For Better or worse: Organizational turnaround in New York City schools

Abstract

The performance of public organizations has become a more salient issue as the popularity of accountability policies has grown. Though organizations are often defined as underperforming, little is known about the effectiveness of various strategies commonly recommended for agency turnaround. This study provides a large-N test of three common categories of turnaround mechanisms – retrenchment, repositioning, and reorganization – in nearly 300 failing New York City schools between 2008 and 2011. Models show that none of the three turnaround strategies appear to be significantly associated with improvements in core organizational performance from an administrative perspective, although repositioning appears to improve client satisfaction.

Key words:

• Turnaround
• failing organizations
• organizational performance
• accountability

Notes

1 When randomly selecting 10 schools for the figure, we considered only those failing schools that also had complete data for the Progress Report weighted score.

2 Some schools listed two principals for certain years. As long as at least one principal remained at the school from the prior year, the school was coded as a 0 (not a new principal).

3 The list contained the following ten items: Art, Music, Dance, Theater, Foreign Language, Computer Skills/Technology, Health, Physical Education, Sports Teams or Clubs, and Tutoring/Enrichment Activities.

4 Because of the manner in which aggregated results were reported by the city, we estimated this proportion by subtracting from 1 the proportion of teachers indicating that the course or activity was not offered. The activities measure was coded as missing if fewer than six responses were recorded on all ten items or if the total number of responses for any item constituted less than 80 per cent of the number of respondents (indicating a large number of non-responses).

5 While high levels of employee turnover in certain organizations may indicate the adoption of a reorganization strategy, the highly unionized workforce in New York City schools substantially limits the ability of administrators to terminate employees. Thus, we expect that most of the turnover we observe is voluntary.