The authors identify four critical puzzles that the successful programs were able to solve: design, implementation, improvement, and sustainability. Pinpointing the specific solutions that clearly improved instruction, they identify the key elements that all successful reform programs share. Offering urgently needed guidance for state and local school systems as they attempt to respond to future reform proposals, Improvement by Design gets America one step closer to truly successful education systems.
The authors identify four critical puzzles that the successful programs were able to solve: design, implementation, improvement, and sustainability. Pinpointing the specific solutions that clearly improved instruction, they identify the key elements that all successful reform programs share. Offering urgently needed guidance for state and local school systems as they attempt to respond to future reform proposals, Improvement by Design gets America one step closer to truly successful education systems.
Improvement by Design: The Promise of Better Schools
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Improvement by Design: The Promise of Better Schools
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Overview
The authors identify four critical puzzles that the successful programs were able to solve: design, implementation, improvement, and sustainability. Pinpointing the specific solutions that clearly improved instruction, they identify the key elements that all successful reform programs share. Offering urgently needed guidance for state and local school systems as they attempt to respond to future reform proposals, Improvement by Design gets America one step closer to truly successful education systems.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226089386 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/06/2013 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.70(w) x 11.50(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Donald J. Peurach is assistant professor of educational studies in the School of Education at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Seeing Complexity in Public Education.
Joshua L. Glazer is visiting associate professor of education administration at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development at George Washington University.
Karen Gates was a senior area specialist in the study of instructional improvement at the University of Michigan.
Simona Goldin is a research specialist at TeachingWorks and a lecturer in the School of Education, both at the University of Michigan. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Read an Excerpt
Improvement by Design
The Promise of Better Schools
By DAVID K. COHEN, DONALD J. PEURACH, JOSHUA L. GLAZER, KAREN E. GATES, SIMONA GOLDIN
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-08924-9
CHAPTER 1
Improvement by Design
This is an account of the common puzzles encountered by three organizations as they built functional educational systems whose aims were to improve many schools attended by many poor children. One puzzle concerned the design of their programs and organizations. A second concerned the implementation of their programs. A third puzzle concerned improving their organizations and programs. A fourth puzzle concerned sustaining their organizations and programs.
All three organizations used a strategy of "improvement by design": that is, improving schools through comprehensive, externally developed interventions. The three interventions—America's Choice, the Accelerated Schools Project, and Success for All—were unusual in their focus and scope. Each sought to effect simultaneous, coordinated change in the day-to-day practices of students, teachers, and school leaders through simultaneous, coordinated change in the roles of those who worked in schools, in the structures and culture in which they worked, and in the technologies of schooling.
The interventions were developed in the 1980s and 1990s, with the goal of greatly improving many of America's weakest schools. They sought teaching that would help students do academically demanding work and boost student achievement. Each was developed and revised in light of experience, in order to improve effectiveness and ensure continued viability in political and economic environments that changed rapidly and often unpredictably.
Each was sponsored and operated by a private organization that was devoted chiefly or entirely to improving education for disadvantaged children. To distinguish these interveners from their interventions, we will refer to the interveners as AC (the organization that developed America's Choice), ASP (the organization that developed the Accelerated Schools Project), and SFA (the organization that developed Success for All).
These three interveners operated alternative school systems of a sort, offering schools across the country designs for change, professional education, help with implementation, support for communication, and new professional standards. They operated on an unprecedented scale. At their peak of operations, each intervener reported supporting a state-sized system of elementary schools: 1,600 elementary schools for SFA (more than the state of New Jersey); 1,400 elementary schools for ASP (more than North Carolina); and 600 elementary schools for AC (more than Arkansas).
All three interveners agreed that improved learning meant moving instruction away from basic skills toward higher-level thought, and that low-achieving students' learning should be accelerated. Yet each of the interveners put the aim of dramatically improved achievement for disadvantaged students in its own terms. SFA sought on-grade reading by the end of third grade. ASP sought "to bring all students into the educational mainstream by the end of elementary school, and to build on those gains at subsequent levels." AC expected much more demanding work for all students in reading, writing, and mathematics, as expressed in its performance standards.
Another extraordinary ambition was to raise the bar without requiring vast new resources, such as extended school days, longer school years, or additional teachers. Rather, the three interveners intended to reach their goals by taking schools pretty much as they were: with standard schedules and with the same resources as other high-poverty schools.
The three interveners thus aimed to do what had never been done and what many believed could not be done: take schools that often were educationally quite weak and attended by America's poorest children and make them successful. The schools that had America's biggest educational problems would have to solve them.
That is a common dilemma: policy makers and others can define problems and devise solutions, but only the people and organizations that "are" the problem can solve them, perhaps with help from others. After all, organizations such as AC, ASP, and SFA could no more "improve" schools than teachers could "learn" students. The three interveners faced a particularly difficult version of the dilemma, since the schools with which they worked not only had many weaknesses but also subsisted in environments that contributed to the problems.
One of those problems was very mobile students and teachers: after a year or two of work, a large fraction of the people who had begun to learn the interventions' new approaches would have left, replaced by students and teachers who knew nothing of them. Though students entered school eager to learn, many lacked the academic skills and knowledge typical of more advantaged students; the achievement gap began before students entered school, so teachers' work was harder than in schools that enrolled students from privileged families. High-poverty schools also had much more than their fair share of teachers who had been weak students themselves, who had attended some of the least demanding colleges and universities, and whose professional education was weak. Local districts typically permitted more experienced and qualified teachers to select assignments at less difficult schools, and they did not assign more able teachers to needy schools. High-poverty schools also had, on average, weaker academic leadership and poorer morale.
These were formidable problems, but the interveners were determined to help schools solve them. Support for their work was one reason that they could do it. Indeed, the three interventions were born amid optimism about the potential to improve weak schools as well as policy pressure to do so. This combination of optimism and pressure was well represented in a succession of loosely coordinated policy and philanthropic initiatives that provided billions of dollars (and much legitimacy) to support systemic, comprehensive educational reform for over two decades:
• In 1988, the Hawkins-Stafford Amendments to Title I of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) established new goals for improving the academic content and achievement of poor students, and it shifted the unit of improvement from individual students to whole schools. It also opened up new potential for schools with large populations of poor students to use Title I funds for school-wide improvement.
• In 1991, the New American Schools Development Corporation (later rebranded New American Schools, or NAS) was launched as a $130 million, private/public collaboration that championed the development, demonstration, and scale-up of a small number of research-based, "break the mold" designs for comprehensive school reform.
• In 1994, the Goals 2000: Educate America Act established the framework for systemic reform by (among other things) providing grants to states to support the development of performance standards and accountability assessments intended to motivate and support deep-reaching, school-wide improvement.
• Also in 1994, the reauthorization of ESEA as the Improving American Schools Act (IASA) repeated the systemic reform framework of Goals 2000, increased the number of schools that could use Title I funds to support school-wide improvement, and established "adequate yearly progress" as the standard by which improvement would be measured (though absent a firm schedule for local or state compliance).
• In 1997, the federal Obey-Porter Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration Act (CSRD) provided $150 million per year that could be used in combination with Title I funds to support comprehensive school reform through state competitive grants, with $145 million to go directly to schools.
• In 1998, the federal Reading Excellence Act (REA) amended Title II of IASA to create a second, new, state-level competitive grant program to support improvement of K–3 reading in the nation's lowest-performing elementary schools. REA provided additional funding that could be combined with both Title I and CSRD funding to support school-wide improvement: $260 million in FY1999 and FY2000, $241.1 million of which went to states.
• In 2002, the reauthorization of ESEA as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) establishedaggressive national goals for improving the academic achievement of all subgroups of students, increased the resources and incentives provided to states to establish standards and accountability systems, and further increased the number of schools that could use Title I funds to pursue school-wide improvement. Moreover, it incorporated both CSRD and REA into ESEA (the former as the Comprehensive School Reform program and the latter as Reading First) and, in doing so, greatly increased the federal rhetoric supporting "research-based" and "research-validated" school improvement.
• In 2007/8, NCLB was due for reauthorization, like all versions of ESEA before it. However, with problems in its implementation, and with increasing political conflict about the act, reauthorization was politically impossible at that time (and remains so at the time of this writing). The effect was to sustain both accountability pressure and Title I funding that, for over two decades, had motivated and supported comprehensive, school-wide reform.
These policy changes were paralleled by states' adoption of systemic reforms, by judicial action that spurred whole-school reform (specifically, in New Jersey's Abbott districts), and by the growth of private professional groups that urged reform. This all was buoyed by a roaring dot-com economy that—given the growing national focus on school reform—led philanthropists to support school improvement.
This political and fiscal support was instrumental in the emergence not only of SFA, AC, and ASP but also of a larger population of comprehensive school reform providers pursuing their own approaches to "improvement by design." Indeed, nearly seven hundred organizations submitted proposals to participate in the New American Schools initiative, from which eleven were initially selected. Some sought to pursue more "technical-first" solutions: for example, by intervening directly on the day-to-day work of students, teachers, and school leaders, with the resulting success serving as a foundation for building a new culture of high expectations, professional responsibility, and mutual trust. Others sought to pursue more "social-first" solutions: for example, by intervening directly on the social make-up of the school and its relationships with parents and community constituents, with a new culture of trust, expectations, and responsibility providing a foundation for improving the day-to-day work of students, teachers, and school leaders.
But there was much less educational support for these reformers than there was political and fiscal support: that is, support for solving the deep, interdependent problems that had undermined learning, teaching, and leadership in many schools. Quite the contrary, many of these problems had deep roots in the schools themselves as well as their environments. The education of teachers was generally weak, leaving most with a very modest grasp of how to teach academic subjects well. The education of school leaders also was weak; few had a deep grasp of how to lead quality instruction or improve schools. Most districts and states had little capability for school improvement. There were very large inequalities in funding for schools within and among states and among schools within districts, so the schools with the greatest need to improve typically began with the weakest resources to do so.
The central educational problem, however, was that US schools and school systems lacked the wherewithal to make large-scale instructional improvement. Public education never developed the educational infrastructure that is common in school systems in many developed nations: common curricula or curriculum frameworks, common examinations that are tied to the curricula, common educational practices that are grounded in the curriculum, teacher education that focuses on helping teachers learn how to teach the curricula that students will study, and a teaching force whose members had succeeded with those curricula and exams as students, among other things.
Teachers and school leaders who work with such infrastructure have instruments that they can use to set academic tasks that are tied to curriculum and assessment. They have a framework that can help them to define valid evidence of students' work. They can develop a common vocabulary with which to identify, investigate, discuss, and solve problems of teaching and learning. Hence, they have the elements of common professional knowledge and skill. Most important for our purposes here, school systems with such infrastructure have instruments with which they can exert a consistent influence on instruction, at scale. Some even have agencies with the educational capability to lead and support change.
The existence of such infrastructure does not assure excellent education; that depends on how well the infrastructure is designed and how well educators use it. But its absence posed enormous problems for those who would improve education in the United States. If a school wanted to promote academically demanding work, it would have to devise an infrastructure of its own or adapt one that already existed, including curriculum, student assessments, and professional education to help teachers learn to do the work. Some schools had done that, especially in privileged communities. But given the enormity of the task, most settled for less ambitious and more pedestrian work, especially in poor communities.
If the interveners wanted to help schools or school systems to enact significantly better instruction, they had to devise some version of an infrastructure. They then had to find ways to help schools that had no experience with coherent and ambitious instruction to make good use of that infrastructure. And, finally, they had to find ways to help schools to sustain their effort through changes in staff, local and state and federal policy, and other circumstances. It is no exaggeration to say that these efforts to improve schools had to take on fundamental weaknesses of the US education system.
The interveners took them on. They proposed to help schools that had the nation's deepest educational problems learn how to solve them, and to do so in an environment that offered much money and political pressure but little educational help. Unlike earlier efforts to improve schools, each intervener built large elements of an educational infrastructure, so that schools could have coherent and effective instructional programs. They also built elements of infrastructure to support schools' work, including professional education, communication networks, common professional language and culture, and organizations to support these things. They had to capitalize on political support while coping with many educational barriers in the same environment. It was an extraordinary assignment.
Distinct Designs for Improvement
Each of the interveners did these things differently. One reason our account is so compelling is that the interveners faced common puzzles despite pursuing three distinct approaches to design-based school improvement. The designers of Success for All believed that teachers should first adhere to tightly specified plans and then adapt them as they grew more expert. By contrast, the designers of America's Choice made room for teachers' discretion from the outset while also seeking to increase their knowledge and skills so they could use discretion effectively. The designers of the Accelerated Schools Project believed that once schools had defined their goals in accord with the program's educational philosophy and reorganized, they could exploit existing resources in themselves and the environment.
Success for All
Success for All was founded and developed in 1987/88 by a research group at Johns Hopkins University led by the husband-and-wife team of Robert Slavin and Nancy Madden, both psychologists. The project team and the program were originally headquartered in that university's Center for the Social Organization of Schools. In 1994, the project team moved to the Center for the Study of Students Placed at Risk, also at Johns Hopkins. In 1997/98, the project team left Johns Hopkins to establish the independent, nonprofit Success for All Foundation. True to the professional identify and expertise of its founders, one key aim was to anchor Success for All in practices identified in prior research as both effective and replicable in improving student performance; a second key aim was to constantly evaluate the replicable effectiveness of Success for All and its multiple interacting components.
Drawing on more than a decade of earlier efforts both to synthesize available research and to field targeted programs, the designers of Success for All focused on the creation of a K–6 reading curriculum that matched a detailed design for cooperative learning among students with detailed guidance for direct instruction by teachers. Its designers specified the methods, moves, and steps for effective teaching, so that students would learn more when teachers followed the program's directions. Their early work convinced the designers that a very detailed instructional plan for K–6 reading could initially overcome teachers' weak expertise, create immediate change, and improve students' learning. They believed that those changes would lift teachers' motivation and commitment to the design, building a foundation for teachers to develop much more expert practice in which they exercised more professional discretion, to support even better student achievement. The directions for K–6 reading were detailed, and they were designed to help teachers themselves to learn while they were teaching. That learning would, in a year or two, enable teachers to reduce their dependence on the directions and be more effective on their own. The extensively elaborated directions were a beginning, and the detail was a way to represent effective practice so that any teacher in a high-poverty school could enact it immediately with any student.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Improvement by Design by DAVID K. COHEN, DONALD J. PEURACH, JOSHUA L. GLAZER, KAREN E. GATES, SIMONA GOLDIN. Copyright © 2014 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Preface1 Improvement by Design
2 The Design Puzzle
3 The Implementation Puzzle
4 The Improvement Puzzle
5 The Sustainability Puzzle
6 Building Systems
Appendix: Research Procedures
Notes
Index