their state — institutions that receive federal funding because they serve large numbers of children from low-income families — or when their graduation rate falls below 67 percent. Schools where specific groups of students have failed to make progress over a state-defined period are also included. Maryland, for instance, requires schools to show measurable improvement within three years. Once designated, these schools receive targeted federal funding, additional resources and hands-on help implementing turnaround plans.

Certain characteristics make a school more likely to end up on the CSI list. A higher proportion of students living in poverty, larger numbers of students with disabilities, and a worse student-to-teacher ratio all increase the risk of designation. On the other hand, suburban location, a higher share of Asian students, charter school status and larger enrolment of more than a thousand pupils are all associated with a lower likelihood of being flagged.

Between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years, the share of public schools carrying the CSI designation rose from 6.5 percent to 7.3 percent. For many of these schools, the underlying conditions that drove them onto the list in the first place are not improving — they are getting worse. More students were living in deep poverty in 2022-23 than three years earlier, and a growing number of schools were flagged on multiple grounds at once, struggling with both low academic performance and low graduation rates simultaneously.

Despite that grim trajectory, the data contains a meaningful bright spot. Researchers found that 46 percent of schools identified as CSI in 2019-20 had improved their results sufficiently to exit that status by 2022-23. Whether that represents genuine progress is difficult to assess in isolation, however, because federal law allows each state to set its own exit criteria. Vermont permits schools to leave the designation once they demonstrate significant improvement against state benchmarks. Ohio, by contrast, requires schools to meet exit criteria for two consecutive years before they can shed the label — a considerably more demanding standard.

To understand what drives successful turnarounds, researchers spoke directly with educators — conducting interviews across three state education agencies, eight school districts and fourteen individual schools. Those conversations identified a consistent set of strategies that helped schools climb out of CSI status.

Effective leadership came up time and again as the foundation on which everything else rested. Agreement from the top down was described as essential. One elementary school principal captured the mindset: the most important thing was making sure every person in the building understood their share of responsibility and their specific role in the effort. Honest, difficult conversations had to happen around the idea that every student, regardless of who they are or where they come from, is capable of learning.

Combining multiple approaches also proved more powerful than relying on any single strategy. Changing the culture of a school — raising expectations around student behaviour and attendance and making those expectations measurable through data — was more effective when paired with consistent, ongoing monitoring of progress over time. Schools that tracked whether their strategies were actually working, rather than simply implementing them and hoping for the best, were more likely to sustain improvement.

Staff also flagged the challenges that remained stubbornly difficult even for schools making genuine progress. Chronic absenteeism emerged as one of the most damaging obstacles. One district official reported that a third of students were regularly missing school. Two middle school teachers explained that when students frequently failed to show up or arrived late, it significantly undermined their ability to plan lessons effectively and accurately assess what their students actually knew and understood.

Addressing that absenteeism directly was therefore a critical step for these schools. Some used quarterly attendance incentives to shift behaviour. One middle school took students who had accumulated fewer than five unexcused absences on an ice-skating trip — a simple but tangible reward that helped reframe attendance as something worth caring about.

Beyond absenteeism, schools also pointed to teacher shortages and high staff turnover as persistent barriers that complicated every other improvement effort. Recruiting and retaining qualified educators in the schools that need them most remains one of the hardest problems in the system.