Contact us:
Turnaround
25 West 45th St., 6th Floor
New York, NY 10036

Phone: 646-786-6200
Fax: 646-786-6201
E-Mail: info@tfcusa.org

Turnaround for Children's mission is to transform the most challenged, low performing schools into positive centers for teaching, learning, and achievement, enabling these schools to help their students break the cycle of poverty and fulfill their potential as learners and citizens.

Turnaround understands that schools in high-poverty communities must be reorganized and reenergized to counteract the effects of poverty in the lives of their students. An extensive study by Mass Insight Education and Research Institute of high-poverty, high-performing schools uncovered that such schools “are able to generate such high achievement because they confront, in specific, comprehensive, ongoing ways, the systemic effects of poverty on their students’ learning.” In particular, the study found that, to be successful, a school-change effort must encompass elements that create conditions for ‘readiness’ in the school. These include the capacity to:
  • ‘act against adversity’ as it manifests in student needs;
  • create a safe and orderly environment;
  • support positive adult-student relationships;
  • develop a strong and professional teaching staff who take responsibility for student achievement and can effectively support the learning needs of high-poverty students;
  • establish leadership that is creative in addressing problems.

 

The Turnaround Model is designed to help schools develop these capacities. Turnaround works to create a different kind of school, one with the knowledge and skills, systems and resources to provide a powerful and integrated response to the adversity in children’s lives so students can benefit from an education that truly prepares them for college, work and life. Strategies for school turnaround commonly emphasize new personnel and alternate management structures as the primary levers for change. However, current research indicates that the most important factor for school change is the organization of schools to systematically address the barriers to teaching and learning that typify high-poverty schools. This emphasis on an integrated, school-based approach rather than on people alone ensures that power is not concentrated in a single leverage point. Accordingly, Turnaround’s comprehensive school transformation model gives the same weight to strategic leadership and staffing decisions as to those organizational systems and practices that have been demonstrated to effectively address the needs of students in high- poverty communities and that can be developed and nurtured in existing schools with existing practitioners to enhance the human capital already within the system. Thus, because it neither requires total school reconstitution nor relies on an already stretched supply of extraordinary individuals, the Turnaround model offers a more readily scalable solution, one that can even be used in new schools to prevent them from failing in the first place. Finally, even extraordinary individuals in newly reconstituted schools are challenged by the same social, behavioral and academic needs of their students and would benefit from systems and strategies for addressing them. The Turnaround Model represents an approach that can be nested within the basic operations of schools and districts as well as coordinated with other reform efforts in partnership with other organizations.

 

  1. Complete Turnaround Model for School Change
  2. Model and Evaluation Summary

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Turnaround for Children, Inc. is a § 501(c)(3) organization. A copy of our latest financial report may be obtained, upon request, from either Turnaround for Children, Inc.,
25 West 45th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10036 or the State of New York, Office of the Attorney General, Charities Bureau, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.