School Turnaround Field Guide

Jeff Kutash, Eva Nico, Emily Gorin, Samira Rahmatullah and Kate Tallant

In early 2009, the Obama Administration announced its intention to use five billion dollars to turn around five thousand of the nation’s poorest performing schools over the next five years. This is a bold challenge to an education sector that has succeeded at turning around individual schools, but has never delivered dramatic change at a national scale. To foster urgency and fuel innovation, the federal government has created large pools of funding and is providing strong policy direction for school turnaround. In response, education leaders are developing and implementing new approaches to systemically fix our nation’s under-performing schools. However, if we are to succeed, we must identify and spread effective practices, create the policies and conditions for success, develop new partnerships, and build capacity to tackle turnaround on a national scale.

This report offers a field assessment of actors, issues, key gaps and early lessons learned in turning around our failing schools. The full report and an executive summary are available, as well as a brief developed for the School Improvement conference held in January 2010.