How State Education Agencies Are Administering School Turnaround Efforts: 15 Years After No Child Left Behind

Abstract

School turnaround—the rapid improvement of student achievement in low-performing schools—is increasingly a major topic of interest in K-12 public education. Federal legislation has left varying degrees of school improvement–related responsibilities up to states, and policy makers have divergent views about how to realize turnaround. We investigate and describe how each state education agency (SEA) is administering school turnaround efforts in federally designated priority schools. To accomplish this, we examined a variety of publicly available documents from SEA websites and summarized the data into three overarching categories. We discuss how this finding has significant implications for policy makers and SEAs, especially as the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) is implemented.