One of the most troubling aspects of school reform over the past 30 years has been the inability to replicate good schools at scale. Since the mid 1970s, researchers have been able to identify the characteristics of effective schools—high expectations, clear standards, strong leadership—but no one has been able to identify a similar strategy for replicating such schools. The systemic standards movement has been the primary response to this problem within the public system, while entrepreneurs seeking to spread charter schools or model curricula face similar challenges from a different angle.
Why is this so difficult? After all, I'd bet the Starbucks on my block looks pretty similar to the Starbucks on yours. Over the past week, I've had the chance to hear two presentation on the challenges of creating effective schools at scale: one from within the system and one from without. Despite their differences as insiders and outsiders, the two had startlingly similar stories to tell about the challenges of creating good practice at scale.
Former Boston superintendent Tom Payzant talked about the challenges of bringing high quality new practice to scale in a recent HUGSE accountability workshop. Speaking from the perspective of the superintendent he used to be, he emphasized the role of trained intermediaries--coaches, district superintendents, and, of course, principals--as the key components to creating the capacity for system-wide improvement. In one sense, the vision here is unavoidably top-down, as the direction comes from the center and moves outward into the districts and schools. But at the same time, Payzant stressed creating opportunities, within this larger vision, for schools to shape the programs to their needs, to choose curricula that fit their missions, and to avoid overly prescriptive programs that denied talented teachers the room to work. If the flaw of “tight on ends/loose on means” was that schools, given the freedom to innovate, didn’t know how to improve the quality of their instruction, the coaching-heavy strategy seeks to remedy the problem by providing external support and expertise for how to improve their practice.
At the same time, Payzant acknowledged that there were some significant challenges to this model. Finding knowledgeable and skilled coaches can be just as difficult as finding high quality principals and teachers. Some schools are much quicker than others to take advantage of new opportunities (such as new curricula for reading), and the lowest performing schools are, not surprisingly, the least likely to do so (more on this in the next post). And a fair number of teachers, particularly those in middle schools and high schools (not to mention universities) are highly resistant to the idea that an external coach should work with them on their teaching, which they see as a core part of their professional expertise.
Approaching similar questions from a different angle, Eastern Michigan researcher Donald Peurach gave an AERA presentation on the efforts of Success for All (SFA), a Baltimore-based reading model, to replicate their efforts at scale. Drawing on his 10 year study of SFA and a literature on organizational replication, he challenged the idea that replication was achieved through developing “best practices” in a hub and then transferring this knowledge to field sites. Rather, he argued, field sites needed to find ways to take what was offered from the hub and make it their own, and the hub needed to learn how to revise its core set of knowledge on the basis of feedback from the field. In this notion of interactive learning, as opposed to transferring knowledge, Peurach’s findings mirror earlier research on the limitations of top-down implementation, and are consistent with a broader constructivist approach to organizational learning and change.
Peurach argues that the challenges to replication are found in four central places: the model, the outlets, the environment, and the hub. Among the barriers he cites: the difficulty of knowing exactly what it is about a successful model that makes it work (the model); field sites that lacked the leadership or previous knowledge needed to make sense of the reform (the outlet); cultural resistance among teachers to the introduction of external routines into their work (also the outlet); a policy and funding environment that was too uncertain to ensure long-term continuity (the environment); and the many managerial challenges facing the hub as it seeks to address the problems in the model, in the outlets, and with the broader environment (the hub). While this analysis is of a program sponsored by an external academic entrepreneur, he argues that similar problems would face state or district efforts to boost capacity. Judging by Payzant’s analysis, he is not wrong.
So where does this leave us? Peurach places his faith in “routines,” which he sees as the key building blocks of organizational replication, tools that encompass both knowledge and tacit skill and can be standardized for widespread usage. The analogy here is a familiar medical one: that doctors are not mavericks who risk patients’ lives in the name of professional discretion, but rather a profession governed by standards of care that serve to ensure a certain consistency in the quality of practice. There is something appealing here, in that it points to the longstanding weakness of teachers’ individualistic notion of professionalism, a vision that is more about being free from oversight and less about working together to achieve quality practice. At the same time, there is something unappealing about applying “routines” to teaching, because teaching, as a form of collective thinking, is most alive when it is open to new or unforeseen possibilities. A middle ground (often proposed but infrequently implemented) might combine the best elements of both: teachers would be given pedagogical strategies but not routines, and other teachers, coaches and principals would consistently observe classroom practice and offer ongoing feedback about how to improve practice. Such a strategy would not solve all the problems of hub, model, outlets or environment, but it would be a start towards spreading quality practice in professional work. Starbucks might learn a thing or two.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Replicating Good Practice: Schools and Starbucks
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Improvement at Scale: More Questions than Answers
We had our first substantive meeting on Tuesday, March 13. Here are a few of the questions that we discussed:
Is the “tight-loose” theory of school reform obsolete? What might follow it?
Much of the standards-based movement was founded on the idea that legislators and other external agents would be “tight on ends” but “loose on means.” The notion was that this framework would provide outside pressure for reform, and provide some standardization across units in terms of what was expected, but it would not be overly prescriptive in dictating the means by which schools would reach these ends. While this perspective continued to receive some support in the seminar, several participants questioned whether this assumed a “theory of internal combustion,” which was not in evidence. What to do about these (very numerous) schools, where there are no such change agents? What would replace a theory of tight-loose? Is there a way to do this that would avoid the dangers of being overly prescriptive?
Is capacity building an answer?
Not surprisingly for anyone who knows the cast of characters at HGSE, one answer to what might replace tight-loose is some kind of capacity building strategy at the school level. The idea here is to move away from models that either a) dictated programs from on high, or b) were tight-loose and left failing schools floundering; and instead c) offer an approach where outside expertise was provided in order to help schools become more able to identify and respond to the needs of their students and the problems at their school. Some of HGSE’s work on Datawise is relevant here. The key, one faculty member argued, was to try to create school ownership over problem-solving, to create greater levels of control in schools that have long only seen themselves as recipients of external mandates. At the same time, either strong leadership within a school or external expertise is necessary to gradually move schools in this direction. Some asked if there was a research base for this point, a question that we will continue to explore in the seminar (and comments will be posted here). I’ve written a bit more on the options for capacity building here.
Is there political support for capacity building?
A number of participants were skeptical that there would be government support for these types of capacity building efforts. There was general agreement that capacity building could be seen as “mush,” that there was little evidence on it that policymakers trust, that it could be seen as “more bureaucracy” and taking money away from the ground, and that capacity was often linked in policymakers minds to professional development efforts which are generally widely in ill-repute. While there was some skepticism that policymakers respond to evidence, there was agreement that evidence was one important missing link in trying to build a political story for capacity building. Another possibility is to try to draw sources of capacity from the for-profit sectors, seeking to expand political support to the right.
What are the leverage points for building capacity?
Even if we knew what we wanted to do, and we could get the money for it, how would we build capacity? Three possibilities (and these are not exhaustive) were outlined: 1) Shift professional development money and efforts to capacity building efforts. End the one-off style of professional development seminars, and tie professional development much more tightly to a school’s strategy for increasing performance. 2) Increase the supply of highly effective principals, either through leadership academies, or by releasing superintendents from collective bargaining provisions that constrain their selection of principals. 3) Increase the supply of external “coaches” to schools. While the quality of these coaches varies widely, they do provide a means for building capacity. It was widely agreed that state departments of education are not currently staffed to do this work.
Is capacity the missing piece? Or are we on the wrong track?
There was some agreement in the room that after 15 years of standards-based reform, we have not made nearly as much progress as was initially hoped. There was significant disagreement about whether this was due to the lack of a capacity building strategy, or whether the overall vision itself was flawed in its view of the profession and its theory of change. More on these issues in future posts.
Our next meeting is April 5th; expect a post in this space on April 10th.
Welcome!
While much of the rest of this Usable Knowledge site seeks to convey what we’re learning here at HGSE to a wider public, this blog will report on a workshop that is explicitly designed to explore what we don’t know. By bringing together faculty, students, and some current practitioners in the field, the workshop gives us a chance to learn from one another as we think about what we know about education reform and where we might profitably go next. This particular workshop is focused around the critical issues of standards and accountability, although this model would work for a broad range of topics in the future. This blog seeks to broaden that conversation to a wider group; we hope to learn from you as we report what we are learning from one another.
Faculty participants in the group include HGSE faculty colleagues Richard Elmore, Dan Koretz, Richard Murnane, Tom Payzant, Paul Reville, and Robert Schwartz. We are joined by 20-25 doctoral and masters students, many of whom have had considerable experience in the classroom or as administrators. We are also occasionally joined by current practitioners, such as Mary Russo, the highly successful principal of the Murphy School in Boston. To allow people to speak freely, I will not identify the speakers by name on the blog. The seminar is organized by Richard Elmore and myself, Jal Mehta (post-doctoral fellow and lecturer at HGSE). It will meet 5 times over the course of the semester, and I will post reports here, starting with the post immediately above this one.
Please comment below – we’d love to hear from you. You can get in touch with me at jal_mehta@gse.harvard.edu. Looking forward to the discussion!