Chapter 11: Moving Beyond the Myths of Turnaround to Address the Intersection of Poverty and Urban Schooling

Turnaround is an organizational management strategy with roots in the corporate sector that became more prominent during the 1980s. As poor educational outcomes have persisted, education policymakers increasingly embraced it as a means to improve the nation’s low-achieving schools. According to Peck and Reitzug (2012), turnaround emerged within education toward the end of the 20th century, and gained momentum with heightened quantitative measures and consequences for school performance. “Indeed, after 2002, with the increasing influence on schools of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability mechanisms, turnaround steadily gained increasing attention as an important new management concept” (Peck & Reitzug, 2012, p. 357). NCLB characterized turnaround as a dramatic and comprehensive intervention that produces significant student achievement gains within 2 academic years and prepares the school for transformation into a high-performance organization over time (May & Sanders, 2013).