The federal School Improvement Grants (SIG) program, to which $3 billion were allocated under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), supports schools attempting to turn around a history of low performance. School turnaround also is a focus of Race to the Top (RTT), another ARRA-supported initiative, which involved a roughly $4 billion comprehensive education reform grant competition for states. Given the size of these federal investments, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is conducting a large-scale evaluation of RTT and SIG to better understand the implementation and impacts of these programs. The SIG component, in particular, focuses on a purposive sample of SIG-eligible schools, including: (1) a group of schools that received SIG to implement one of four intervention models specified by the U.S. Department of Education; and (2) a comparison group of schools from the same districts that are not implementing one of these four intervention models with SIG support. Though the results from this evaluation of SIG are not necessarily generalizable to SIG schools nationwide, they are nonetheless important because they add to the limited knowledge base about the implementation and impacts of SIG-funded school turnaround efforts. This brief focuses on the implementation of SIG by examining three interrelated levers for school improvement: (1) school operational authority; (2) state and district support for turnaround; and (3) state monitoring of turnaround efforts. Two appendices present: (1) Race to the Top and School Improvement Grant: Intervention Models as Described by the U.S. Department of Education SIG Guidance (2012); and (2) Table B.1. Characteristics of the State Sample as of 2009-2010 and Table B.2. Characteristics of the District Sample as of 2009-2010. (Contains 33 endnotes, 9 figures, and 4 tables.)