Attaining rapid school improvement can be a complex undertaking. Equally challenging is the work of sustaining and even expanding on a school’s initial improvements so that the school can more fully become a vibrant learning organization.

There is much to learn from schools that demonstrate sustained improvement and those who lead them. But because there has not been a broad effort to identify and highlight such schools, their successes have yielded little practice-based guidance for leaders who aspire to the same outcomes for the schools they lead.

Conceived to help fill a knowledge gap, this report presents promising practices for how to sustain the advances made in schools that have demonstrated rapid improvement.

The promising practices presented are derived from:

  • A comprehensive review of relevant literature on topics related to school turnaround, organizational turnaround and sustainability, and effective leadership
  • The experiences of five school principals whose schools continuously improved after their initial turnaround gains

This report is designed for principals, school leadership teams, principal supervisors, superintendents or other district leaders, and state education agency staff.