Picture an urban
school district that has some small pockets of success, and glimmers of hope.
These small successes breed confidence among administrators and teachers, but
it does not ensure that the district can spread those small wins to all of
their schools.
In fact, to
spread that success, also known as scaling your reform, it takes a whole new
set of skills in addition to the skills and knowledge the district cultivated
in the small pockets of success. “Scaling up” in education is a possibility,
with examples of large-scale reform efforts like New York City’s Community District
II.[1] However,
in many districts, the ability to scale remains elusive and even
intimidating.
There have been
recent efforts in academia to shine light on different avenues for bringing
school reform to scale. One of the more recent studies highlight work across a
set of districts awarded with the Broad Foundation prize. In a presentation about her findings, Zavadsky
outlines the key efforts districts make
to bringing reform to scale.[2]
1)
Coordinating
planning, communication, resources, and supports across the system
2)
Creating
collective ownership and accountability for student progress
3)
Create an
aligned coherent educational program
4)
Create constancy
for mobile student populations
5)
Create system
equity
6)
Reform moves
beyond one teacher, principal, school
I find this list
helpful for guiding district’s thinking in how to build a context for scaling
reforms. However, this list explains the what, not the how, and might leave
someone wondering what these efforts look like in their district context.
The other
recent research I find relevant to understand how to move reforms to scale is
Childress, et. al.’s chapter titled Managing
for Results at the New York City Department of Education, from O’Day et al.’s, book, Education Reform in
New York City: Ambitious Change in the Nation's Most Complex School System.[3]
What I like about the Childress, et al. study is it describes some of those
specific levers New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) used to scale
their reform. Childress, et al. point out that “simply adding pressure on
schools without a concurrent efforts to increase capacity runs the risk of
undermining the ultimate goal of improving performance.”[4]
The case study describes how the district helped schools develop into
organizations in which the personnel was always learning about how to solve
problems of performance. To develop their focus on organizational learning in
schools, the NYC DOE developed learning tools and processes to help build
school’s capacity to solve and evaluate their own problems. For example, these
tools helped “increase school teams’ capacity to learn from data and adjust
their behavior based on that learning."[5]
(p. 92).
The case study goes onto
describe two central accountability tools that were used to provide schools
with feedback on their outcomes as well as processes for achieving those
outcomes. NYC DOE’s use of “Progress Reports” gave schools ratings on their
school environment, student performance, student progress, and additional
credit using mostly administrative data.
They coupled the summative nature of the Progress Report with a “Quality
Review” where every school was visited for one or two days and rated on these five
criteria by observers:
1) Gather data
2) Plan and set goals
3) Align instructional
strategies to goals
4) Align capacity
building to goals
5) Monitor and
revise.
The Quality Review
reinforced the emphasis on organizational learning because of its heavy
emphasis on the process by which school teams use data to improve instruction.
Childress, et
al.’s case about New York City shows an unique example of a district’s effort
to scale a reform, which fits nicely within the types of efforts districts can
make to scale reform as described by Zavadsky.
While NYC DOE focused heavily on accountability, but also built schools’
ability to learn from data and adjust
their behavior based on that learning. As districts examine ways to scale their
reforms, I might recommend using the lens from Zavadsky’s study and exemplars
like New York City, to guide how to move their small success stories into
system wide improvements.
[1] Elmore, R.
and Burney, D. (December 1998) “Continuous
Improvement in Community District #2, New York City” University of
Pittsburgh, HPLC Project, Learning Research and Development Center.
[2] Zavadsky, H. (2009). Bringing
School Reform to Scale: Five Award-Winning Urban Districts. (Forward
by Tom Payzant). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
[3] Childress, S. Higgins, M., Ishimaru,
A., Takahashi, S. (2011). Chapter 4: Managing for Results at the New
York City Department of Education. From O'Day, J., Bitter, C. S.,
Gomez, L., M., Eds. Education Reform in New York City: Ambitious Change
in the Nation's Most Complex School System. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
Education Press. (I will make you a copy of this.)
[4] Childress, et al., p. 87.
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