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Toward Success at Scale While many districts share the goal of helping all students achieve at high levels, few qualify as high-performance systems. Mr. Vander Ark outlines the strategic choices that district leaders must face as they attempt to steer their systems toward success.
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THERE ARE hundreds of good schools in America, schools that help all students achieve at high levels, but a decade into the standards movement, success at scale remains elusive. The new proposition of the standards movement -- that all students should leave high school prepared for college, work, and citizenship -- is widely accepted. But it is far from reality.
Few, if any, public school districts can be called high-performance systems. It's not yet clear how -- or even if -- public school districts as currently conceived and governed can meet the challenge of helping all students achieve. With growing diversity, the emerging opportunities and challenges of information technology, the evolving knowledge about high-performance organizations, and new propositions that all students can and should achieve at high levels, it's still not clear what success at scale will look like.
How Should the System Work?
The most important question for state and district leaders to answer is: What will success look like? Specifically, they must define what students need to know and be able to do and what forms of evidence will be required. (These questions imply an even more fundamental agreement about the purpose of education, a shifting and unstable foundation at the turn of the century.)
The second question, which has largely been answered at the local level, is: How will success be achieved? Specifically, the superintendent and school board members must come to a set of temporary agreements about how the system should work, who will make what decisions, what level of discretion schools have, how the district will support schools, and how parents and community members will be engaged. With tradition often taken as a given -- and virtually cemented into place by mounting layers of federal, state, and local programs and policies -- these important questions are seldom asked.
Worse than suppressing thoughtful conversation about organizational strategy, though, the burgeoning bureaucracy has created rampant incoherence. With schools viewed simply as buildings in which various programs are implemented, it is little wonder that not enough works together for students. Here's a frequent set of observations in a typical American school: a teacher attempting a new instructional strategy she learned about during a drive-by professional development seminar doesn't have sufficient training to successfully execute the new strategy; a mountain of adopted textbooks offers little support; the daily schedule was developed to support time with various specialists (physical education, music, art, and library), not planning or prep time; and no one else in the building has a clue what she's doing.
This typical situation illustrates what I will call incoherence and a lack of alignment. I use coherence here to refer to the desirable situation in a school in which everything works together for students and teachers. One senses coherence in a school after visiting several classrooms and observing similar goals, strategies, themes, and instructional materials. This coherence reflects a common intellectual mission, a shared pedagogy, a supportive structure and schedule, and a regularly scheduled time for teachers to work and learn together.
Alignment, the second term, implies that curriculum and instruction are aimed at district and state standards. A good private school may have a high degree of coherence without alignment to state standards. Good charter schools may achieve coherence through unique pedagogies and structures and still be aligned with state standards.
Centralized or Decentralized?
How should the system work? First, we must confront the age-old, tight/loose quandary of what to centralize and what to decentralize. This question is most difficult and pressing for large, low-performing urban districts. District and civic leaders can encourage alignment and coherence in a centralized system by having the central office control curriculum, instruction, staffing, and budgeting, or they can produce a decentralized scheme in which schools, using some kind of local decision-making process, make a large share of these decisions.
In the late 1980s, just as the standards movement was beginning to gain a foothold, the organizational pendulum swung toward decentralization and various forms of site-based management (adapted from the quality management movement in business). With varying degrees of emphasis on alignment, the proponents of decentralization banked on the involvement of teachers and parents to improve coherence, engagement, and achievement. Lacking clarity of purpose and outcomes; collaboration skills and structures; and the time, flexibility, and leadership to make decentralization work, most site-based management efforts floundered or at least failed to produce the desired results.
By 2000, state accountability systems had begun to take hold, and the pendulum swung back toward centralization. Today, standards increasingly mean standardization under the guise of "alignment." However, unlike the original vision of a variety of approaches (expressed through curriculum, pedagogy, structure, etc.), alignment is most frequently used to refer to a highly centralized system: one curriculum, one pedagogy, one approach to staff development, one schedule, one structure. Such fully aligned systems attempt to create coherence not just in the classroom but across gigantic bureaucracies (a monumental and rare feat).
While centralization is emerging as the new conventional wisdom, a variety of approaches have recently been attempted or advocated. Four points on the centralized/decentralized continuum illustrate strategic choices that different system leaders are attempting.
The first two strategies are attempts to build effective "school systems"; the last two are efforts to encourage diverse "systems of schools." Many small districts are in the first category, but San Diego is the only large district attempting a radical centralization. Most urban districts fall into the second category (centralized, with some local variations). A few districts have ventured into the third category, but no city has attempted to become a full-fledged "charter district."
Whether a system is centralized or not, it takes the school board, senior district staff, unions, business and civic leaders, and parents and students working together to make the schools work. Radically changing the way a school system operates takes an act (or many acts) of heroic leadership and a reshaping of virtually all the agreements between the district and schools, as well as many of the basic agreements within schools. Making any system work appears to take a sustained effort of at least a decade, with concerted efforts to broaden the leadership and ownership at all levels.
When Rudy Crew, the former chancellor of the New York City Schools, was superintendent in Tacoma, Washington, he told people there that he and the board defined "what" students needed to know and the schools defined "how" students would learn it. With two interlocking circles, which intersected in the area of negotiated support services, he gave staff members a simple explanation of his vision of how the system should work. Whatever the organizational strategy, it appears critical that system leaders be able to describe it in simple terms and support it with consistent organizational behavior.
Organic or Surgical?
A second strategic choice revolves around the degree to which a community or district leads the system reform. The choice may simply indicate where the impetus for reform originates -- in the boardroom, in the classroom, or in the neighborhood. Four examples on the community-led versus district-led continuum follow:
Visualizing
These two strategic choices can be plotted graphically as in Figure 1, with the horizontal axis representing centralized versus decentralized (a fully centralized system on the left and a decentralized system of choice on the right) and the vertical axis representing the extent to which the community is involved in defining the strategy (community-led efforts at the bottom and district-led efforts at the top). This 2 X 2 matrix identifies the four basic organizational/political strategies available to district or civic leaders:
The reform efforts of any district can be plotted on this chart, and their changes over time can be displayed as well.
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The Systemic Leap in Logic
Many superintendents muddle around in the middle of the chart, with an inherited systemic reform agenda that they are unable to clearly articulate. And even if they can, most teachers and principals cannot do so, and others experience a completely different reality. These efforts to create alignment and coherence at scale are based on three rarely challenged assumptions: 1) that coherence can be created across a large system, 2) that designed coherence will be deemed desirable by parents and teachers, and 3) that it will work for all students. It seems likely that each of these assumptions will prove to be only partially true as the standards movement matures.
There may well be a lesson here for everyone attempting to implement "best practices." Effective practices typically evolve over a long period of time in high-functioning, fully engaged systems. Powerful conversations lead to adult learning, which results in agreements, products, and practices. When particular components are extracted and implemented without the foundational conversations and broad parent/teacher learning, there is a risk that they will be only partially implemented or rejected altogether. In a very bold move, Anthony Alvarado is attempting to improve instruction in San Diego rapidly. Derived from an eight-year evolution in New York's District 2, his "systemic reform" improvement strategy is being implemented in every San Diego classroom. Not surprisingly, this high-wire act has met enormous resistance from teachers and some parents. It will either demonstrate rapid improvement -- or be rejected by a new school board (or both).
The dozen Alaska districts that are replicating Chugach's success run a similar risk. The "aligned/engaged" strategy pioneered by Chugach emerged from over five years of community engagement to develop a "merit badge" curriculum in which students advance based on their demonstrated proficiency. The risk is that a district that is copying this approach will shortcut engagement and become just another modestly successful effort to layer the Chugach model on top of an obsolete system.
Where to Start?
Like the answers to the question of how the system should work, the answers to he question of where to start depend on a variety of factors: the superintendent's life experiences, board opinion, community and union leadership, local tradition, performance levels, and system capacity. Steve Jubb, executive director of the Bay Area Coalition of Equitable Schools, says there are three entry points for system leaders: instruction, community organizing, or school design.
In terms of the matrix discussed previously, leading with instruction is a "systemic reform" strategy that is based on a particular set of beliefs regarding teaching and learning. Reform strategies that emerge from parent or neighborhood organizing typically involve "marketplace of choice" strategies that lead to diverse school solutions. Superintendents who lead with school designs may do so in a centralized or decentralized manner, depending on the level of diversity the designs encourage and the amount of autonomy they provide.
Superintendents may use a different strategy for high schools than they do for elementary schools, or they may use a layering approach by creating new categories of schools. Sacramento and Boston are deploying "systemic reform" and leading with school design. Both have successfully improved their K-8 schools and have begun redesigning their existing high schools. Boston opened a small group of diverse "pilot" schools, and Sacramento intends to open a number of charter schools. Both are "system of schools" strategies. In other words, a superintendent could deploy "systemic reform" for existing schools and "system of schools" reform for new schools (or just for high schools).2
Memphis was the first urban district to disconnect support from governance and to encourage diverse solutions built around common standards, a "system of schools" strategy. Each school adopted a school design, many from the New American Schools, and each school received some of its support services from the model providers. Superintendent Gerry House was named national superintendent of the year in 1999 for leading this "system of schools" strategy. But shortly after she left the district in 2001, the new superintendent reversed course in an effort to create an "aligned" system.
The Bronx is emerging as one of the most unusual stories in American education. In one of the poorest and lowest-performing districts in the country, Norman Wechsler is using a "marketplace of choice" strategy to transform the system. Rather than attempt to improve giant failing high schools, Wechsler hired charter school leader Eric Nadelstern to lead the development of dozens of new high schools, most of which will be housed in existing facilities. Eventually, large comprehensive high schools will be replaced by several new autonomous small schools, each with one or more community partners. This "marketplace of choice" strategy builds on community assets and interests and the momentum of the small schools movement in New York.
Decisions about organizational strategy not only may be affected by a superintendent's bias and the most pressing needs uncovered in an initial assessment, but they also may be strongly influenced by politics. The trend toward mayoral control and a growing number of state interventions increasingly expand the number of politicians and political bodies involved in these decisions.
Implications
In addition to the lessons that can be extracted from each of the kinds of district strategies outlined here, there are four important implications of this classification system.
1. Exposure. In order to make conscious strategic choices, superintendents and those training to be superintendents need the opportunity to study, in some depth, the variety of strategies being deployed and espoused. Experiences such as those offered by the Broad Center for Superintendents, which takes groups of 20 candidates to several urban districts to study a variety of contexts and strategies, would be worthwhile for any prospective superintendent.
2. Preparation. Changing the basic organizational strategy of an American urban school district may be the toughest assignment on Earth. Superintendents must be politically savvy, possess sophisticated consulting skills, and be adept managers of change. Most preparation programs are lacking in all three areas. Superintendents leading large districts must be prepared to design and facilitate the improvement processes of whole systems, and they must be able to develop the political support to sustain them over time.
3. Research. The Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University and the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington house some of the only people in the country studying the issue of success at scale. The most important question in American education deserves more attention than it is getting. Admittedly, the issue is a big one -- one well suited to study by teams of graduate students in several fields (education, political science, sociology, and economics, to name a few) and tailor-made for meta-analysis of various districts' efforts.
4. Development. The lack of strategies that depend on high engagement points to a significant R & D opportunity, particularly with regard to charter districts (and even states), as described in Paul Hill's recent work. These strategies can and should be attempted in high-functioning districts that see the benefits of autonomy and choice and in state takeover situations in which efforts to rebuild capacity can be augmented by forming new schools with a high degree of accountability.
Superintendents and policy makers who take seriously the issue of success at scale will not have to offer the apology of Nobel prize-winning poet Wislawa Szymborska, "I apologize to big questions for small answers."
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Last updated 9 December 2002
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