Here is a tale for our time. It upends the reigning assumptions about the role of funding, about the false god of innovation and the speed with which low-performing schools (or any school) can make genuine, significant improvement. A few months ago, I was invited to review a book about school turnarounds. It described the herculean--and amply funded--exertions made by various schools to make radical changes to their structure and processes in order to achieve better results. By far, the most interesting reportage focused on one representative, low-achieving urban high school. Its ostensible purpose, we were told, was to significantly increase both test scores and the proportion of students who would be college-ready by graduation. To accomplish this, the school decided to divide the school into small, theme-based Despite these complex, time-gobbling rearrangements, a note of disappointment creeps in. It becomes increasingly apparent that the innovation hasn't delivered on its promise. By the end of the book, a more studious climate has emerged at the school, but the school has made only modest test-score gains. In 2010, after two years of effort, there is no apparent increase in the proportion of students ready for college. In an ideal world, the reasons for this would be self-evident to educators because the initiative clearly suffered from what has hobbled general school improvement for more than 30 years: a failure to acknowledge and address the most obvious, desperately needed shortcomings in curriculum and instruction. The school chose instead to follow the money--to focus on ephemeral, unproven, but lavishly funded As the interviews in the book make plain, there was never any serious effort to ensure the provision of the most crucial elements of a quality education: a coherent, content-rich curriculum; massive increases in reading, writing, and discussion across the curriculum; and a focus on the most ordinary, well-known elements of effective lessons. Rather than address these, the school succumbed--as so many do--to the siren song of attractive but unproven innovations. For students who were subjected to this experiment, who only get one shot at an education, there was no turnaround at their school. Not so far away Another high school was already well along in its process. Shortly after the book review was published, I received an email from Susan Szachowicz, principal of Brockton High School, south of Boston. In our exchanges, and from some further reading, I learned that Brockton had been one of the poorest-performing high schools in Massachusetts. A huge, mostly minority, high-poverty school, where only about 25% of its students were passing state exit exams in language arts and math. Brockton had a 33% dropout rate. Brockton, however, did manage to truly, substantively turn around--and with amazing speed. Like the other school, Brockton was offered the same big money and flirted seriously with the idea of accepting it, with the condition that it would implement the same (now discredited) innovation. But then, in a fit of good sense, Brockton, the state's largest high school, decided to turn down the money. The staff realized the folly of expecting college-readiness to spring spontaneously from subdividing their school into a melange of small, experimental, theme-based academies. Instead, this huge, 4,100-student school decided to honestly examine the quality of curriculum and instruction students were receiving at Brockton. …