The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine if there is a relationship between transformational leadership style, school climate, student conduct, and student attendance in urban elementary schools. Survey data were collected from a purposeful sample of elementary school principals and a convenience sample of their staff members in an…

Improving student achievement is a continual focus of educational and political leaders. The strategies used to impact student achievement are varied as are the results. The United States Department of Education provides grant funding to states and local educational agencies with the goal of impacting student achievement through the use of…

As U.S. school leaders anticipate the end of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funds and contemplate possible budget shortfalls, they will have to make hard choices about how best to leverage limited resources to improve student outcomes. With the stakes high, lawmakers and experts urge school system leaders to rely on research and…

Each year, school systems plan for how to improve student learning in the coming year. This process involves reviewing student achievement and student progress data, establishing priorities, and building a budget aligned to these priorities using all available funding sources. In an effort to support school systems with this process, the Louisiana…

In the last 20 years, the United States has spent billions of dollars on policies and programs to turn around, or rapidly improve, its lowest-performing schools. Little consideration has been given to the critical role the school district plays in launching and shaping school turnaround. This case study of one mid-sized urban district's effort to…

This article contributes to the literature on school turnaround by examining the effect of the North Carolina Transformation (NCT) initiative, which was implemented in 75 low-performing schools after the state's efforts to turn around the lowest performing schools under Race to the Top ended, on student reading score growth in grades K-3. Reading…

As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the School Improvement Grants (SIG) program received more than $3 billion with the goal of substantially improving student achievement. The SIG program's funding was to help states turn around the nation's persistently lowest-achieving schools using one of four school intervention…

In the 2018-19 school year, 5,664 U.S. schools were identified as Comprehensive Support and Improvement (CSI), meaning that thousands of students attended schools that performed in the bottom 5% of their state's accountability framework and/or had a graduation rate below 67%. Across the nation, states, parents, educators, principals and…

School Improvement Grants (SIG) represent one type of governments' capacity-building investment to spur sustainable changes in America's persistently under-performing public schools. This study examines both short- and long-run effects of the first two cohorts of SIG schools from two states and two urban districts across the country. Using dynamic…

The federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program allocated US$7 billion over nearly a decade in an effort to produce rapid and lasting improvements in schools identified as low performing. In this article, we use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of Ohio's SIG turnaround efforts on student achievement and school…

This descriptive qualitative case study examined how rural superintendents implement the eight turnaround principles to foster and sustain improvement in the school district organization. The eight turnaround principles are as follows: school leadership, school climate and culture, effective instruction, curriculum, assessment and intervention…

The School Improvement Grants (SIG) program received over $3 billion through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Through grants to states, SIG focused on turning around the nation's persistently lowest-achieving schools using one of four school intervention models, with the aim of substantially improving student achievement. The…

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…

The Texas Education Agency offers grants for districts to implement school turnaround strategies at low-performing schools. Districts that receive these grants can implement a school turnaround strategy (referred to as a district-managed restart strategy) that includes replacing most of the principals and teachers at schools that the district…

The Texas Education Agency offers grants for districts to implement school turnaround strategies at low-performing schools. Districts that receive these grants can implement a school turnaround strategy (referred to as a district-managed restart strategy) that includes replacing principals and teachers at schools that the district identifies as…