This study proposes an empirically grounded theory of how school reform implementation relates to effectiveness, useful for developing and studying many approaches to school reform both in the U.S. and abroad, and also for assessing how policymakers and implementers might leverage various aspects of implementation to create effective school…

The school turnaround initiative and school reform have been focal points of the national education conversation since the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 was enacted by Congress under the Johnson Administration. No Child Left Behind (NCLB, 2001) built upon the concept of equal access to a high-quality education for all…

The recent Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires states to identify and turn around their lowest performing schools, but it breaks somewhat from prior policies by granting states significant autonomy over how they identify and turn around these schools. This mixed-methods study, which draws on administrative, qualitative, and survey data,…

While network governance in education has been widely discussed in the literature, research focusing on the behaviours of and interactions between pluralist actors is rare, and the power exercised by China's local governments in network governance is under-researched. This study uses school turnaround, a networking process that involves multiple…

Numerous high-profile efforts have sought to "turn around" low-performing schools. Evidence on the effectiveness of school turnarounds, however, is mixed, and research offers little guidance on which models are more likely to succeed. We present a mixed-methods case study of turnaround efforts led by the Blueprint Schools Network in…

School climate is critical to school effectiveness, but there is limited large-scale data available to examine the magnitude and nature of the relationship between school climate and school improvement. Drawing on statewide administrative data linked with unique teacher survey data in Michigan, we examine whether school climate appeared to play a…

Turnaround interventions often require or encourage low-performing schools to replace teachers, assuming that schools will recruit high-performing teachers who remain effective after transferring. However, teacher effectiveness may change after transferring, which could explain why some teacher replacement efforts do not improve student…

The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of Uncommon Schools in a turnaround setting. Uncommon was awarded a 2016 grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) to support TurnNJ, a project intended to support Uncommon's whole-school turnaround efforts in Camden and Newark, New Jersey. The study…

Numerous high-profile efforts have sought to "turn around" low-performing schools. Evidence on the effectiveness of school turnarounds, however, is mixed, and research offers little guidance on which models are more likely to succeed. We present a mixed-methods case study of turnaround efforts led by the Blueprint Schools Network in…

Intervention efforts in turnaround elementary schools in the U.S. have focused on academic interventions, missing the important link between students' social emotional competence and academic outcomes. The current study describes implementation of a multi-tiered approach to support young students' social emotional competence in an urban turnaround…

For much of the last two decades, beginning with the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, the top political leaders have shown concern about children stuck in failing public schools. NCLB required districts to do something -- not enough, but something -- about those schools. Millions of children still languish in low-performing schools,…