The Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (ESE) and the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education are deeply committed to ensuring that every student in the state has access to a high-quality education, and they have combined this commitment with an openness to innovation. After just one year of School Improvement Grant (SIG) implementation in the state's turnaround schools, Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester in 2011 asked his team to document what was working in the state's lowest performing schools that had engaged in redesign efforts. In 2014, they distilled their findings into a set of turnaround best practices. Supported by this research, ESE began to align its assistance efforts with these turnaround practices. The department took four key steps: (1) It revised the required turnaround planning template to allow schools and districts to choose evidence-based strategies that fit their contexts, so long as they were aligned with the framework of practices; (2) It aligned its application and scoring rubric for competitive federal SIG funding with the revised turnaround plan and the research results from successful schools and in so doing raised the bar for all SIG-funded schools, which could no longer focus on only one or two strategies of varying quality; (3) It changed its process for monitoring progress, adding a turnaround practices and indicators rubric to assess implementation of each of the best practices at its turnaround schools; and (4) It focused its direct assistance toward supporting better implementation of the turnaround practices in the field, aligned with the needs identified through the monitoring process.