Contemporary Perspectives on School Turnaround and Reform is an interdisciplinary book series that highlights research, policy, and practical insights into the implementation and impact of current school improvement efforts. For over five decades, school improvement initiatives have been the topic of intense policy and practical focus. From highly prescriptive school turnaround models to highly flexible site-based management reforms, a large compendium of knowledge has been gleaned from many different efforts to improve low-performing schools. Nevertheless, the sheer range of differences in how school improvement models are designed, implemented, and sustained means that there continues to be an inadequate understanding of how to effectively support the lowest-performing schools. Thus, books in this series will curate chapters aimed at understanding how educators, researchers, policymakers are currently thinking about school improvement and putting strategies into practice. We encourage books that address the opportunities, challenges, and tensions inherent in developing, implementing, and scaling school improvement efforts.
The books in this series will highlight both scholarly inquiry and practical application. Drawing from experiences across diverse contexts (i.e., countries, educational systems, grade levels, population density), each volume seeks to elucidate current school improvement practices, their impact on students, educators, schools, organizations, and educational systems and insights for improving future initiatives. Moreover, books in this series will be grounded in theory and rigorous empirical evidence that draws generalizable or transferable insights of relevance to the current schooling environment. Books may draw a variety of methods including but not limited to on qualitative, quantitative, mixed-methods, historical, and comparative approaches that advance the understanding of school improvement and reform.
We invite single-author or collaborative books or edited collections organized around a collective theme within school improvement and reform. Books may examine any educational setting or compare across different educational settings but should address elements of school improvement. For example, books might consider the breadth of interventions implemented at various levels to improve low-performing schools or look across contexts to understand the opportunities and challenges inherent in the work of improving low-performing schools. We encourage books that include multivocal perspectives on school improvement, including perspectives of researchers, policymakers, and educators.
List of topic areas
- Current state of school improvement and reform: What interventions are state, district, or province level education agencies currently putting into place to improve low-performing schools?
- Contextual variation: How do school improvement models vary across different contexts (e.g., in rural versus urban areas)?
- Sustainability and maturation: What happens after a model has been implemented for multiple years, and how can successes be sustained?
- Funding and resources: What resources are currently available to support school improvement efforts, and how are these resources being used?
- Theories of Action: What do practitioners really need to do in order to in order to improve school performance?
- Scalability: What does it take to scale effective models into a larger number of schools? Is it even possible to implement one model at scale or must improvement models necessarily be highly tailored?
- Impact and Mechanisms: What is the impact of school improvement on a variety of student outcomes, and what key mechanisms explain these effects?
- Stakeholder Engagement: Whose perspectives influence approaches to school improvement? How do leaders incorporate multiple perspectives in developing school turnaround models?
- Innovation, Opportunities, and Challenges: How, if at all, do district and school leaders innovate and develop new strategies for school improvement? What challenges do actors encounter, and how do they manage or respond to those challenges?
- Implementation: How are school improvement initiatives adapted, implemented, and sustained across varying organizational contexts? What implementation efforts facilitate success?
- Evaluation and Measurement: How should researchers, policymakers, and practitioners evaluate school improvement efforts? What measures best capture successful reform and improvement?
Submission information
Interested authors or editors can access the book proposal form for download here. Please submit the completed form along with a CV for each contributing editor or author to the series editors (Lam D. Pham, Alisha Butler, and Adam Kho). Proposals will be reviewed on a rolling basis and shared with the editorial team following an internal review. If you have questions about the series, proposal process, or would like to discuss a potential volume, please email the series editors.
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