From Oyster Reefs to Turnaround Schools: An Educational Restoration Model for the COVID-19 Era

COVID-19 shocked preK-12 education systems, disrupting reform efforts and straining schools' capacities for improvement. Yet accountability policies - in particular, school turnaround - marched on unabated, potentially exacerbating pandemic-related crisis conditions. This conceptual paper draws on the field of ecological restoration to reconstruct school turnaround as educational restoration. Mirroring best practices for restoring oyster reefs degraded by the climate crisis, we explain how educational restoration accounts for and responds to disruption and damage in turnaround schools. We propose an Educational Recovery Wheel to support policymakers and practitioners in restoring schools' innate capacities to implement sustainable improvement and strengthen the resilience of education systems.