Press
Education Week: What, Exactly, Does School ‘Turnaround’ Mean?
05.27.2010
Education Week‘s Lesli Maxwell covers the PPI Capital Forum on turnaround schools:
That, to me, was the key question raised, but not really answered, at an edu-salon convened yesterday by the Progressive Policy Institute.
And the question didn’t come from any skeptic on whether or not turning low-performing schools around is an achievable goal. It came from Justin Cohen, who as the president of the School Turnaround Group at Mass Insight Education and Research Institute, is working closely with educators in a half-dozen states on this very difficult endeavor.
With $3.5 billion in stimulus-funded Title I School Improvement Grants flowing to the states and local districts to fix chronically low-performing schools, U.S.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his team at the Education Department have focused heavily on how you turn schools around, and are requiring one of four ways to do it. Their four endorsed school-improvement models are also part of the Obama administration’s blueprint for renewing ESEA. (Those models, of course, have been gaining more detractors lately, especially inside the halls of Congress.)
