COBY V. MEYERS JOSEPH MURPHY Turning Around Failing Schools: An Analysis ABSTRACT: High-stakes testing and accountability implicate failing schools more frequently and more precisely than ever before. Consequently, efforts to turn around these schools have become paramount for educators, policy actors, and community members. Through a synthesis of research on failing schools, this ar- ticle unpacks the constructs of school failure and turnaround. It also details causes of decline and crisis. Finally, it analyzes current educational strategies in- tended to turn failing schools into successful ones. The concept of troubled schools is not new in American public educa- tion, but with the advent of and increase in high-stakes testing, the iden- tification of failure and turnaround is become prominent in public edu- cation. Turnaround work in education is not without problems, however. Some of these issues are small or simply technical; others are consider- ably more serious, often throwing the field of educational turnaround work into question. One especially troubling aspect of the literature on turning around fail- ing schools is that it almost universally fails to examine turnaround work in other industries and organizations. Specifically, a large and growing body of literature is now available that helps us to see how churches, hos- pitals, universities, government entities, for-profit firms, and not-for-profit organizations have successfully and unsuccessfully engaged recovery ef- forts (see Murphy & Meyers, 2007, for a review). Nevertheless, the pressure emanating from failure generates turnaround efforts of various kinds and intensities within the education sector, imple- mented and enforced at different levels. In this article, we examine these Address correspondence to Coby V. Meyers, 1307 Longhunter Lane, Nashville, TN 37217. E-mail: coby.v.meyers@vanderbilt.edu. Journal of School Leadership Volume 17-September 2007 631