Research on school improvement has accumulated an extensive list of factors that facilitate turnarounds at underperforming schools. Given that context or resource constraints may limit the possibilities of putting all of these factors in place, an important question is what is necessary and sufficient to turn a school around. We use qualitative…

Since at least the publication of "A Nation at Risk" (1983), the United States has used competition and top-down approaches in seeking student achievement in the country. Twenty years ago, to create a pathway for the lowest achieving schools in the country to have a clear path for improvement, the turnaround school movement was…

The demands placed on principals to meet the wide range of needs present within the learning community continue to expand within the context of school reform. While there is some research on the ideals of successful turnaround school reform strategies, there is a lack of research on the essential key levers it takes to reform a school and district…

This qualitative phenomenological study uncovered the essence or invariant lived experiences of school leaders who currently or formerly directed sustained school turnaround, a relatively unexplored phenomenon. A purposive sample of four school leaders included principals in suburban, urban, and rural settings from three distinct geographic…

The purpose of this study was to determine the specific competencies found in turnaround principals that lead to student achievement. The target population was school principals who have effectively turned around low-performing schools that were designated as priority schools in the state of Tennessee. Three forms of data were used for this study:…

Public charter schools lack research that determines what makes them successful. Charter schools are relatively new, existing for around 30 years in the United States. The depth and breadth of research focusing on public education rarely includes charter schools. The research focusing on charter schools specifically is quite limited. Like…

Schools used to be the center of a community, serving as a hub for empowering students, staff, and community members. As our public school and political landscapes are constantly changing, this qualitative, phenomenological study researches school stakeholders in the midst of turnaround efforts, exploring the role of inclusive engagement on…

This review paper describes the development of turnaround leadership research in educational settings to understand its trends and future directions. The review uses an established research process to make sense of the turnaround leadership literature. It identifies the continuities and discontinuities in this research area, which have strong…

Purpose: Increasingly, school systems are forming improvement networks and using continuous improvement (CI) to realize more ambitious and equitable instruction. Yet networks reside in environments that place formidable demands on school leaders and house multiple, and sometimes contradictory, beliefs about educational goals and practices.…

We argue that gentrification is school pushout by a different name, displacing Black children and families through multiple modes of hypersurveillance, invisibility, criminalization, and disposability. We share vivid frontline experiences as Black women educators and a Jewish American woman educator while foregrounding the multiple ways in which…

For more than two decades, federal law has required states to identify schools failing to provide students with a high-quality education and has led to substantial debate about how best to do so. Appropriately identifying the lowest performing schools matters because it allows state and local education agencies to target limited resources for…

This is the appendices for the full report, "Identifying the Nation's Lowest Performing Schools: Shifts Following the Passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)." This study examines state identification of schools for the most intensive support to see how changes in federal laws and regulations played out nationally and at the…

This study proposes an empirically grounded theory of how school reform implementation relates to effectiveness, useful for developing and studying many approaches to school reform both in the U.S. and abroad, and also for assessing how policymakers and implementers might leverage various aspects of implementation to create effective school…

This study is situated within the idea that in complex adaptive systems such as higher education, organizational leaders need to be ready to make decisions that not only react to change but also are able to inspire it. This ability to respond to external change through the development and exercise of internal capabilities for long-term success is…

Massachusetts General Law does not recognize students as stakeholders in school turnaround, despite extant literature supporting the benefits of including students as decision makers in their education experiences. The purpose of this Action Research study was to understand why student voices are critical to successful school turnaround, and to…