Discover how top-down, policy-into-practice educational mandates have adversely affected Indigenous communities in the United States' midwestern core. The author scrutinizes how leaders and intermediaries in Nebraska, involved at various tiers of policy development and reform, conceptualized and implemented school accountability policy in Indian…

State-led school turnaround in the United States has raised important questions about state efficacy and capacity for school improvement and institutional change. State intervention conventionally relies on compliance-driven coercive pressure drawing on the regulative underpinnings of institutions. State technical assistance for turnaround is an…

For the past thirty years, Michigan has used Emergency Management (EM) and receiverships to solve city and school finance issues. The impact of these state intervention policies has been highly publicized and has led to institutional distrust among black citizens in urban communities --with the Flint water crisis standing out as the most infamous…

Building from previous research on self-efficacy, sustained professional development, instructional leadership, and the science of reading, this quantitative correlational study explored the interrelationship among 51 purposively sampled Tennessee's elementary turnaround leaders' participation in sustained, systematic early literacy professional…

School improvement plans (SIPs) are increasingly used to structure the process of setting and monitoring goals. As SIPs are designed to identify and address local problems of practice, there is the possibility that these tools help school leaders initiate and carry out ambitious school improvement. Yet, practical challenges abound in the…

In England, schools are able to take on academy status, which is intended by the central government to give them greater autonomy (DfE, 2018). Groups of academies can form multi-academy trusts (MATs), which typically grow in size with additional schools becoming academies and joining. One mechanism for MAT growth is sponsorship, which occurs when…

This paper examines a state department of education's (SDE) decision to contract a consultant to "turnaround" schools, per a logic of outsourcing for external expertise. Our ethnographically informed case study explores whose knowledge had the most worth in diagnosing areas for improvement and identifies this case as part of a trend to…

An interpretive narrative inquiry approach is adopted to shed light on the improvement agendas applied in a specific set of coastal schools. The unifying thread between the focal cases is that they had been designated as failures and made notorious through association with their communities' tainted reputations. These schools feature in a report…

Turnaround principals of chronically inadequately performing schools faced myriad challenges and required the requisite skills to derive positive transformational change (Duke, 2015). Challenges include identification of the root causes, development of a cohesive turnaround plan, successful implementation, and progress monitoring (Duke, 2015). The…

Test-based accountability pressures have had mixed effects on the student outcomes that they are intended to improve. Accountability policies have also resulted in transfers of less effective teachers into untested early grades and more effective teachers in early grades into tested grades, which could yield unintended negative consequences. In…

Purpose: In empirical research and practitioner guides, turnaround processes tend to be described in terms of discrete stages and strategies. Though necessary, this characterization belies the twists and turns of turnaround leadership. The purpose of this paper is to expand the assumptions of how turnaround proceeds in linear "chronos"…

School leaders should not have to choose between personal well-being and professional success. However, as the pressures associated with high-stakes accountability persist, school leaders are often forced to make this difficult choice. In what we label as under-resourced schools, where leaders frequently experience the pressures associated with…

Schools are facing many issues as a result of the recent pandemic, as well as societal pressures for all students to achieve. There have been unprecedented changes in the educational landscape with a growing concern for students' success and learning loss. Instructional leaders are expected to make innovative changes to meet the instructional…

The "statewide system of support," a feature of Congress's 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, provided an organizational framework for a "managerial" approach to school improvement that was accelerated in No Child Left Behind (2001). When Congress temporarily flooded states with economic…

Various leadership theories and practices, along with state and federal policies, have been implemented to improve school performance; however, turnaround principals (TAPs) have been considered hallmarks of school turnaround. While the key practices for TAPs to navigate school improvement are known, little is known about how TAPs shepherd the…