The federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on March 12 examining the national landscape of school improvement and strategies that helped schools exit comprehensive support and improvement (CSI) and the challenges they faced. Under Title I, Part A of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, states are required to measure the performance of their public schools. They must also identify three categories of low-performing schools for support and improvement, including those that need CSI — representing the lowest-performing schools in the nation.
The report determined that a school’s location, size and student characteristics — such as having higher rates of poverty — influenced the odds of improvement.
The number of CSI schools increased from 6.5 percent of all public schools in 2019–20 to 7.3 percent in 2022–23, largely due to schools that were recategorized from needing additional targeted support and improvement (ATSI) to needing CSI because they did not meet their state’s criteria to exit ATSI.
The report found that these schools were more academically challenged and economically disadvantaged in 2022–23 than the CSI schools in 2019–20, with more CSI students experiencing deep poverty.
Overall, 46 percent of CSI schools identified in 2019–20 had exited improvement status by 2022–23. Researchers found several factors influenced the chances of a school exiting CSI status including student characteristics and size. For example, large- and medium-sized schools had increased chances of exiting, while schools with a higher percentage of poor students had decreased chances of exiting.
Key findings
While many schools face an uphill battle when attempting to exit CSI, interviews with educators from three state educational agencies, eight school districts and 14 schools identified six strategies as key to a school’s ability to prove they no longer need CSI. These include:
- Communicate mission and achieve buy-in: Educators interviewed emphasized the importance of developing and communicating a mission about improvement to the school community and working to achieve buy-in of school staff on improvement reforms.
- Change school culture and expectations: Educators described efforts to raise the academic expectations for student behavior and to teach grade-level content to all students.
- Foster staff collaboration: Encouraging staff collaboration and building teams among teachers was identified as an important strategy to help schools exit CSI.
- Use data to monitor progress and adjust instruction: Educators said they used data to assess student progress and adjust their teaching strategies, including qualitative and quantitative data collected at state, district and school levels.
- Target professional development: Targeting professional development to address specific needs of school staff and utilizing instructional coaches were found to be particularly important in helping schools exit CSI.
- Sustain improvements: Educators commonly described various ways they planned to sustain the improvements their schools had made to either exit CSI or remain off the CSI list after they exit, such as continuing to observe teaching and providing feedback even though this type of monitoring was no longer required.
“Many of these strategies are interrelated,” according to the report. “For example, schools can use data to measure changes in school culture and expectations regarding student behavior, attendance, and academic performance and monitor sustained improvements. Targeted professional development can help change school culture and expectations and foster staff collaboration. Moreover, effective leadership at multiple levels was commonly noted as critical to successfully implementing these strategies. This is consistent with our past reporting that organizational transformations should be led by a dedicated team of high-performing leaders.”
Chronic absenteeism, enrolling high numbers of transient students, and teacher recruitment and retention were cited by many interviewees as some of the main challenges related to implementing strategies to exit CSI.
For example, one district official said as many as one-third of the district’s students were chronically absent, and two high school teachers explained that when students are habitually absent or late, it affects teachers’ ability to plan lessons and assess student progress. Others described having a high percentage of transient students as an obstacle to exiting CSI — one elementary school principal said that it was common for about half of the student population to transfer in or out of the school before the end of the year, and that “having new students enroll throughout the school year took time away from teaching lessons because teachers had to continually dedicate time to reestablishing classroom routines and expectations.”
