Turnaround Principals : Passionate Leaders Who Can Improve Low-Performing Schools

The book will offer a progressive perspective of turnaround principals and enhance the current turnaround school literature. It highlights a historical and holistic perspective of school turnaround. This book offers hope to the future of school turnaround and its leaders, as the book spotlights stories of the lived experiences of three critically conscious principals’ journey to school transformation.

Each principal’s leadership transformed the school into an exceptional school that caters to the needs of the students, the teachers and the community. The book highlights critical conscious turnaround principals who disrupted cultures of oppression in predominantly African American turnaround schools. The passionate leaders are illuminated in the book because their leadership improved academic outcomes for students and the working conditions of teachers and staff.

Also, the book spotlights the successful turnaround principals’ critical lens of faulty systems and structures that often create an oppressive school culture. By holding a critical lens, the turnaround principals’ critical consciousness manifested into a keen knowledge of the systems and structures that create and sustain inequity (critical analysis), a sense of power or capability (sense of agency), and commitment to act against oppressive conditions (El-Amin, Seider, Graves, Tamerat, Clark, Soutter, Johannsen, Malhotra, 2017).