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School Turnaround Group
ALL SIX PARTNERSHIP
ZONE INITIATIVE STATES NAMED RACE TO THE TOP FINALISTS Read our longer statement here.
"If we turn around just the bottom 1 percent, the bottom thousand schools per year for the next five years, we
could really move the needle, lift the bottom and change the lives of tens of millions of underserved children."
- U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, May 11, 2009
The imperative of turnaround
Too many of our children are languishing in low-performing schools that have consistently and shamefully failed their students, families, and communities. School turnaround is an attempt to remedy this failure.
The Turnaround Challenge
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation awarded the Mass Insight Education & Research Institute a grant late in 2005 to produce a framework for states and districts seeking a flexible, systemic approach for swift, significant improvement in schools that have clearly failed their mission, producing track records of under-achievement that are indefensibly poor. The Turnaround Challenge and corollary resources released in 2007, were the result of that grant.
A follow-up grant from the Gates Foundation supported a Mass Insight-led effort to inform national and state leaders around the issue of school turnaround, and to carry out a research and development process to create tools and reports that would help school, district, and state leaders implement the report’s turnaround framework. The resulting resources from this initiative, Meeting the Turnaround Challenge, are available in our Turnaround Challenge Resource Center, and are now being used to design and implement policies in a variety of states.
Turning research into practice
The Turnaround Challenge has gained tremendous attention and praise in the world of education reform, including being downloaded over 175,000 times since its release. With the benefit of both national momentum and turnaround expertise, we decided to take our work to the next level and implement the framework we have espoused. We are now in the process of launching an intensive initiative to transform the The Turnaround Challenge framework into practice.
Mass Insight has been awarded a 2-year, $1.5M grant, from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to selectively work with a selective group of states, and districts within those states, that have the capacity, leadership consensus, and readiness to reinvent the district model by transforming clusters of turnaround schools through the creation of Partnership Zones.
In addition to the work of this Partnership Zone Initiative, we continue to lead the creation of practice-based tools and reports on school turnaround, advocate at the national and state level for optimal policies and conditions, and support a broader network of states and districts through proprietary consulting work.
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