Do the Effects Persist? An Examination of Long-Term Effects After Students Leave Turnaround Schools

Abstract

Whole-school reforms have received widespread attention, but a critical limitation of the current literature is the lack of evidence around whether these extensive and costly interventions improve students’ long-term outcomes after they leave reform schools. Leveraging Tennessee’s statewide turnaround reforms, we use difference-in-differences models to estimate the effect of attending a turnaround middle school on student outcomes in high school, including test scores, attendance, chronic absenteeism, disciplinary actions, drop out, and high school graduation. We find little evidence to support improved long-run student outcomes—mostly null effects that are nearly zero in magnitude. Our results contribute to a broad call for educational researchers to examine whether school reforms meaningfully affect student outcomes beyond short-term improvements in test scores.