Educators exploring comprehensive school reform often ask, “Do the American Schools designs work?” New designs can work to improve student achievement. When fully implemented, every new design has helped schools raise attendance rates, increase parent involvement, and improve student performance. Success, however, is not guaranteed; some schools have not achieved the results they expected, and a few have not experienced any improvement after adopting a design.
Research suggests a reasonable explanation for such discrepancies. Successful comprehensive reform is not simply the product of “plugging in” a design model, but the result of an entire education system working in concert to implement a design. This involves making the significant changes in policies and practices necessary for full and effective implementation. Districts, schools, and Design Teams all play key roles in the success of comprehensive school reform. Our experience tells us that:
• A district must support focused professional development, decentralize governance and budgeting authority, and develop a funding strategy to support the chosen design’s implementation.
• A school must choose a design that fits its vision and goals; participate in intensive, ongoing professional development; reorganize the use of time, staff, and resources to better support instruction; and commit to the difficult work of implementation.
• A Design Team must effectively communicate its design to schools, provide facilitators to train and support school staff members, align design implementation with local standards, and benchmark successful implementation.
Experience shows that these roles are interdependent; without all of these activities, implementation is unlikely to succeed. In addition, factors such as the quality of school staff, the relationship between district and school staff, and unexpected crises such as budget deficits or teacher strikes can stall implementation. Lower levels of design implementation appear in districts where:
• Leadership is not stable or is likely to turn over soon;
• The effort is not central to the district’s goals;
• A budget or redistricting crisis; and
• The district has a history of broken promises to schools concerning support for reform.
Lower levels of implementation occur in schools where:
• Districts force a match with a specific design;
• Schools are confused about the design and feel poorly informed;
• There is a turnover in the principalship; and
• There is internal strife and tension prior to selecting a design.
Lower levels of implementation occur in Design Teams that:
• Do not have stable leadership;
• Do not communicate their designs well;
• Focus on governance and infrastructures before curriculum and instruction; and
• Do not use benchmarks or other implementation checks regularly.
If implementation is to succeed, district officials, principals, teachers, and Design Teams must work together towards a common goal and shared vision. As in an orchestra, performers in the string, brass, and percussion sections must follow the same score and stay in tune. If one section falls behind, the music will sound disjointed and flat, or chaotic and discordant. With patience and communication, each section of the comprehensive school reform orchestra — districts, schools, and Design Teams — must carry the tune, leading or following in turn.
Using Evidence to Make Decisions
Given this context, how can educators judge whether a design will succeed in a particular school or district? For the past decade, policy makers have defined successful reform efforts as those that show increased standardized test scores in every, or nearly every, school. This narrow definition is not applicable to comprehensive school reform because such reform is much more complex, involves more people, and requires more teacher independence than traditional reform programs. Stringent definitions of effectiveness lead to narrowly designed, curricular-focused programs. History shows such programs do not work at scale.
Schools, districts, and states must therefore define “evidence of effectiveness” more broadly when identifying and exploring designs. Rather than simply using improved test scores as the only criteria for adopting a design, educators should use this information as one of many critical pieces involved in the decision to move forward with a comprehensive reform effort.
Practitioners agree that Design Team track records on test scores are very important, but test scores are not the best indicator of compatibility with a particular school. The design must fit people at the school, student needs, staff, parents, etc. It must feel like tailor-made clothes, not something bought at a secondhand shop. That chemistry match between a design and the perceived needs and preferences at the school is essential.
Due to the complexity of comprehensive school reform data collection and the limited amount of available research, assessing designs remains challenging, even for large research institutions. Many organizations have offered suggestions to educators for handling this daunting task. The following checklist may help educators evaluate the effectiveness of comprehensive school reform models:
• Upon what research is this design based?
• What evidence is there that this design can help schools increase student achievement?
• Is there evidence that this design has helped schools and students succeed on measures other than test scores?
• What characteristics are shared by schools that have been successful with this design? Were the faculties supportive? Was the district supportive?
• Under what circumstances have schools failed to achieve the anticipated results?
• How do skill levels of the teachers/principals in the school affect the success of this design?
• How does this design help schools work with diverse student populations?
• How long does it usually take for schools working with this design to see results?
• What are the plans for continuous improvement of this design? How is this improvement measured?
Through intense, ongoing conversations with Design Teams, educators should be able to collect the contextual and empirical information they need to make a sound, knowledgeable choice about a design. Results without data are meaningless. Results without meaning are hollow.
Developing a Shared Accountability System
Given this complex notion of effectiveness, schools and districts need to be prepared to take several steps to ensure that a design fulfills its potential. First, they must develop a process to continuously seek and use information about implementation in order to manage the many factors affecting success. Second, they must take into account the interdependence of actions and policies; as we have discussed, successful implementation depends on coordinated efforts on the part of districts, schools, and Design Teams.
In light of this interdependence, schools and districts must commit to holding all participants in the system accountable to one another so that the failure of one individual, division, department, or process does not doom the entire effort. These are complicated challenges, but they are essential to a design’s success in a particular school.
It became clear that Design Teams considered district and school staff primarily responsible for the successful implementation of a design, while teachers and administrators thought it was the Design Teams’ job.
The new working group, comprised of teachers, principals, administrators, union leaders, and Design Team members, developed a framework for a system of shared accountability. The framework provides guidance for establishing a continuous cycle of setting goals, developing action plans, measuring progress, assessing and adjusting action plans, and resetting goals based on concrete information. It has six steps.
Steps to Shared Accountability
Step 1
Build and sustain strong partnerships among all key stakeholders based on shared responsibility for results. Identify and engage leaders as you begin exploring comprehensive reform. Partners should include teachers, principals, Design Team leaders, central office staff, union leaders, parents, school board members, and business and community leaders.
Step 2
All partners agree on standards of performance that are tied to higher student achievement.
Step 3
All partners jointly set and use benchmarks to assess progress towards standards in each school.
Step 4
Partners identify gaps between where a school is, where the benchmarks indicate it should be, and why these gaps exist.
Step 5
Partners develop plans to address gaps and improve performance.
Step 6
All partners implement action plans and reset benchmarks to move closer to the standards.
Challenges to Effective Comprehensive Education Reform
Thousands of educators in hundreds of schools have worked new designs over the last six years. Many have declared victory, while some have run from the field. All, however, have faced challenges along the way. Studying these challenges yields important insights for educators exploring a new design. Our discussions with teachers, principals, district administrators, superintendents, and Design Team leaders were remarkable in their consistency; the same factors surfaced again and again as people talked about their struggles to understand and undertake design implementation.
In general, everyone agreed that comprehensive school reform is extremely difficult work. More specifically, they shared insights about the design selection process, the kinds of district support necessary for successful implementation, and the aspects of implementation itself that presented particular challenges. We hope the candid thoughts expressed by these voices from the field indicate how difficult, yet how rewarding, comprehensive school reform is.
Choosing a Design – Schools need to decide.
Forced matches rarely succeed; they make an already challenging situation more difficult by breeding resentment from the start. One teacher, whose school is no longer implementing the design, reported that the forced match caused problems before implementation even began. “Just after we were able to get 80 percent of the staff to sign on, people started grumbling that they didn’t know what the design meant, and that the district and principal were pressuring them. We never had ownership of the design because we never really had the opportunity to choose our model.”
Schools need time to make a good choice.
It’s a difficult process to decide on a model. It is something you can’t jump at — you must look at it carefully. Generally, schools have found that they need at least six months to gain the in-depth knowledge they need to make an informed choice. All designs don’t work for everybody. When it clicks for you it’s a dynamite program. But you have to want it to click, and look at it very carefully.
The entire faculty must buy in.
Resentment also simmers when individual teachers or small groups of teachers feel pushed into voting for a design. One principal noted that real buy-in is particularly difficult to achieve because some teachers assume that “this will stick around for a few years and then it will be gone,” like countless past reform programs. Buy-in is especially tricky because they acknowledge that a signature on a ballot does not always mean strong support. Many schools have found it effective to form a relationship with a Design Team before actually committing to implementing the design; knowing who they will be working with often makes people more comfortable with endorsing a design.
Design Teams need to communicate the designs clearly.
Teachers need to understand not only the content and goals of the design, but also the extra time, energy, and effort implementation requires. While teachers bear some responsibility for asking the right questions, Design Teams must be thorough, clear, and forthcoming as they describe the design and the implementation process to potential partners.
School visits help immensely.
When investigating a design the first thing you should do is visit local schools or schools similar to yours that have implemented the design. Even if you have to spend $1,000 on travel, it could save you from wasting $100,000 over a few years.
Understand what “comprehensive” means.
Many practitioners expect any new efforts to be similar to past school reform programs — a narrow activity, limited in scope, and intended to be squeezed into the existing school program. Changing this mind set was a particular challenge for some schools.
Some schools had difficulty in that they saw this as an addon program and not an integrated way to run a school. You just keep the stack the same height by adding more to the top. They did not understand that this was a framework to get the job done.
“Fit” is important.
Most practitioners agree that the “fit” between a design and a school is the most important factor in a successful match. The key pieces to consider in determining this fit are the philosophical approach the school takes and the experience level of the school staff. If the staff leans toward prescriptive, it needs one design; toward constructivism, another.
A poor fit hinders implementation; one teacher reported that although her colleagues needed additional assistance in teaching reading and math, they chose a very constructivist design that did not meet their needs. Implementation in this school was not successful.
Decentralize staffing decisions to schools.
First, districts and schools need to give teachers the opportunity to transfer to another school if they object to the chosen design. Second, districts should factor the design into their decisions about transfers in general. In one district, the central office shifted teachers in response to a budget crisis without regard to the designs in place in some schools. One school lost its core group of supporters for the design and eventually gave up the design entirely.
Provide staff and time to support the effort.
Staff members are assigned to particular designs and work with faculty and community members to help them make educated decisions. This structure needs to be there. We don’t expect principals to constantly have to track down designs or develop contracts. There are things that can be done at the district level that take advantage of economies of scale.
Make priorities clear, and keep them consistent.
People at schools that don’t get central office support find themselves with competing priorities, choosing between design and district professional development requirements. This contradicts what comprehensive school reform is intended to do: help a school develop and move towards one central vision. The district needs to set this tone and stick to it. A change in direction on the part of district leadership confuses teachers and principals and requires them to shift their attention to the next initiative. In several cases, as priorities changed, they failed to provide promised support for designs. As a result, schools lost public support for designs and eventually dropped implementation efforts.
Invest in design-based change.
Once a district commits to comprehensive reform, it must follow through with funding. After the initial investment, districts must then give schools the power and the help they need to pay for the designs themselves. It is the district’s role to provide financial support to adopt the design. The district should help finance the designs in the beginning, but schools should pay for it quickly. If it’s free, there is not a lot of commitment, but if they must make a sacrifice, they have an incentive.
Maintain close relationships with Design Teams.
When a school district and a Design Team are not in concert about expectations for schools, it creates serious problems. Districts and Design Teams should agree on expectations up front, and meet frequently to revisit these agreements and review progress. Practitioners suggest discussing issues including:
• how Design Teams work with local standards and assessments;
• how many professional development days Design Teams require and when;
• what districts and Design Teams are accountable for; and
• how the district will handle payments to the Design Teams.
Leadership and continuity at the school are essential.
We have consistently found that principal turnover is a major predictor of design weakness or failure. If there is a large percentage of staff turnover, you must put in place an annual re-orientation and re-commitment to the design.
New principals and teachers should be hired with the understanding that the design is a top priority, and those who do not support it should not be hired.
Teachers need ongoing support.
This does not apply only to reluctant or less experienced teachers. One superintendent learned that her most capable teachers needed the most support during design implementation. When you are talented, you are used to feeling confident in what you are doing, but when you are doing something new, you feel awkward.
The most talented people have been devastated because they are doing something that is hard, and they don’t feel good about themselves. To keep support of the design over time, you must address it each year. Every year we must re-dedicate ourselves to the design.
The whole school should begin implementation together.
Even if all design elements are not in place immediately, it is more effective to engage the whole staff from the beginning rather than phasing it in grade by grade. You think you can get by with less, but you get less in outcomes.
Be as patient as possible.
Success takes time. It’s a growing process. It wasn’t easy to change math for teachers who have been teaching math for 25 years. Accountability systems, of course, don’t always allow patience. Time is a real issue in terms of implementation and expectations. It’s hard because the public wants you to do things faster than you can do them. This remains one of the staunchest challenges facing both Design Teams and those implementing designs.
Every practitioner we spoke with told us how hard comprehensive school reform is. Schools must understand this type of change demands a lot of work, and it demands a lot of a person. This is not a nine-to-three job. It is something that requires teachers to work outside their comfort zone. The first year is tough, it requires a long-term commitment.
This is the bottom line from those who are immersed in comprehensive school reform: It is extremely hard, but it can be remarkably successful and can help teachers and students set and meet ambitious goals. Ultimately, of course, successful implementation of a comprehensive design depends upon a school and its faculty. This is where the real work of school reform is done. Our experience so far gives us confidence that most schools have the potential to create and achieve a vision of success — given support from the district and concrete assistance from an effective, school-level organization like a Design Team.
Jeff Palmer is a teacher, success coach, trainer, Certified Master of Web Copywriting and founder of https://Ebookscheaper.com. Jeff is a prolific writer, Senior Research Associate and Infopreneur having written many eBooks, articles and special reports.
