Purpose: School district superintendents say politics is the number one factor limiting their performance, yet research provides limited guidance on navigating the political dynamics of district improvement. State takeovers and district-wide turnaround efforts tend to involve particularly heated and polarized debates. Massachusetts' 2012 takeover…

Federal education policies gave political and financial support for state education agencies to turnaround low-performing schools on an unprecedented scale. North Carolina's ambitious program turned around over half of all schools nationwide that underwent turnaround funded by Race to the Top. Exploiting the assignment to turnaround based on…

School leadership is a key factor in school turnarounds. The general prescription for what school leaders should do tends to be this: Set high expectations for staff and students and give strong instructional supports. Most school systems recognize how tall an order this is, given everything else the principal job entails. Even principals who are…

Educators at a turnaround school in Boston describe how they built a foundation for achievement gains by building and safeguarding relational trust among staff. The school, Henry Grew Elementary, focused in particular on fostering educators' readiness to trust, clarifying roles, and solidifying routines to support connection and risk-taking.

This research report examines the dramatic turnaround of the Mildred Avenue School in Mattapan, which won EdVestors' 2017 School on the Move Prize. We teamed up with EdVestors to investigate the role of teacher leadership and labor-management collaboration in driving rapid school improvement. In 2013, the Mildred was a school in crisis. Academic…

Full-service community schools (FSCSs) are broadly viewed as a strategy to address the multiple challenges faced by low-income children and families that can create barriers to students' learning. Several studies have investigated the perceptions and experiences of a variety of key stakeholders involved in this reform strategy. However, no studies…

Every student deserves arts instruction for its own sake, as an essential ingredient to a well-rounded education. Yet arts education adds value for a whole host of other educational purposes: among them, enhanced writing and reading, ability to retain information, problem solving, and critical thinking. Interest in models of whole-school reform…

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…

The article ''Transforming Educational Experiences in Low-Income Communities'' analyzes the efforts of a highly impoverished small elementary school to provide the kind of wrap-around services children in very poor communities need to give them a fair chance to succeed. For a child from a low-income family, what happens in the non-educational part…

As districts across the country search for ways to turn around their lowest-performing schools, a growing number are partnering with external providers--often charter operators--to implement "restarts." These providers receive operational autonomy and bring their own approach to schooling, positioning them to implement deep and…

The National Implementation Research Network (NIRN) and the National Center for School Turnaround (2018) published the "Four Domains for Rapid School Improvement: An Implementation Framework" as a companion to the Center for School Turnaround's (2017) recent publication of "The Four Domains for Rapid School Improvement: A Systems…

This brief provides an overview of five strategies used for persistently underperforming schools that demand significant changes to how schools are organized. It draws upon published research, as well as the experiences of cities pursuing different types of improvement strategies. None of the five strategies offer a surefire way to improve…

Informed by the Social-Emotional and Character Development (SECD) approach to school turnaround, the present study examined the relationship between students' recollection and reflection of their experience in a SECD program and academic achievement and explored the mediating effect of student-teacher relationships. Based on an intervention in an…

We examine the role of ideas in the politics of school choice policy and situate our study within scholarship that understands frames and logics as types of ideas operating in the foreground and background of policy debates. Our data are from a case study of political contention over portfolio management reform (in which a central office oversees…

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…