Turnaround Leadership

Turnaround leadership concerns the kind of leadership needed for turning around a persistently low-performing school to one that is performing acceptably as measured by student achievement according to state tests. I first treat this question in the narrow sense, i.e., as a strategy for targeting low-performing schools, and then place it in a larger context—namely, how such turnaround can be part of an overall approach to sustainable system change. The sequence I will consider moves from the school to the district to the system as a whole. My conclusion, which I state upfront, is that what looks like apparent success in turning around schools is actually quite superficial and indeed illusory.