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School turnaround through network governance: the role of turnaround schools in China’s Shanghai City

ABSTRACT Collaboration and networking have been widely recognized and adopted as strategies for school turnaround. However, most studies focus on external forces’ (particularly governments’) role in promoting collaborative turnaround, paying less attention to turnaround schools’ reactions to external actors. With specific reference to Shanghai, China, this qualitative empirical study examines the complexity of schools’ role in school turnaround through network governance. Drawing on document review and interview data, this study found three patterns of turnaround schools’ interactions with local governments and third-party actors in different school turnaround networks – compliant follower, reserved enforcer, or rational aspirant. Turnaround schools’ differentiated responses to external actors in China’s collaborative turnaround indicated their different awareness and capacity to utilize external resources. This resulted from schools’ different levels of disadvantage and leadership and external actors’ different extents of power exercise and differently impacted schools’ positions and power relations with external actors.