Chapter 8: Unfinished Business: State Education Agencies and Their Capacity to Lead School Turnaround

In 2009, the Obama administration rolled out the Race to the Top program (RttT), a $4.35 billion effort focused on improving educational outcomes through ambitious and comprehensive state-led education reform. RttT’s purpose was to advance education reform around four main areas:

As mentioned earlier, one area of RttT focused on turning around the low-achieving schools. Within a state’s RttT application, they outlined how school turnaround would transform various government agencies and the state’s (primarily the state education agency) role for implementing school turnaround policies and practices, and the expected student achievement outcomes. One of the underlining assumptions of RttT was that state education agencies (SEAs) would play the primary role in facilitating school turnaround. Also, that SEAs had the necessary capacity to combat any challenges related to their school turnaround efforts, and that RttT funds would be used to fill any gaps in capacity (i.e., financial, human resources, or technical assistance). In each RttT application, states discussed to various levels of detail how they would realign resources to better meet district and school needs, provide external support and technical assistance, monitor and address school progress and barriers to improvement, and create various incentives to spur academic improvement (Childs & Russell, 2016; Gottfried, Stecher, Hoover, & Brown-Cross, 2011; Le Floch, Boyle, & Therriault, 2008; Rhim & Redding, 2011).