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We examine the Los Angeles Unified School District's Public School Choice Initiative (PSCI), which sought to turnaround the district's lowest-performing schools. We ask whether school turnaround impacted student outcomes, and what explains variations in outcomes across reform cohorts. We use a Comparative Interrupted Time Series approach using administrative studentlevel data, following students in the first (1.0), second (2.0), and third (3.0) cohorts of PSCI schools. We find that students in 1.0 turnaround schools saw no significant improvements in outcomes, whereas students enrolled in 2.0 schools saw significant gains in English Language Arts in both years of the reform. Students in 3.0 schools experienced significant decreases in achievement. Qualitative and survey data suggest that increased support and assistance and the use of reconstitution and restart as the sole turnaround methods contributed to gains in 2.0, whereas policy changes in 3.0 caused difficulties and confusion in implementation, leading to poor student performance. U n c o r r e c t e d P r o o f Impact of Turnaround on Student Outcomes A BRIEF REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ON SCHOOL TURNAROUND REFORMSSchool turnaround takes many forms, incorporating a variety of strategies that range from dramatic (e.g., school closure and reopening under a new operator or the hiring of new leadership and faculty) to relatively modest (e.g., changes in professional development or curriculum). Under the SIG program, turnaround is given a narrower definition as one of four possible interventions for improving low-performing schools in which schools must replace the principal, fire all of the school staff and rehire no more than half of them, and grant the new principal sufficient flexibility to implement a comprehensive approach to improve student outcomes. The remaining SIG models include "restart", "transformation", and "closure" (USDOE 2010b). 2 Regardless of label, all school turnarounds focus "on the most consistently underperforming schools and involve dramatic, transformative change" quickly-within two to three years (Calkins et al. 2007, p. 10; also see Herman et al. 2008; Villavicencio and Grayman 2012).To date, little evidence exists regarding the efficacy of school turnaround efforts. The U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences What Works practice guide on school turnaround (Herman et al. 2008) found no empirical studies of requisite rigor demonstrating intervention effects. The one notable exception is a recent study that uses a regression discontinuity approach to isolate the impact of SIG-funded reforms on student achievement (Dee 2012). That study finds evidence that SIG-funded school reforms led to significant improvements in the performance of California's lowest-performing schools in their first year of SIG implementation. Importantly, Dee finds the SIG turnaround (often labeled "reconstitution") model drives the positive results and other models are less effective in improving school performance.Much of the remaining rese...

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Background Many school districts are relying on instructional coaches to improve teaching and learning under the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Yet we know very little about how coaches exercise systemic leadership to support districtwide improvements in instruction. Purpose In this study, I broadly define systemic leadership as efforts to coordinate multiple reform goals with school improvement strategies and classroom instruction, and to build institutional knowledge and collaborative structures for scaling up instructional change. I used social-network theory and the concept of brokering to study the systemic leadership practices of Digital Learning Coaches (DLCs) in the Peterson Unified School District (PUSD, a pseudonym), a midsized urban district that distributed iPads and laptops to schools in the 2014–15 school year for CCSS instruction. Research Design I used an explanatory sequential research design to examine how DLCs engaged educators at all organizational levels of PUSD to support systemic change. I collected social-network data to map communication networks in the district and how DLCs brokered information in these networks. I then conducted a multiple case study of three DLCs in six elementary schools to characterize the quality of systemic leadership exercised by DLCs through their brokering exchanges and the organizational factors informing their leadership. Findings I find that DLCs brokered information in a siloed, top-down manner from the central office into schools, guiding teachers on how to integrate technology with instruction but failing to coordinate this support with other CCSS resources popular among school leaders and teachers. Consequently, DLCs struggled to build coherence around the use of technology with school goals for improvement, provide instructional support to a broad footprint of teachers, and discover and share novel uses of technology developed by teachers. The organizational context of the central office and its schools informed DLC brokering, with top-down hierarchies, organizational silos, principal leadership, and the experience, goals, and training of DLCs influencing how these coaches engaged educators. Conclusions My findings suggest that district leaders should provide explicit guidance, resources, and more time for instructional coaches to demonstrate leadership in support of systemic change. I also show that instructional coaching is dependent on the organizational context of schools, suggesting that there will be local variation in the leadership outcomes that coaches achieve in practice and that district leaders should account for pertinent factors such as principal leadership, school structures for teacher collaboration, and school-reform readiness when developing coaching programs.