Chapter 10: Assessing School Turnarounds: Using an Integrative Framework to Identify Levers for Success

Over the past 6 years, federal initiatives such as Race to the Top, School Improvement Grants, and No Child Left Behind waivers have promoted school turnaround models as part of what former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan described as an “overall strategy for dramatically reducing the dropout rate, improving high school graduation rates and increasing the number of students who graduate prepared for success in college and the workplace” (U.S. Department of Education, 2009b). Contrary to the prominence of school turnaround on the federal education policy agenda (Ayers, Owen, Partee, & Chang, 2012; Kutash, Nico, Gorin, Tallant, & Rahmatullah, 2010), research on the effectiveness of school turnarounds is limited in that the results are mostly anecdotal (de la Torre et al., 2012), there is no evidence of successful turnarounds at scale (Peck & Reitzug, 2013), and the research base is largely made up of case studies that cannot establish causality (Herman, et al., 2008). The dearth of research on school turnarounds is further complicated by semantics as turnaround is often used as a catchall for a variety of school improvement efforts (Herman et al., 2008; Zavadsky, 2012). Even the U.S. Department of Education has taken to using the term to describe both a specific model of school improvement, as well as an overall strategy for improving our nation’s lowest performing schools (U.S. Department of Education, 2009a). The ambiguity surrounding the term turnaround makes it difficult to interpret studies of school turnaround as researchers confound, fail to differentiate, or do not clearly identify critical differences among the various theories of change associated with models used to turn around schools.