Craig Peck

School Turnaround Fever: The Paradoxes of a Historical Practice Promoted as a New Reform.

School “turnaround” has received significant attention recently in education literature and policy action, especially as a means to dramatically improve urban education. In current common education usage, “turnaround” refers to the rapid, significant improvement in the academic achievement of persistently low-achieving schools. Employing a conceptual framework informed by research regarding school reform history, the school leadership fashion cycle, and paradoxes in educational innovation and reform, this exploratory study examines policy documents, foundation works, and empirical studies in considering the historical roots, current recommended practices, and outcomes to date of the turnaround reform movement. We present the results of our inquiry in the form of a series of vexing paradoxes that characterize the recent fervor for school turnaround at the same time they signal the promise and pitfalls of the reform idea. We conclude by examining implications for urban school policy makers and school-based leaders.

How Existing Business Management Concepts Become School Leadership Fashions

Purpose: This article examines the history of three management concepts that originated in the business sector and progressed to the K-12 education sector. Framework: We propose a new conceptual model intended to help illuminate how ideas and strategies originally created for business leadership gain influence in the realm of K-12 school leadership. We build upon existing research into the history of educational reform and relevant studies of organizational management fads and fashions. Methods: We focused on three business management concepts that emerged in the past four decades as school leadership fashions: Management by Objectives, Total Quality Management, and Turnaround. We analyzed relevant data by mapping lines of business management influence on school leadership, tabulating fashion-related document appearances in the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) database, and charting the appearance of business-inspired fashions in consecutive editions of prominent educational leadership textbooks. Findings: An existing business management concept, after a time lag, crosses borders from business to education. Various stakeholders serve as fashion setters who help the incipient innovation become an influential, attention-grabbing school management fashion that receives broad but fleeting attention in K-12 education before fading away as a discarded reform. Over the last four decades, this cyclical process has served as an accumulating fashion trend in which existing (and possibly outdated) business management techniques are routinely positioned as promising, innovative K-12 educational solutions. Implications: We conclude by offering thoughts on implications and suggestions for future study, including asking whether “locally sourced” management innovation can and should exist in K-12 school leadership.

Education by Any Means Necessary: Peoples of African Descent and Community-Based Pedagogical Spaces

This study examines how and why peoples of African descent access and utilize community-based pedagogical spaces that exist outside schools. Employing a theoretical framework that fuses historical methodology and border-crossing theory, the researchers review existing scholarship and primary documents to present an historical examination of how peoples of African descent have fought for and redefined education in nonschool educative venues. These findings inform the authors’ analysis of results from an oral history project they conducted into how Black Bermudian men utilized learning spaces outside schools, such as the family, Black church, and athletics clubs, to augment their personal and scholastic development. Based on their historical and empirical research findings, the authors argue that educational actors (including teachers, administrators, policy makers, and researchers) focused on school-based issues like the academic achievement gap would do well to recognize the impact learning spaces outside of schools may have on student scholastic success, particularly for minority men.

Accountability, autonomy and stress: principal responses to superintendent change in a large US urban school district

This study investigates how principals in a large US urban school district responded to two different superintendents who employed contrasting leadership styles and utilised divergent organisational schemes. We originally conducted interviews with principals in 2007, when the districts superintendent asserted fierce performance demands and limited principals’ site-based discretion in favour of protecting and exerting central office power. We conducted interviews again in 2013 after a new superintendent had relaxed school test score expectations and distributed the central offices previously tight, centralised control into largely self-directing sub-regions. Our findings demonstrate that superintendent change noticeably affected how principals understood and encountered accountability, autonomy and stress. To help make sense of our findings, we employ a three-part conceptual framework drawn from the study of educational leadership. We conclude by considering implications, including the notion that unrelenting stress has become a permanent part of the modern urban US principalship.

“My Progress Comes From the Kids”: Portraits of Four Teachers in an Urban Turnaround School

This article uses elements of narrative and portraiture to acknowledge the voices of four teachers who participated in a 3-year effort to turn around an urban elementary school. Turnaround is a san...

Discount Stores, Discount(ed) Community? Parent and Family Engagement, Community Outreach, and an Urban Turnaround School

What roles do parent and family engagement and community outreach play in educator efforts to improve low-performing urban schools? To address this question, we considered findings from our 3-year case study of Brookdale Elementary (a pseudonym), which was undergoing a state-mandated, district-directed turnaround reform effort from 2011 to 2014. Specifically, we investigated how and why school personnel engaged with and reacted to parents and families, community-based organizations, and the surrounding locale. In the end, the school’s educators encountered complicated obstacles yet generated some tangible victories in their pursuit of productive school, parent/family, and community connections. We conclude by considering implications of our findings.

You're the New Principal? Considering First Steps toward Improvement at Sparrow Middle School.

In the contemporary context, demands for rapid school turnaround meet the reality of increased principal turnover. Therefore, it is crucial to help aspiring school leaders hone their problem-solving skills. This case provides readers with an opportunity to diagnose issues of concern at a struggling school, and then prescribe several initial strategies for improvement. To accentuate the personal relevance of the exercise, the authors employ second person narrative voice. The case has been revised and enhanced during its use over the past several years in principal preparation programs, including a federal-grant-funded initiative to train aspiring leaders of high-need, low-performing schools. The teaching notes provide guidance on how educational leadership instructors might use the case within their own courses.