Turning Around - Book Cover

TURNING AROUND TURNAROUND SCHOOLS is a book that explains a practical approach for helping struggling schools in today's educational environment of high stakes testing and accountability. It describes the efforts of a group of educators to deal with the changes caused by the standards-based reform of the early 1990s. The book chronicles the changes in perceptions, practices and assumptions made by these educators during their 20 years of working with "turnaround schools." The authors focus on areas that produced the greatest leverage in changing schools (e.g., identifying all of the learnings and learner characteristics required by standards or developing causal data streams) and on some of the barriers that made these high leverage strategies difficult to implement (e.g., compliance cultures or entrenched programs).