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Despite decades of research that points to the importance of family and staff engagement, the average school district in the United States is not designed to empower families and teachers to shape school improvement. The COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to change that. Pandemic-fueled disruption helped seed ideas with families and educators about how to improve schools, and stimulus funding requirements for public input gave them an opportunity to communicate their vision as part of historic federal investments in K-12 education. Between January 2020 and September 2021, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) conducted interviews with parents and teachers in four New England high schools and analyzed district communication in 86 New England school systems. Echoing national trends, few school systems communicated their plans to engage families and educators around stimulus investments. Where they existed, engagement strategies were often inequitable and failed to give families and teachers the support they needed to offer actionable input. School systems interested in better approaches to engaging the public must not start from scratch. Past experiences of including educators, families, and communities in the work of school improvement offers many lessons and suggests new, creative strategies worth trying.

In partnership with the Barr Foundation, the Center on Reinventing Public Education conducted longitudinal interviews with ten teachers and seven parents across four school systems in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, and Massachusetts between January and June of 2021. Our interviews expose how ill-equipped New England schools were to address adolescent well-being during the pandemic. Specifically, our interviews reveal that as adolescents suffered, under-resourced families looked to schools for help that didn't come. While teachers made heroic efforts, they reportedly felt unprepared to deliver the support students needed. And schoolwide efforts were often inconsistent or limited. States and districts should be using this as an opportunity to reassess how they support adolescents and their families. This doesn't require radical redesign, fancy technology, or additional staff. Schools can make important changes with the resources they currently have. Specifically, school systems should: (1) tap community assets to dramatically deepen supports for the well-being of young people and their families; (2) give teachers mentorship and support in social-emotional learning, not just training materials; and (3) use leadership and data to make sure social-emotional well-being a schoolwide priority.

While state policymakers are ultimately responsible for public schools statewide, their influence over local school districts has always been incomplete at best. State chiefs, the ostensible leaders of state education agencies, have limited powers and local school boards ultimately control most of the money and staff. As a result, when state leaders seek change in local school systems--whether to address financial mismanagement, corruption, or weak outcomes for students--they are often stymied by factors outside of their control. State takeovers of local school districts emerged as one strategy for overcoming these limitations on state authority. State takeovers suspend the powers of local boards and put in place a state-appointed superintendent. They aim to provide states a direct means for influencing the oversight and operation of local schools that does not hinge on gaining local leaders' cooperation. While state takeovers can be powerful, they are never permanent. To understand how state leaders have sought to sustain the hard-won improvements they gained through state takeovers, the authors interviewed a total of 10 current and former senior state officials who had overseen state takeovers or served as state-appointed superintendents. The interviews provide key lessons for states seeking to make improvements in districts and schools navigating a transition to local control, and emphasize the need to focus on sustainability well before state interventions begin. The authors summarize the main themes that emerged from their interviews in three sections: (1) State takeover is an important but limited tool; (2) States must build a local political base for takeover-initiated reforms; and (3) Exit strategies must set the conditions for long-term success.

In 2014, the Springfield Public School district in Massachusetts had tried just about every strategy in the turnaround playbook to improve a set of struggling middle schools, but these efforts failed to generate the desired improvement. In 2015, drawing inspiration from national efforts to infuse schools with enhanced autonomy and accountability, the district voluntarily ceded operational control of six middle school campuses to the newly formed Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership (SEZP), an independent nonprofit charged with overseeing the turnaround effort. SEZP offers principals freedom from district rules in exchange for increased accountability for results. These changes, along with a new collective bargaining agreement for teachers working in SEZP and new supports for students and principals, represent a marked departure from Springfield's previous efforts. This case study profiles SEZP, comparing and contrasting it with conventional turnaround strategies such as district-led turnaround, reconstitution, chartering, and state-initiated turnaround. Key findings include: (1) SEZP brought together a package of reforms aimed at generating improvement and a new governance model that gives schools much greater freedom to change without needing to ask permission or fear regulatory second-guessing; (2) SEZP offers a "middle way" between other school turnaround strategies: providing more local participation and less controversy compared to either state takeovers or chartering, and committing more deeply to school autonomy, tailored support, and choice of talent compared to conventional district-led turnarounds; and (3) Thus far, SEZP has seen less controversy and more goodwill than many other turnaround efforts, but whether the strategy results in improved student outcomes remains to be seen.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) puts responsibility for improving student outcomes back where some say it has always belonged--under states' purview. No longer will prescriptive federal requirements dictate how states should identify, support, and turn around the lowest-performing schools and districts. Instead, states are empowered to craft their own "evidence-based" turnaround strategies. Recent history provides many examples of state-initiated turnaround, including collaborative approaches that leverage school districts as partners, targeted turnarounds through state-managed school districts, and comprehensive district takeovers that aim to improve management as well as instruction. Yet, the evidence base around these strategies is surprisingly weak. Existing research fails to identify the comparative effectiveness of alternative approaches or help states understand when particular strategies are likely to deliver the desired results. This report addresses these gaps and provides a comprehensive look at state-initiated turnaround in all its varieties. The report identifies various mechanisms states can use to intervene in schools and dives deep into nearly a dozen recent turnarounds in eight states. It maps the five common turnaround approaches: state support for local turnaround, state-authorized turnaround zone, mayoral control, school takeover, and district takeover. It also analyzes what is known about state-initiated turnaround in all its forms. This report documents how the state role in school and district turnaround has evolved over time and the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches. Research for this report included: (1) Examination of state laws and regulations; (2) Interviews with 15 stakeholders--including state chiefs, district staff, community groups, and support providers--on the role of the state in turnaround, political and substantive impacts of state-initiated turnarounds, and implementation challenges; (3) Review of recent evaluation evidence on state-initiated turnarounds and literature on conditions required for turnarounds to succeed; and (4) Deep dives in 11 cases of state-initiated turnaround in eight states: (a) Oakland Unified School District (CA); (b) Recovery School District (LA); (c) Lawrence Public Schools (MA); (d)Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership (MA); (e) Educational Achievement Authority (MI); (f) Camden City School District (NJ); (g) Newark Public Schools (NJ); (h) New York City Department of Education (NY); (i) The School District of Philadelphia (PA); (j) Shelby County Schools iZone (TN); and (k) Achievement School District (TN), which included reviews of research and media accounts documenting the causes and impacts (both political and substantive) of the turnaround effort. The following are appended: (1) Strategies States Currently Employ to Support School/District Turnaround; (2) Summary of Cases Selected for Deeper Inquiry; and (3) Evaluations of State-Initiated Turnaround.

Weighted student funding (WSF) decentralizes control over resources and empowers principals as financial leaders of their schools. In this study, we set out to understand how principals are making use of those leadership opportunities. Based upon a 2017-18 survey of 639 principals in 14 school districts implementing WSF, we find that principals are actively engaged in the budget process and utilize their flexibilities, but often do not come into their role with the financial leadership training to carry out those tasks. Among the findings: (1) Principals understand how WSF works and why their district is using it; (2) Principals in WSF districts take the lead on budget decisions for their schools; (3) Principals in WSF districts involve school-level stakeholders often left out of the budget development process; (4) Principals in WSF districts customize spending for their school community; and (5) Many principals lack formal training to fully leverage the benefits of WSF. While our results capture some of the variability in principals' experiences across WSF districts, more research is needed to understand how these results are shaped by the diversity of rationales motivating districts to adopt WSF, as well as continued evolution of WSF within and across districts.

"The SEA of the Future" is an education publication series examining how state education agencies can shift from a compliance to a performance-oriented organization through strategic planning and performance management tools to meet growing demands to support education reform while improving productivity. This volume, the fifth in the series, draws on the experiences of state agency staff from Massachusetts, Michigan, and Tennessee, as well as the work of the Regional Comprehensive Centers, to explore how state education agencies can bolster their ability to use research and data to drive key spending, policy, and program decisions. Volume 5 includes practical tools state agencies can use to assist with research and data. Following an introduction by Ashley Jochim, this report contains the following essays: (1) Better Policy through Research: Pursuing High-Impact Research in State Education Agencies (Carrie Conaway)--features a sample policy analyst job description and a research office organizational chart; (2) Making Research Matter for the SEA (Nathaniel Schwartz)--describes how to build a research team within the SEA, and provides a framework and practical guidance on how research fits in the policy cycle; (3) Building Productive Research Partnerships (Venessa Keesler)--includes a case study of a research partnership: the Michigan Consortium for Educational Research; and (4) Technical Assistance to Support Evidence-Based Policymaking: A Conversation with the Regional Comprehensive Centers (facilitated by Bethany Gross)--provides a sample blueprint for states looking to create a research office, and Comprehensive Center leaders Kathleen Dempsey, Caitlin Howley, and Paul Kohler discuss their experiences in building evidence-based policy. [For "The SEA of the Future: Leveraging Performance Management to Support School Improvement. Volume 1," see ED562516. For "The SEA of the Future: Prioritizing Productivity. Volume 2," see ED562514. For "The SEA of the Future: Building the Productivity Infrastructure. Volume 3," see ED562515. For "The SEA of the Future: Uncovering the Productivity Promise of Rural Education. Volume 4," see ED562510.]