School Turnaround Policies and Practices in the US

The Relationship Between School Turnaround and Student Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis

“…Using an iterative process and balancing an inclusive search string and a reasonable number of records that can be screened and analyzed thoroughly, we created the following search string: “school turnaround” OR “turnaround school” OR “school improvement grants” OR “turnaround reform” OR “school reconstitution” OR “reconstituted school” OR “school closure” OR “school restart.” This search returned more than 13,800 studies (Supplementary Appendix Table 2 in the online version of the journal). In efforts to reach saturation, we also conducted an ancestral search from the reference lists of previous reviews of school turnaround (e.g., Murphy & Bleiberg, 2019; Trujillo & Renée, 2012) and the initial articles identified from the search process. To attempt to find any additional research published outside academic publishing or distribution channels (i.e., “gray” literature), we also conducted a hand search of publications from private research firms, large school districts, research associations, government research agencies, and funding agencies.…”

“…By replacing the principal, the hope is that the new principal will be more effective in inciting drastic changes to improve the school operations and culture (Duke, 2015; Leithwood et al, 2010). This logic, adapted from the larger management literature, recognizes the complex task of organizational turnaround requires competent leaders capable of addressing a variety of school domains (Murphy & Bleiberg, 2019). When replacing teachers, the idea is that newly hired teachers will not only be more effective at improving student outcomes, but they will also be more willing to adopt school practices linked to improved organizational performance (Malen et al, 2002).…”

“…Under NCLB, schools that failed to meet proficiency goals for three or more consecutive years were required to implement a suite of strategies related to changes in school organization, staffing, management, and governance—forerunners to the school turnaround strategies examined in this meta-analysis. These options included restructuring school programs, replacing administrators and teachers (the transformation and turnaround models, respectively), restarting the school as a charter school or under the management of a private company, closure , and state turnaround , such as the school improvement efforts conducted under NCLB waivers (Murphy & Bleiberg, 2019). As NCLB granted states the flexibility to determine the conditions under which schools had to undergo corrective action, initial implementation of these strategies was decidedly uneven (Herrmann et al, 2014; Schueler et al, 2017).…”

“…Second, school turnaround cannot be divorced from the broader policy context of high-stakes test-based accountability. By identifying schools in need of improvement based on student proficiency levels, federal turnaround policy tacitly endorsed a vision of school reform agnostic to the broader sociopolitical context of schools, even though what determines performance levels are largely outside of school control (Murphy & Bleiberg, 2019; Trujillo & Renée, 2012).…”

“…The basis for this view comes from a Practice Guide from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) that found no experimental or quasi-experimental studies demonstrating the efficacy of school turnaround (Herman et al, 2008), as well as more recent narrative reviews. These reviews have come to this conclusion largely as a result of what are seen as shortcomings in the theory of change underlying school turnaround rather than the systematic review of the empirical evidence on the effectiveness of school turnaround (Malen & Rice, 2009; Meyers & Smylie, 2017; Murphy & Bleiberg, 2019; Peck & Reitzug, 2014; Trujillo & Renée, 2012). Yet, in the past decade, school turnaround has been the subject of extensive study.…”