The National Center for Educational Accountability is seeking the answer to why some schools do better than others:
Over the past decade, an explosion of data on student performance has generated increasing attempts to identify what have been dubbed high-flying schools and learn from them...But the investigations here in Illinois, and in other states affiliated with the Austin, Texas-based National Center for Educational Accountability’s best-practices studies, stand out on several fronts....Rather than drawing on the experiences of a handful of high performers, by the end of this year, the NCEA and its state affiliates will have conducted such case studies in more than 400 schools in 17 states, supported in part by a $1.2 million grant from the Los Angeles-based Broad Foundation....
To probe what sets high-performing schools apart from others, the NCEA has designed a best-practices framework that forms the basis for structured interviews with district administrators, principals, and teachers. Underlying the framework, said Ms. Rutherford, are clear and specific academic goals for students, rooted in state content standards. “That clearly has emerged,” she said, “as the bedrock foundation: this penetrating, deep understanding of what it is children are to know and be able to do and how to connect it across grades.”
Oooh, there's that scary "S" word again - standards. Too many schools avoid them, and fail to learn from the actions of the successful St. Louis Belleville School District:
Clear expectations for what students should know and be able to do are communicated through a grade-by-grade skills continuum that the district updates regularly. District exit tests, given at the end of each year and crafted and refined by committees of classroom teachers, measure whether students are learning those objectives. Any changes in the curriculum flow through a district curriculum committee, which meets monthly and includes representatives from every grade and school.
That sounds about as far from the child-centered, anti-testing, free-flowing, "the teacher is your friend" model as one can get. Which is why it works so well.
This caveat, while realistic, seems pessimistic:
Although most education analysts agree that it’s important to identify and learn from high-performing schools, others caution against concluding that schools alone can close achievement gaps between students of different racial and social backgrounds.“Some schools do a much better job with disadvantaged children than other schools,” said Richard Rothstein, the author of Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap. “I think we know a little bit about what their best practices are, and those should be duplicated and imitated.” Still, he added, “too many people are quick to conclude that because some schools do better than others, therefore, schools can close the achievement gap on their own. There’s no evidence for that.”
Where's the evidence that schools shouldn't try everything in their powers to close that gap? Imitating the successful schools might be the most efficient way of doing that.
Posted by kswygert at May 4, 2005 09:28 AM