School improvement research has insufficiently considered the importance of intervening in schools with declining academic performance. Fields such as engineering and medicine have prioritized predicting decline to save structures or patients before they are in peril. Unfortunately, in education, school improvement policies and interventions are only enacted once schools reach low levels of academic performance. In this study, we apply sophisticated statistical models to analyze more than 10 years of longitudinal student achievement data in English/language arts and mathematics in the US state of Texas. We find that a considerable number of schools consistently decline over time. Some significant predictors of decline included shifting student demographics and changes in the percent of economically disadvantaged students. Higher starting percentages of students labeled as English language learners also increased the likelihood of decline, but increasing percentages of English language learners over timereduced the rate of decline. Leadership stability also appears to be important to impeding decline. We close by discussing implications for research, policy, and practice.

中文翻译：

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为最坏的情况做准备：将学校衰退的预测因素确定为改进计划

学校改进研究没有充分考虑干预学习成绩下降的学校的重要性。工程和医学等领域优先考虑预测衰退以在结构或患者处于危险之前拯救它们。不幸的是，在教育领域，学校改进政策和干预措施只有在学校的学业表现不佳时才会颁布。在这项研究中，我们应用复杂的统计模型来分析美国德克萨斯州 10 多年的英语/语言艺术和数学纵向学生成绩数据。我们发现相当多的学校随着时间的推移不断下降。下降的一些重要预测因素包括学生人口结构的变化和经济弱势学生百分比的变化。被标记为英语语言学习者的学生的较高起始百分比也增加了下降的可能性，但随着时间的推移增加英语语言学习者的百分比会降低下降的速度。领导稳定性对于阻止衰退似乎也很重要。我们最后讨论对研究、政策和实践的影响。