The district role in turning around low performing schools

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Assembly
California Legislature
Assembly Select Committee on Low Performing Schools
Informational Hearing

Testimony of Marla Ucelli
Annenberg Institute for School Reform
Delivered February 27, 2002

Note: Footnotes appear as superscript Roman numerals like this ⁱⁱⁱ. Click on a numeral to link to the reference item listed at the bottom of the page.

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Mr. Chairman, Members of the Committee, and guests, my name is Marla Ucelli and I direct District Redesign for the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. Thank you for the opportunity to address this body with its important and challenging charge.

The Annenberg Institute is a non-partisan, non-profit organization affiliated with Brown University. Our mission is to develop, share, and act on knowledge that improves the education of children and young people. Our particular focus is on poor children and children of color in America's cities.

There is a troubling fact that brings most of us into this room today. Schools work well for some students and their families, but for many they hardly work at all. Glaring gaps in student achievement exist across racial and ethnic groups, between rich and poor, and between urban and non-urban areas.

Of course, there are high achieving students, good schools, and high quality teachers in almost every community. The problem is one of scale. Good schools and good instruction have never been widely available to all students. At the Annenberg Institute, our work is not aimed at high schools alone, but it addresses issues of support, connectivity, and coherence that we know are essential to their redesign.

For starters, evidence abounds that we need better supports and stronger incentives for improving schools, particularly ones that are already low performing. Our review of the last two decades of relevant research has identified some of the key supports that schools need. They need:

• high standards and expectations,ⁱ a shared philosophy about learning,ⁱⁱ and the authority to make key decisions, including hiring staff who support the philosophy;ⁱⁱⁱ
  
  
• a pool of well-qualified teachers and administrators;^iv
  
  
• incentives to participate in, and ready access to, high-quality professional development, curriculum support, and on-site assistance;^v
  
  
• respectful and trusting relationships that connect school staff, students and parents-both on a person-to-person basis, and through formal organizations like parent teacher associations and unions;
  
  
• a mechanism for monitoring school progress in terms of equity, achievement, and other student outcomes;^vi
  
  
• access to economies of scale (for functions like data and technology management as well as transportation, food services, etc.);^vii
  
  
• substantive parent and community involvement in schools and in the lives of students.^viii

While we know that large-scale, sustainable improvement depends upon schools having access to these supports, we know a lot less about how best to provide them. In an ideal world, entrepreneurial educators might learn from the exemplars and best practices that do exist. However, as Harvard's Richard Elmore reminds us, "It is unlikely that successful practices will spontaneously reproduce themselves just because they are successful, in the absence of structures and processes based on explicit theories about how reproduction occurs."^ix Elmore underscores the importance of a supportive infrastructure beyond the school.

For the remainder of my time today, I'd like to talk about one potentially important source of that support; something that, for most of us, is invisible: the school district and especially its "central office." When average citizens think of public education, the superintendent, board, and central office staff are probably not the images that first come to mind. More likely, it might be their child's classroom, a favorite teacher, or the latest incident of cheating or violence to happen at a school nearby.

School districts are rarely on the top of policymakers' minds either. In the post-Nation at Risk ^x era, most efforts to create high-performing schools share one commonality: they have focused on federal, state, or school-level actions.^xi They have rarely considered the impact of districts beyond their potential to do harm.

The United States has some 16,000 school districts. The 100 largest, mostly urban districts are responsible for educating more than one-fifth of the nation's schoolchildren, 40 percent of our minority students and at least 12 percent of our poor children.^xii You'll also find that ineffective high schools aren't spread evenly throughout the land. Many of the worst are clustered in the same districts.

And here in California, the fifteen largest unified school districts, which are primarily urban, educate more than one-quarter of the state's students and almost one-third of the state's students of color.^xiii The urban nature of large districts is important, too. When comparing students whose only difference is geography, urban students still perform worse than students in non-urban areas. So if you care about students who have historically been least well-served by public schools, you need to care about districts.


Some recent studies provide encouraging evidence that school districts can provide the supports schools need. Community School District 2 in New York City was able to improve instruction and student test scores by organizing all its operations to support teachers' learning of their craft and maintaining a focus on key curricular areas, like literacy and math.^xiv Houston Independent School District has narrowed achievement gaps by focusing on accountability, teamwork and efficiency.^xv Other districts in Texas achieved district-wide academic improvement for poor students by reorganizing the central office not only to provide instructional support, but also to translate shared equity beliefs into concrete school practices.

But these remain the exception rather than the rule. We know that many, many districts with large numbers of low-performing schools are spearheading reform efforts that aren't having the desired results. As Rick Hess of the University of Virginia puts it, they are "spinning wheels."^xvii Recent research about why district reform efforts falter has implications for effective high school redesign. According to Tom Corcoran's work at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education:^xviii

• Districts start too many initiatives, and they are often poorly coordinated and sequenced. When was the last time you heard a superintendent or school board announce that they had stopped doing something?
• Decisions about what to do seem to be driven more by trends than evidence.
• Efforts begin with conflicting and unclear goals. Understanding what functions and authority should be centralized and what should be decentralized to schools is a major challenge for districts.
• Support for implementation is weak.
• And there are few solid mechanisms for learning from failure or success.

There is an important lesson here. Adopting sound strategies -small learning communities, a proven school-to-career program, reduced class size -is very important. But it is not likely to have the desired impact if such strategies are placed haphazardly atop what's already there, if teachers and principals don't have the buy-in, the ongoing support and guidance, or the resources to know and care about what they're doing, and if they lack the capacity to continually assess and refine their work.

So, in other words, what many districts do now in the name of reform, some of it mandated from above, is almost the opposite of what the research tells us needs to happen to help schools build their capacity to improve.

Our national task force on the future urban districts -called School Communities that Work- is out to change that. Our goal is to help create, support, and sustain urban education systems with two characteristics: all schools in the system meet high academic performance standards and none have significant differences in achievement based on race, ethnicity, primary language, or family income. Our work focuses on three main areas that we believe represent the most powerful leverage points.


1) Building capacity for quality teaching - the core business of schools. Traditionally, central offices have been technocratic, making structural demands on schools but buffering schools and teachers from intrusions on the core function-classroom instruction.^xix The Design Group on Building Capacity for Quality Teaching and Leadership seeks to carve out a new role for central office that supports the dispersion of good practices throughout schools in big city districts.

2) Developing support of and for families and communities. We know empirically that students whose families are engaged in the learning process and whose communities support education are more apt to perform well in school.^xx Understanding what it takes to bring urban communities-many of which are challenged by issues of race, class and resource scarcity-together to support the education of all children is the major task of the Design Group on Developing Family and Community Supports.

3) And, lastly, the infrastructure that enables the previous two. Stanford's David Tyack has shown us how districts were created by design as sorting mechanisms, providing some students with access to college and good careers and other students with more limited opportunities.^xxi Now, more and more students must reach high academic performance standards to succeed in our global economy. The Design Group on Organizing, Managing and Governing Schools and Systems is creating a new design for an equity-focused school district, aimed at ensuring that students who need the most supports get the best teachers and multiple opportunities to succeed in school.

Some of the resources and tools will be available this summer. Then, in our next phase of work, we will seek to implement ideas generated through these Design Groups to help local partners produce real life examples of high-performing systems of schools.

In closing, let me be clear about a couple of things. While some districts have made major progress in one or more of these leverage areas, no district has yet succeeded with all of them. There is no blueprint, and districts cannot be mandated into redesign. They can be re-visioned as more nimble, responsive organizations with a much tighter focus on understanding and supporting effective instruction, but it will require changing entrenched behaviors, redirecting resources (including human resources), and re-tooling central office staff. That, in turn, will require support and incentives from states, pressure from communities, resources from private foundations and government, and technical assistance and tools from organizations like ours and others.

Let me also be clear about the consequence of not building the capacity of districts to support what matters most. As long as educators, policy makers, and the public focus on education reform only on a school-by-school basis some schools will continue to be left out of the improvement cycle. And the schools "left out" are almost guaranteed to be those serving the poor, minorities, new immigrants, and English-language learners.

Thank you very much.

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FOOTNOTES
Reports available as PDF files require Acrobat software for viewing. You can download it free from Adobe's website.

ⁱ The Education Trust. (1999). Dispelling the myth: High poverty schools exceeding expectations. Washington, D.C.: Author. [Download PDF; 103 pages]

ⁱⁱ Abelmann, C., Elmore, R., with Even, J., Kenyon, S., and Marshall, J. (1999). When accountability knocks, will anyone answer? Consortium for Policy Research in Education. [Download PDF; 52 pages]

ⁱⁱⁱ Hill, P.T., Campbell, C. and Harvey, J. (2000). It takes a city: Getting serious about urban school reform. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution. [Available on-line]

^iv National Commission on Teaching & America's Future. (1996). What matters most: Teaching for America's Future. New York, NY: Author; [Download PDF; 162 pages] Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform. (1995). Reinventing central office: A primer for successful schools. Chicago, IL: Author. [On-line order form]

^v National Commission on Teaching & America's Future. (1996). What matters most: Teaching for America's Future. New York, NY: Author. [Download PDF; 162 pages] Darling-Hammond, L. (1999). Solving the dilemmas of teacher supply, demand and standards: How we can ensure a competent, caring and qualified teacher for every child. Washington, D.C.: National Commission of Teaching & America's Future. [Download PDF; 43 pages]; Darling-Hammond, L. (1997). Doing what matters most: Investing in quality teaching. New York, NY: National Commission of Teaching and America's Future. [Download PDF; 75 pages]

^vi Wasley, P.A., & Fine, M. (2000). Small schools and the issue of scale. New York, NY: Bank Street College of Education. [Download PDF; 87 pages]; Ragland, M. A., Asera, R. and Johnson, Jr., J. F. (1999). Urgency, responsibility, efficacy: Preliminary findings of a study of high-performing Texas school districts. Austin, TX: Charles A. Dana Center. [Download PDF; 32 pages]

^vii Chubb, J.E. & Moe, T.M. (1990). Politics, markets, and America's schools. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution; Epstein, J. L. (1991) Paths to partnership: What we can learn from Federal, state, district, and school initiatives. Phi Delta Kappan.; Comer, J. (1993). School power: Implications of an intervention project. New York, NY: Free Press.; Comer, J., ed. (1999). Child by child: The Comer process for change in education. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. [Review and order]

^viii Schorr, L. (1997). Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America. New York, NY: Anchor Books.

^ix Elmore, R.F. (1996). Getting to scale with good educational practice. Harvard Educational Review. [Abstract]

^x U.S. National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk : The imperative for educational reform : A report to the nation and the Secretary of Education, United States Department of Education. Washington, D.C.: Author. [Available on-line]

^xi Massell, D. & Goertz, M. (1999). District strategies for building capacity and the influence of state policy on local initiatives. Washington D.C.

^xii Young, B. (2000). Characteristics of the 100 largest public elementary and secondary school districts in the U.S.: 1999-2000 [Available on-line],

^xiii California Department of Education (2001): http://data1.cde.ca.gov/dataquest/

^xiv Elmore, R.F. with Burney, D. (1997). Investing in teacher learning: Staff development and instructional improvement in Community School District #2, New York City. New York, NY: National Commission on Teaching & America's Future and Consortium for Policy Research in Education. [Download PDF; 36 pages]

^xv Harvey, J., McAdams, D., and Hill, P. (2000). Leaving no child behind: Lessons from the Houston independent school district. Houston, TX: Center for Reform of Schools Systems.

^xvi Skrla, L.; Scheurich, J. J., and Johnson, J. F. (2000). Equity-driven achievement-focused school districts. Austin, TX: Charles A. Dana Center, University of Texas at Austin. [Download PDF; 50 pages]

^xvii Hess, F. (1999). Spinning wheels: The politics of urban school reform. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. [Available on-line]

^xviii Corcoran, T., Fuhrman, S., and Belcher, C. (2001). The District Role in Instructional Improvement. Phi Delta Kappan.

^xix Elmore, R.F. (2000). Building a new structure for school leadership. Washington, D.C.: Albert Shanker Institute. [Download PDF; 42 pages]

^xx Schorr, L. (1997). Common Purpose: Strengthening Families and Neighborhoods to Rebuild America. New York, NY: Anchor Books. [Abstract and order form]

^xxi Tyack, D.B. (1974). The one best system: A history of American urban education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.