Chapter 7: U-Turn Required: How Virginia’s First School Turnaround Specialists are Meeting the Challenges of Improving Low-Performing Schools

This chapter examines the work of five specialists in the initial cohort of the Virginia School Turnaround Specialist Program (VSTSP), a collaborative effort between the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education and Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, to provide executive leadership training for principals to turnaround low performing schools. The chapter describes the training program, the methodology used to track the progress of the five specialists, the challenges specialists faced, their efforts over two years to address these challenges, and their assessment of the extent to which the challenges had been eliminated. Student achievement data at the end of the first and second years of the program also are presented.