Can States Take Over and Turn Around School Districts? Evidence From Lawrence, Massachusetts

TURNING around chronically underperforming schools and districts has been an elusive goal, despite prioritization at the highest levels of government (Gewertz, 2009). In recent years, considerable federal resources have been devoted toward this end. The Obama administration’s signature education initiative, Race to the Top, awarded over $4 billion in competitive grant funding to states in part based on states’ plans for turning around their lowest achieving schools (Smarick, 2010). The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act also funded an additional $3 billion in School Improvement Grants (SIG) aimed at improving the lowest-performing 5% of public K–12 schools (Dee, 2012). At the state level, there is considerable variation across accountability models in the policy response to chronic underperformance. Through its Elementary and Secondary Education Act Flexibility Program, the U.S. Department of Education (U.S. ED) has recently encouraged states to adopt tiered accountability systems targeting the lowest performers for intensive interventions. The U.S. ED has highlighted as an exemplar Massachusetts’s accountability system, which is defined by the state’s 2010 Achievement Gap Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2012). That system has three important features. First, the state classifies schools and districts into distinct performance levels. Second, the state requires low-performing schools and districts to implement rapid improvement plans. Third, the 685824 EPAXXX10.3102/0162373716685824Can States Turn Around School Districts?Schueler et al. research-article2017