I just read a fascinating book, Restoring Opportunity, by Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane. It describes the now-familiar problems of growing inequality in America between the educational haves and have-nots, but then goes on to describe some outstanding preschool, elementary, and high school programs that may offer models of how to help disadvantaged children close the gap. Refreshingly, Duncan and Murnane do not stop with heartwarming tales of successful schools, but also present data from randomized experiments showing the impacts on children, especially for the small high school initiative in New York City and the University of Chicago Charter Network.
From these and other examples, Duncan and Murnane derive some factors common to outstanding schools: Accountability for outcomes within schools, extensive professional development and support for teachers, and experimentation and evaluation to identify effective models.
Readers of this blog won't be surprised to learn that I support each of these recommendations. So let's start there. How do we get more than 100,000 schools to become markedly more effective? Or to make the problem a little easier, how about just the 55,000 Title I schools?
Duncan and Murnane are forthright about many of the solutions that aren't likely to make a widescale difference. They note that while there are a few promising charter management organizations, charters overall are not generally being found to improve learning outcomes, and some of the most celebrated charters achieve good results by burning out young, talented teachers, a strategy that is hard to sustain and harder to scale. Popular solutions such as ratcheting up accountability, providing vouchers, and changing governance have also been disappointing in evaluations.
There is a strategy that puts all of Duncan and Murnane's principles into practice on a very large scale: Comprehensive school reform. They note the strong evaluation results and widespread impact of two CSR models, one of which is our Success for All program for elementary and middle schools. CSR models exemplify the principles Duncan and Murnane arrive at, but they can do so at a substantial scale. That is, they invariably provide a great deal of professional development and support to teachers, accountability for outcomes within schools, links to parents, provisions for struggling students, and so on. Unlike charters, CSR models do not require radical changes in governance, which explains why they have been able to go to substantial scale far more rapidly.
The only problem with comprehensive school reform models is that at present, there are too few to choose from. Yet with support from government and foundations, this could rapidly change.
Imagine a situation in which Title I school staffs could choose among proven, whole-school reform models the one they thought best for their needs. The schools themselves and the leaders of their CSR reform networks would be responsible for the progress of children on state standards, but otherwise these schools would be free to implement their proven models with fidelity, without having to juggle district and CSR requirements.
Such a strategy could accomplish the goals Duncan and Murnane outline in thousands of schools, enough to make real inroads in the problems of inequity they so articulately identify.