Chapter 1: School Turnaround and Reform in Rural Schools: an Overview

Ongoing initiatives and policies to rapidly improve schools identified as underperforming, low-performing, in need of turnaround, or a number of other labels remains politicized (Peck & Reitzug, 2014). This might be most obvious in rural educational settings that have traditionally been underserved and underfunded. In the realm of school turnaround political discourse, recent reform initiatives have seemed to not account for the rural context at all. Initial federal mandates accompanying School Improvement Grant (SIG) money set aside for intensive improvement efforts in schools deemed the lowest-performing in the United States might best underscore the point. Federal policy implicated school principals as one of the key drivers—if not the primary one—for low levels of student achievement and emphasized changing the principals in such schools (U.S. Department of Education, 2010). Yet, shortly after the policy was enacted, the lack of qualified principals in rural areas who could act as replacements (Rosenberg et al., 2015; Scott & McMurrer, 2015), however, was a clear signal that critical features of rural education had not been considered fully.