ERS Briefing: Supporting School Turnaround

Breaking the vicious cycle of underperformance

Joe McKown, Laura Schick, Karen Hawley Miles, January 30, 2020

In turnaround schools, traditional approaches to school improvement (and some say, even the recent seven billion dollar federal investment in school improvement) aren’t enough – but why?

Schools that successfully achieve turnaround “do school” differently to break cycles of underperformance and maximize learning for all students, and they do so with district support. In our new briefing, we explore a model for how schools and districts can rethink their use of resources to drive and sustain school turnaround, with stories from four school districts (San Francisco, Denver, Memphis and Miami) that put these strategies into action with promising results.