In recent years, a handful of education scholars have begun to cast a wider net for advice on how to engineer successful school turnarounds. The need for turnaround strategies that work is more timely than ever. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the list of schools identified to be in need of help grows longer by the year, making educators increasingly desperate for some solid research-based advice. Yet the research base on successful turnaround strategies in education is too new and too thin to be of much help to those schools, scholars say. Existing studies in education, they say, tend to focus on making incremental, rather than dramatic, improvements and ignore decades of time-tested studies documenting what worked for managers in other fields. Joseph F. Murphy, a professor of educational leadership at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, contends that if education scholars had looked at the deeper body of research beyond their backyard, they would have found that some of their own intervention prescriptions conflict with the advice emerging from the turnaround studies outside their field. For a successful turnaround, schools must: (1) Change the leadership at the top of the organization; (2) Begin with the budget and start identifying inefficiencies; and (3) Plan around data.