Northwest Regional Comprehensive Center

Breaking the Habit of Low Performance: Successful School Restructuring Stories
This report examines five schools that successfully restructured. By current accountability standards, these schools had long-documented histories of poor performance and failed efforts to improve. At each of these schools, multiple factors enabled them to kick the low-performance habit. The report looks at what these schools have done differently from the thousands of schools that languish in improvement status as well as what actors intervened to catalyze, change, or create an environment conducive to improvement.

Performance-Based Dismissals: Cross-Sector Lessons for School Turnarounds
This report examines the research on performance-based dismissals outside education—where the experience base is much richer—to inform strategies for turnaround leaders in public education. The ways in which state and district policies enable—or more often impede—targeted staff replacement and provide policy recommendations for local and state education leaders are also examined.

Tough Decisions: Closing Persistently Low-Performing Schools
The report describes why and how four urban districts—Denver Public Schools, Chicago Public Schools, Hartford Public Schools, and Pittsburgh Public Schools—closed schools for low performance. It focuses on two distinct closure strategies: 1) closing school buildings and dispersing students to other schools; and 2) closing and then reopening the schools with new leadership and staff.