How Would You Fix the Worst Performing School in America?

Case Study Series: What Would You Do?

If you were hired to run the worst performing school in America, what would you do?

For the last two years on social media, I have had thousands of “gurus” complain about my posts, offer their two-cents and claim to know more than they do. So I decided to allow all those so-called experts in education to start putting their money where their mouth is.

Who knows how this social experiment will go? Maybe there are people out there that have valid and realistic ideas? Then again, I might just receive the same failed ideas that haven’t worked for a century.

Case Study : Demographics and Context

Before you can outline your solutions and fixes to the worst performing school in America, you first need to know the context of this school. First of all, the demographics of this school includes 80% African-American and Hispanic students. The school is located in a very low socioeconomic neighborhood. And the reported crime rate is the highest in the state.

Student Achievement:

Although the graduation rate of the school district is around 50%, half of those students report going to college. Upon further inspection, half of the students that start to attend college dropout before they earn a college degree.

How Do You Fix this School?

You are hired to run this school. For the purpose of this exercise you are the new principal of the high school. What would you do first? How will you address the problems the school faces? How do you propose boosting student achievement? How do you bring hope to this community?

To make things a little easier on you, there is no funding gap for this school.

What do you do?

Post Your Solutions in the Comments