Leaders should not underestimate the enormity of the challenge of improvement in a low performing school. In many low performing schools, even simple problems like improving student behavior in the hallways is a steep challenge. In large part it is because social and relational trust between teachers is insufficient for individuals to risk changing habits and patterns – even simple ones (Payne, 2008). It is the degraded levels of teacher-teacher trust and teacher-student trust that helps explain why some school improvement approaches go so far as to include replacing principals, replacing some or all staff, and even closing and restarting schools. These types of changes are a way to catalyze culture shift.
The groundbreaking research on school improvement by Bryk, Bender Sebring, Allensworth, Luppescu, and Easton (2010) identified 5 factors that predict whether or not a school improved:
- Effective Leaders: The principal works with teachers to implement a clear and strategic vision for school success.
- Collaborative Teachers: The staff is committed to the school, receives strong professional development, and works together to improve the school.
- Involved Families: The entire school staff builds strong relationships with families and communities to support learning.
- Supportive Environment: The school is safe and orderly. Teachers have high expectations for students. Students are supported by their teachers and peers.
- Ambitious Instruction: Classes are academically demanding and engage students by emphasizing the application of knowledge
In many ways, these factors for school improvement help define the culture shift needed to begin school improvement – especially collaborative teachers, involved families, and supportive environment – though all are relevant. In their research, a low score in just one of the five factors can reduce the likelihood of improvement to less than 10%. Schools strong in at least three of the five areas for school improvement were 10 times more likely to show substantial gains in student learning.
Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all formula for school improvement in low performing schools. Successful efforts must be sensitive to local context and flexible to meet the needs of the community (Chester and White, 2017). However, the evidence suggests that organizations typically choose to make only minimal change if that is an option (Stulich, Eisner, & McCrary, 2008). This is troublesome because both theory and research also suggest that improvement requires systemic rather than piecemeal change and that the least disruptive interventions are usually the least effective (Jochim, 2016; Herman, Stecher, and Hamilton, 2015).
Thus, legitimate school improvement efforts also require a coherent strategy that includes shared behavioral expectations about how each stakeholder group can support the efforts and works to build a culture that expects success of all students (Anrig, 2015; Lane, Unger, & Stein, 2016). The Wallace Foundation describes this as “alignment between all adults in the building to consistently execute, day in and day out, on the concrete actions needed to instill a new culture.” (Kutash, et al., 2010, p. 35). Others have described this as “an improvement mind-set that permeates all behaviors, decisions, discourse, and actions.” (Lane, Unger, & Stein, 2016, p. 5) To do this, all stakeholders must prioritize school improvement efforts, be provided sufficient additional resources needed to make this shared vision a reality, and then disseminate information to the broader system about successful innovations.
At the start of a school improvement effort, it is vitally important how the work begins. Efforts to include teacher, student, family, and community participation in the planning and then implementation of changes have a better chance of gaining traction and contributing to a shared focus. Therefore, it is important for schools to pick a small number of changes to start on the path to improvement, rather than a laundry list. Quality over quantity.
The school, along with stakeholders, should carefully choose interventions that are research-based, can be adapted to their specific context, and match their capacity to implement. Starting with a set of changes that is too far out of reach produces fatigue and potential failure that reinforce a negative or demoralized culture. Dee (2012) suggests that school improvement programs can be viewed as explicit efforts to align, coordinate, and sustain individual efforts into a larger and more efficient collective vision of school improvement.
As schools begin to make changes or implement a new initiative, they should pay special attention to making sure they are doing what they said they would do. Too often, changes are deemed a failure not because they did not have potential, but because they lacked careful attention and sufficient support in the early and often difficult first steps forward.
This is part of a series of articles detailing and providing examples from each of these components. Other articles in the series:
- Overview
- Supporting Structures and Systems
- Culture Shifts
- Turnaround Leadership
- Instructional Transformation
- Talent Management
By Bradford R. White, Interim Director, Illinois Education Research Council (IERC) and David Osta.
Anrig, G. (2015). Lessons from school improvement grants that worked. The Century Foundation. Retrieved from: http://www.tcf.org/blog/detail/lessons-from-schoolimprovement-grants-that-worked.
Bryk, A. S., Sebring, P. B., Allensworth, E., Easton, J. Q., & Luppescu, S. (2010). Organizing schools for improvement: Lessons from Chicago. University of Chicago Press.
Chester, M., and White, J. (March 7, 2017). Radical change for struggling schools? It’s reliably doable. The Washington Post. Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2017/03/07/radical-change-for-struggling-schools-its-reliably-doable/?utm_term=.8790b28f35c9.
Dee, T. (2012). School turnarounds: Evidence from the 2009 stimulus (No. w17990). National Bureau of Economic Research.
Herman, R., Stecher, B., and Hamilton, L. (February 11, 2015). “Reauthorizing ESEA: What We Know and Where We Should Go with School Improvement” Commentary (The RAND Blog). Retrieved from https://www.rand.org/blog/2015/02/reauthorizing-esea-what-we-know-and-where-we-should.html.
Jochim, A. (2016). Measures of Last Resort: Assessing Strategies for State-Initiated Turnarounds. Linking State and Local School Improvement. Center on Reinventing Public Education.
Kutash, J., Nico, E., Gorin, E., Rahmatullah, S., & Tallant, K. (2010). The school turnaround field guide. Wallace Foundation. http://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-center/Documents/The-School-Turnaround-Field-Guide.pdf.
Lane, B., Unger, C., & Stein, L. (2016). 2016 Massachusetts Turnaround Practices Field Guide: A Research-Based Guide Designed to Support District and School Leaders Engaged in School Turnaround Efforts. Prepared for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Payne, C.M. (2008). So much reform, so little change. Cambridge MA: Harvard Education Press.
Stulich, S., Eisner, E., & McCrary, J. (2008). National Assessment of Title I: Final report. Washington DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. Retrieved from http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20084012/.