Public charter schools lack research that determines what makes them successful. Charter schools are relatively new, existing for around 30 years in the United States. The depth and breadth of research focusing on public education rarely includes charter schools. The research focusing on charter schools specifically is quite limited. Like…

Turnaround schools represent a strategy for swiftly revitalizing underperforming educational institutions. This study examined how teachers perceived the role of teacher leadership within one urban turnaround high school. The study addressed the following research questions: 1. How do teachers within an urban turnaround high school conceptualize…

Massachusetts General Law does not recognize students as stakeholders in school turnaround, despite extant literature supporting the benefits of including students as decision makers in their education experiences. The purpose of this Action Research study was to understand why student voices are critical to successful school turnaround, and to…

In the United States, thousands of students attend urban, secondary schools that are in need of improvement due to their inability to meet state standards (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020a). These schools are in need of transformation but cannot be turned around without the right leader in place (Herman et al., 2008). Turnaround…

Purpose: The involvement of organizational development (OD) consultants in schools has become widespread in recent years. In Israel, their presence increased in the past 2 decades when the Ministry of Education encouraged their entry as support for the self-management reform and improvement of failing schools. Despite accumulated experience and…

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…

For this paper, we developed and validated the "Orientation to School Renewal" instrument, a 21-item instrument, based on seven factors, which allows schools to measure their school renewal efforts. The research is based on Goodlad's notion of school renewal. Through an extensive literature review and our work over an eight-year period…

This report focuses highlights turnarounds at two Massachusetts schools, Worcester Technical High School and the Roger L. Putnam Vocational Technical Academy in Springfield, that were once known for high dropout rates and low graduation rates. The report shows that these schools now excel due to new leadership, community investment, and committed…

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…

The sifting and sorting mechanisms of Australia's education system continue to work to the detriment of groups put at a disadvantage. For mainstream schools serving working-class communities in particular, the rejection of the offers and advantages of schooling continue to result in differential class consequences and inequalities for…

Purpose: While recognizing networking as a powerful means of school turnaround, most studies focus on governments' and schools' roles in promoting collaborative turnaround rather than the complexity of external providers and their behaviors. This study explores multiple external providers' complex roles in networked school turnaround.…

School turnaround is premised on the assumption that school leaders provide the guidepost along which transformational change occurs. This collective case study examined the turnaround leadership styles and practices of eight senior high school principals in seven senior high schools in Ghana. This study examined the research questions: What…

Since the passage of early federal K-12 school legislation such as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965 and its many evolutionary successors including the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) and the Every Student Succeeds Act (2015) there has been increased scrutiny on low-performing schools and particularly their leaders. These…

Prior to the 2012-13 school year, New York and many other states underwent changes to their accountability systems as a result of applying for and being granted waivers from the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. A key component of these new accountability systems, under what is known as ESEA Flexibility or NCLB Waivers, was the…

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…