This updated resource provides state education agencies and districts with guidance on assessing a district’s readiness to support school turnaround initiatives. First published in 2013, the guide has been updated to highlight how its approach to assessing district readiness embeds and reflects key components of Four Domains for Rapid School Improvement, a framework developed by the Center on School Turnaround.

Using this framework, the guide aims to help policymakers or practitioners consider school turnaround as a system-level issue — fundamental district-level practices must be in place to establish the conditions for school turnaround to succeed. This perspective counters the tendency for school turnaround efforts to focus on only the school’s structure and leadership. By contrast, this guide provides an introduction to district-level turnaround readiness and the conditions that will help districts best position resources to enable turnaround schools to succeed and to sustain that success.