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New Mexico: State Policy Brief on School Turnaround

Policy/Policy brief

New Mexico: State Policy Brief on School Turnaround

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The State Policy Brief Series highlights state policies, regulations, practices, laws, or other tools intended to create the necessary conditions for school and/or district turnaround. Each brief includes a tool overview, its development process, its impact, and lessons learned that could assist other education agencies interested in enacting something similar.

The focus of this brief is the New Mexico Public Education Department’s Principals Pursuing Excellence (PPE) program that was launched in 2013. The program was designed to develop a cadre of strong turnaround principals. The brief includes an overview of the program, a description of the program with stakeholder roles and responsibilities, the program’s impact and lessons learned from the program’s implementation.

Policy Perspective: School Turnaround in England: Utilizing the Private Sector

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This paper, written by strategic partner of the CST, Julie Corbett, provides research and examples on England’s approach to turning around its lowest performing schools. The English education system utilizes private vendors to support chronically low-performing schools and districts. The introduction is followed by discussions of each of the three main strategies for private sector involvement, including: school-based management, turning around individual schools and outsourcing the management of districts to private vendors. The paper concludes with lessons learned that could inform the implementation of similar efforts in the U.S.

Recommendations for Differentiating Services to Support Schools Designated for Targeted Support and Improvement

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The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), as the latest reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, includes major revisions to the law in terms of how states design their accountability systems and provide supports aimed at improving academic outcomes in their lowest-performing schools. ESSA defines a category of schools, called Targeted Support and Improvement (TSI) schools, which must develop and implement a support-and-improvement plan that targets improvement for a particular subgroup (or subgroups) of students. This paper delves into the TSI designation, draws out some lessons learned from prior education reform work (particularly efforts to improve schools with an earlier, similar designation of being focus schools), and makes the case for providing support to TSI schools that is differentiated according to the particular needs of different schools and districts.