Turning Around the Nation's Worst Schools

With the nation’s worst schools languishing, there is much talk about the need to turn schools around. But what does a school turnaround actually look like? What obstacles does it face in terms of implementation and policy? What aggressive restructuring efforts have been tried so far, and what impact have they had?

When a school fails to improve test scores for five straight years, it enters the last-ditch “restructuring” phase of the No Child Left Behind Act. With more than two thousand schools (and counting) planning or implementing school restructuring, the market for turnarounds is ripe. Recognizing that conventional efforts to restructure schools typically fall short, there has been increasing interest in reconfiguring people, institutions, and support systems to radically improve America’s worst schools.

Please join us on March 11, 2008, as we push past the jargon and examine what it takes to craft and implement a coherent school turnaround strategy. This conference is cosponsored by the Mass Insight Education & Research Institute.

About the Author

 

Frederick M.
Hess



  • An educator, political scientist and author, Frederick M. Hess studies a range of K-12 and higher education issues. He is the author of influential books on education including “The Same Thing Over and Over,” “Education Unbound,” “ Common Sense School Reform,” “ Revolution at the Margins” and “Spinning Wheels,” and he pens the Education Week blog, Rick Hess Straight Up. His work has appeared in scholarly and popular outlets such as Teachers College Record, Harvard Education Review, Social Science Quarterly, Urban Affairs Review, American Politics Quarterly, Chronicle of Higher Education, Phi Delta Kappan, Educational Leadership, U.S. News & World Report, National Affairs, The Washington Post, New York Times, The Atlantic and National Review. He has edited widely cited volumes on education philanthropy, stretching the school dollar, the impact of education research and No Child Left Behind.  He serves as executive editor of Education Next, as lead faculty member for the Rice Education Entrepreneurship Program, on the review boards for the Broad Prize in Urban Education and the Broad Prize for Public School Charters as well as on the boards of directors of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, 4.0 SCHOOLS and the American Board for the Certification of Teaching Excellence. A former high school social studies teacher, he has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Rice University and Harvard University. He holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University as well as an M.Ed. in Teaching and Curriculum.


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  • Email: rhess@aei.org
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