The State Departments of Education and the School Districts teams, supported by the University of Virginia Partnership for Leaders in Education and the Wallace Foundation Grant, are provided continuing executive training over a two year period. Each consecutive year all stakeholders experience an extensive five day summer leadership institute at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. The focus is on aligned governance and leadership using case studies and current literature on business and education best practices to guide the learning. Development and implementation of the Balanced Scorecard with Project Management Oversight is taught and subsequently used to monitor and report results over several years. Each team drafts a 90 Day Next Steps action plan and commits to an instate midyear progress review.

On site training is provided to create a unique Scorecard for each state department and district. The majority of the goals and measures for the Scorecard are determined by the third party Instructional Review conducted in each school district. The benchmarks listed above are constantly monitored and periodically reported by project oversight managers to the superintendent and the governing boards. The Project Management Committee is charged with the authority and responsibility to change struggling schools into achieving schools and to move good schools to become great schools. With strict adherence to the concept of Aligned Leadership, by adopting the process of continuous Instructional Review, and with regular accountability monitored by the Balanced Scorecard, states and districts can meet or exceed the important learning outcomes expected for each student by educators, parents, board members, and taxpayers.

In its work, the Stupski Foundation has gotten particular traction by focusing on the ?how to? of building a Comprehensive Aligned Instructional System that includes both aligning the instructional systems and aligning the system as a whole to support instruction. More broadly, creating systemic reform appears to require the following components to be successful. Leadership in the system must work concurrently on four fronts: 1) creating / communicating / embedding a common understanding of success that includes the belief that all students can succeed at high levels; 2) continually iterating a key strategy to realize that vision; 3) building a coherent system, the comprehensive aligned instructional system described above; and 4) building a culture that supports the deep implementation of a continually reflecting, evolving, equity-based organization. It is the job of top leadership to intentionally create opportunities, and leverage crises and opportunities that arise, to simultaneously move on these multiple levels.

The Foundation has also found that certain contexts offer greater opportunities for reform for strategic leaders able to leverage them. These include fiscal and / or achievement crises that unify the board and union to support bold new directions; state contexts that offer key infrastructure supports such as strong data and assessment systems that support instructional improvement as well as accountability; and key partnerships for external benchmarking, validation and thought partnership

I believe the challenge for urban school districts is to create a whole system of effective schools and not just have a few more good ones. This requires systemic and strategic thinking with the goal of graduating all students from high school ready without remediation for post secondary education of some kind. My interest is looking at systemic practices that are resulting in gains in student performance and narrowing achievement gaps.

A Strategy with a High Potential for Success

Closing the Achivement Gap with Best Practice

Strategic Learning Initiatives

Education is the gateway to opportunity and achievement, yet American schools continue to fail many of their students, most notably those living in poverty and children of color. Urban school systems operate like immune systems, driving off many of even the most promising innovations. Individual schools have closed the achievement gap, but school-by-school improvement does not solve our larger problem.

School districts need to learn how to implement successful strategies and quickly scale them up district-wide. Two school districts, Chicago and St. Paul, are making impressive progress with a strategy that is based on the principles of High Performance Management. Leaders around the world in the private and nonprofit sectors have refined the principles over the past fifty years, and they have been used in some schools and school districts (Simmons, 2006, pp 209-235; Lawler, Mohrman and Ledford, 1995; Letts, Ryan and Grossman, 1999).

St. Paul doubled its reading scores in four years across 70 schools beginning in 1999 with over 40 percent low income families (American Productivity and Quality Center, 2004, p 63). Chicago increased reading and math scores two and a half times over 14 years for half of its 360 elementary schools, all in low income neighborhoods (Simmons, 2006, p. 12). (The majority of the schools in the other half were put on probation in 1996 which had a sustained negative effect of their performance.) In Chicago, 86 percent of the families in the public schools are low income. Merging Two Concepts

Chicago and St. Paul have merged two successful concepts into a powerful strategy for leading change to close the achievement gap in districts with a large percentage of low income families and English language learners: Site-Based Management (SBM) and Scaling-Up Best Practice (SUBP).

The recent research shows that ?successful SBM schools have decision-making authority in areas of budget, curriculum and personnel. They cultivate resources outside the school through involvement in professional networks and connections with business groups.? (Wohlstetter and Briggs, 2001). These schools also:

Implement a strategy for shared leadership that includes administrators, teachers, and students (Many SBMs in the country do not have shared decision-making authority, and the stakeholders lose interest in participating.)

Enhance the impact of SBM by using comprehensive school reform models to provide professional development and support for principals and teachers,

Encourage parents to help their children learn at home.

In Chicago the research shows that the points above provide a powerful package of Essential Supports which were responsible for accelerating test score results in the schools in the lowest income neighborhoods (Sebring, Penny, et. al. 2006)

The second concept, Scaling Up Best Practice (SUBP), enables the gains of SBM including the Essential Supports, to be diffused across most schools in an under-performing district. The best examples include:

Changing the district?s philosophy of management from mandating change from the top down to supporting change at the school level. In Chicago, this change was facilitated by a state law that replaced the Chicago Board of Education with a new board. It also required that all schools create Local School Councils (LSC) and elect teacher, parent and community members.

Restructuring the district into semi-autonomous Areas. In Chicago the leadership created 23 Areas with about 25 schools per Area to provide more effective support to the principals. This included granting 120 schools additional autonomy beyond what they had with the LSC governance process. In St. Paul, the school board decentralized the governance process by creating Local School Councils.

Creating networks of five to ten schools to facilitate learning and sharing together within neighborhoods.

Supporting site visits to best practice schools and classrooms.

To be most effective, the SUBP concept needs to be supported by the application of five principles that can be distilled from the experience of Chicago and St. Paul. They are:

o Create effective leaders at every level of the system.

o Transform the structure and culture of both the central office and the schools to enhance site-based management: creating effective school-based governance and culture through school councils and leadership teams, teacher teams at each grade level, and growing the trust among the stakeholders at the school level. Reinforce the new attitudes and behaviors by encouraging schools to work in neighborhood networks in order to accelerate the rate of learning and sharing and minimize the costs of high quality training and coaching.

o Improve instruction through a comprehensive and multi-year process of on-site professional development and coaching of both teachers and principals.

o Engage parents in helping their children learn at home.

o Do all these at the same time to create and then capture the synergy that starts to take place.

These are, fundamentally, the same principles that the best firms around the world were beginning to use to improve quality and productivity in the 1970s. (Some schools and school districts in North America had also started the process.) They include:

Focus on meeting and exceeding the needs of both the customer and the employees.

Give involvement in problem-solving and decision-making to the people closest to the process.

Focus everyone on improving the quality of the product and service.

Use teamwork within and across levels to meet the needs.

Conclusion

Neither Chicago nor St. Paul have closed the gap in student achievement. They have made more progress, more rapidly, than other urban districts, and they are sustaining that growth.

The benefits of this strategy for scaling up best practice are:

It releases the untapped energy and creativity of the current teachers, principals, students, and parents in ways that not only accelerate the rates of both adult and student learning, but also build self-managing learning communities. As a result, productivity and quality improve steadily.

The principles of the strategy for scaling-up best practice are consistent with the vision, management philosophy, core values, customer and employee focus, de-layered organizational structure, self-managing teams (schools with significant autonomy), continuous improvement in quality and results of a internationally validated system: High Performance Management.

The challenges of this strategy are that it requires:

Effective leadership in the school.

A paradigm shift in management strategy and behavior by the central office leadership; from mandating daily change in the schools to supporting school-based change.

Sustained support for ongoing professional development for the school staff.

An authentic partnership with the teachers? and principals' unions and associations.

Parent programs that encourage and enable parents to be active participants in their child?s education.

Policy makers and researchers need to reflect on why it is so difficult to scale up best practice in larger school districts and start thinking about how they can adapt strategies from districts where scaling-up has been successful. The lessons from Chicago and St. Paul are worthy of study, including both examination of the data and site visits to talk with the people who created those results.

Annotated References

American Productivity and Quality Center, Education in Action: Examining Strategic Improvement Efforts, Houston, 2004. Provides the results for St.Paul and other districts that are closing the gap.

Lawler, E. E., Mohrman, S. A., and Ledford, G.E., Creating High Performance Organizations: Employee Involvement and Total Quality Management, San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1995. A handbook for how to implement high performance management.

Letts, Christine W., William P. Ryan and Allen Grossman, High Performance Nonprofit Organizations: Managing Upstream for Greater Impact, New York: Wiley, 1999. Nonprofit examples of high performance management.

Sebring, Penny, et.al., ?The Essential Supports for School Improvement,? Chicago: Consortium on Chicago School Research, 2006. Provides the data showing those interventions needed to accelerate adult and student learning in Chicago.

Simmons, John, Breaking Through: Transforming Urban School Districts, New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 2006. Analyzes the Chicago experience and reviews effective strategies.

Wohlstetter, Priscilla and Kerri L Briggs, ?Key Elements of a Successful School-Based Management Strategy,? John Simmons, School Reform in Chicago: Lessons and Opportunities. A Research-Based Framework for Developing High Impact Funding Strategies. Chicago: Chicago Community Trust, 2001. Data showing the impact of SBM on accelerating student learning.

About the Author

John Simmons is the President of the nonprofit Strategic Learning Initiatives, which provides both technical assistance to schools and school districts and policy research. His latest book is Breaking Through: Transforming Urban School Districts, Teachers College Press, 2006. To contact: jsimmons@strategiclearninginitiatives.org; 954 W. Washington Blvd, Chicago, IL 60607. 312 738 0022. www.strategiclearninginitiatives.org.

The journey toward improving student opportunities and outcomes begins when a school board selects a superintendent. The next step is for the Board and the superintendent to take the superintendent's theory of action and assess how that theory of action will impact their school district. To the degree that the school board members believe, understand and commit to implementing the theory of action will dictate the amount of systemic reform that will occur.