Toward Success at Scale

Abstract

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. 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? …