Part 3

In 2009, President Obama offered funding to school districts across the country to improve their most persistently struggling schools. In exchange, they would have to adopt what were considered one of four sweeping turnaround models first used by Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, in the late 1990s when he was steering Chicago’s troubled public schools.

“We want transformation, not tinkering,” Duncan famously declared in a 2009 speech introducing the national program...