Chapter 2: Global Thinking, Local Action: Promoting Global Competencies and Sustainable School Improvement in High-Poverty Contexts

School improvement and turnaround is an urgent need across the globe as school systems in different parts of the world are facing low-performing challenges that sometimes paralyze leaders due to the magnitude of change required for substantially improving our educational institutions. In this chapter, we seek to frame school low-performing challenges as opportunities for improvement, in the spirit of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs). These are challenging times that require maximizing the principle of global thinking while taking actions at the local level; these local actions, in turn, lead back to global thinking. This chapter tries to capture a 3-year experience of successfully establishing a district-level turnaround office to support low-performing schools in a large urban district located in the southern region of the United States; this work was organized in collaboration with schools and the state education agency. Sharing this experience is important since other school systems around the nation and the world are searching for better ways to support low-performing schools at the state-, district-and school-level. The authors provide a useful framework for other nations, states, and districts motivated to identify ways to support low-performing schools by developing global competencies needed for continuous improvement and long-term success. First, we briefly describe the context of this work while keeping in mind the framework postulated by the UN-SDGs. Second, we identify the initial steps for establishing a district-level turnaround office. Third, we share lessons learned from the turnaround work since the creation of the office and the necessary global competencies to implement these lessons. Finally, we provide ideas about next steps in the evolution of central office, state, and national supports for turnaround schools. Our hope is that readers around the world will use applicable concepts in their particular contexts.