The Logic of School Improvement, Turnaround, and Innovation

The process of improving school performance has maintained a consistent logic at least since the advent of curriculum standards and state assessments in the 1990s. Over the past half-decade, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s (2009) charge for the nation to turn around its 5,000 lowest-achieving schools has introduced an impetus for innovation that may leaven the stolid logic. We are only now on the cusp of evaluative research, especially that related to the U.S. Department of Education’s School Improvement Grant (SIG) and Investing in Innovation (I3) programs, research that will let us distill from the myriad of approaches those that may alter our understanding of how schools improve. This distillation of successful strategies will then legitimately carry the stamp of “innovation,” as the new strategies alter the logic we have previously applied.