This paper aims to explore how teachers and school-based staff experience policy and navigate instability in urban schools labeled as failing and placed into ‘turnaround’.  Urban public schools in the United States have been impacted by perpetual uncertainty and precarity as cities transform and schools are subjected to frequent policy churn. These schools are sites of both stability and instability during times of change and upheaval such as the coronavirus pandemic and current cost-of-living crisis. Urban schools provide stability through social services for families (e.g.: food banks, Wi-Fi hotspots) and safe spaces for students in addition to schooling; however, many urban schools simultaneously experience increased surveillance, turbulence, and intervention through accountability policies that label them ‘failing’ and in need of ‘turnaround’ (school takeover or intervention), or closure. This instability is further compounded by local contextual factors (rising intakes of English learners and special education students amidst budget constraints, competition with charter schools, local school choice policies) as well as national and international trends (privatization of education, displacement of families due to gentrification, financial crises and widening inequalities). Schools are on the frontlines of navigating societal and local instabilities, but there is limited research exploring how school-based staff respond to these challenges while experiencing school accountability interventions.

Since the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act, a significant focus of American education policy centered on ‘corrective action’ designed to turnaround ‘underperforming’ schools, in common with other neoliberal systems. Turnaround policies vary by state and include options such as firing school staff, appointing private management, restructuring the school, or closure. The decision to intervene in ‘failing’ schools is determined by student performance on standardized tests and other metrics such as graduation rates. The goal of turnaround is rapid change and improvement in school performance. Similar policies exist internationally such as ‘special measures’ in England (Perryman, 2006), ‘turnaround’ in China (Tao, 2023) and Malaysia (Harris et al., 2017), and ‘failing schools’ interventions in some German states (Dedering, 2018). Turnaround policies connect to the governance turn (Ball, 2009) in neoliberal education policy and frequently involve public-private partnerships, consultants, and philanthropic actors in schools. In America, after two decades of turnaround policies, there are “very few examples of permanent school turnaround” (Meyers, 2020), but many students, teachers, and communities have been impacted as thousands of schools experienced turnaround- mostly in urban, low-income, Black and Latinx communities (Lipman, 2011).

Accountability systems often center ‘teacher-deficit’ views (Ingersoll, 2011) even as teachers are central to school improvement work. Furthermore, the experiences and perspectives of teachers are frequently underrepresented in research on turnaround policy. The limited scholarship on teachers in turnaround schools highlights the uncertainty and stress at the heart of their experiences. Cucchiara et al.’s (2015) study on working conditions under turnaround shows teachers experienced rigorous workloads, long hours, chronic instability, and frequent turnover of leadership and staff. Peck and Reitzug’s (2018) case study contributes portraitures of four primary teachers in turnaround schools and highlights the “dizzying nature of change” and high teacher attrition rates. The pandemic has exacerbated these conditions and Harbatkin et al. (2023) found that turnaround schools were disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and experience greater educational inequities.

In exploring teachers’ experiences, this study will pay particular attention to contextual factors, issues of equity, and teachers’ identities. Ultimately, this paper examines the relationship between accountability policies and teacher experiences in neoliberal systems and can act as a cautionary tale of the impacts of policy interventions and labels, especially when these interventions ignore context and substitute control for support.  

The study will address the questions: 1) How does ‘school failure’ impact on school communities? 2) How do school turnaround policies impact on teachers, school-based staff, and students? Using a qualitative methodology, I explore how school staff experience turnaround interventions designed to drive improvement of ‘underperforming’ schools. To answer the research questions, I conducted 30 semi-structured interviews and a focus group of school-based staff and students in 8 secondary turnaround schools in a large urban district in the northeastern United States. This study uses the term ‘turnaround’ to describe schools subject to state interventions due to falling in the bottom 10% of accountability metrics in the state. The schools differed in their size, type, and length of time in turnaround status. The participants comprised a range of job titles (teachers, school leaders, social workers, instructional coaches) and represented diverse racial groups, gender identities, ages, and experience levels in the field of education. The interviews and focus group were conducted between October 2023 and January 2024. The focus group and some interviews were conducted in person in the United States, while other interviews were conducted online. The interviews lasted approximately 40 to 155 minutes and explored how school-based staff experienced turnaround policy and how this manifested in their professional practices and identities. The interviews were audio recorded, verbatim transcribed, and coded using NVivo. The theoretical framework for the study draws on policy sociology (Ozga, 2021) and Critical Race Theory (Gillborn, 2005) to situate turnaround policy within a wider context of global neoliberal education reform while analyzing localized impacts of policy on racially segregated and disadvantaged urban schools. This study draws on Bradbury’s (2020) framework using policy sociology and Critical Race Theory to analyze how regimes of truth surrounding policy problems are constructed and how policy can perpetuate inequities. This study also uses Perryman’s (2006) theories of ‘panoptic performativity’ to analyze how accountability discourses and technologies can become internalized by educators. In an era of policy borrowing and policy mobilities, drawing on research from European and international contexts can illuminate the flow of discourses and policies (high-stakes testing, inspection regimes, teacher deprofessionalization) across national contexts and expose how they play out in localized contexts such as hyper-segregated American urban schools.

The preliminary findings show that the day-to-day context of teaching, learning, and management in turnaround schools is increasingly complex, especially since the coronavirus pandemic. School-based staff are tasked with navigating the complex needs of students while responding to various stakeholder demands, accountability pressures, and local politics and policies (plans to merge and close schools, changing service models for English Learners, moving towards full inclusion models). Additionally, turnaround schools have disproportionate numbers of English learners and special education students but lack the necessary budgeting, staffing, and support to equitably serve those populations. Many families are living in increasingly precarious situations (homelessness, food insecurity, community violence, need for mental health services) and more pressures are placed on schools to meet students’ social-emotional, mental health, and physical health needs in addition to meeting academic benchmarks. As schools are tasked with increasing demands, teachers are subjected to deficit models of accountability policies that blame them for ‘low performance’. Accountability policies do not take the impacts of segregation, poverty, and context into account when labeling and intervening in schools. Furthermore, turnaround policies often position English learners and special education students as policy ‘problems’, but do not provide specialized support or funding to address equity issues. Turnaround teachers expressed feeling ‘set up’ to fail, and highlighted the ‘vicious cycle’ of policy, practice, and their context. Turnaround policies had a significant impact on teacher identity and emotions. Teachers struggled with feelings of deprofessionalization through mandated curricula and pedagogical directives while being subjected to surveillance and performativity through inspections. Teachers expressed the paradox of performativity in having to choose between serving their students’ needs or meeting the increasing pressures of the turnaround accountability system. This study aims to provide a nuanced picture of the complexity of policy enactment and the impacts of ‘failing schools’ policies on school communities.

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