Better By Design? A Consumer's Guide to Schoolwide Reform

December 1, 1999

PDF version

James Traub

Published by
The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
December 1999

Foreword

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

In recent years, a number of high-profile education reformers and organizations have developed comprehensive, replicable models of curriculum and instruction that are meant, in one fell swoop, to transform entire schools. Some of these models have familiar names: Success for All, developed by Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins; Core Knowledge, developed by E.D Hirsch of the University of Virginia; Henry Levin's Accelerated Schools; Theodore Sizer's Coalition of Essential Schools; and Chris Whittle's Edison Project. You can think of them as "name-brand schools," something new in the American context. Today, in fact, dozens of models and designs are out there, most of them being vigorously marketed and some of them fairly widely implemented.

This is a quintessentially American approach to things: Instead of sending the old jalopy to the mechanic, the body shop and the gas station for a complete overhaul, let's buy a new car. And let's make sure that it's fully loaded with all the features that we desire.

This approach to education reform has spread rapidly since the 1980s, when we first began to see whole school designs associated with celebrated education gurus: Sizer, James Comer, Ernest Boyer, and so on. It was given a considerable boost in the early 1990s by the founding of the New American Schools Development Corporation (now "New American Schools"), whose purpose was to identify and provide financial support for the developers of promising designs. Today, there's a $150 million federal program ("Porter-Obey") to subsidize the adoption of these designs, and there's mounting emphasis on "schoolwide" strategies in the big federal Title I program as well. Many states and cities are promoting the idea of "whole-school reform" and proposing (or in some cases, requiring) that low-performing schools adopt designs from a specified list. What all this means is that, in the next several years, more and more parents and school districts will be shopping around for the best model for their child or district.

But how will they know which "name brand" is right for them, their school, or their district? People faced with a choice among many similar products often welcome "consumer guidance" that helps them to compare and contrast their options.

This book seeks to provide such guidance. It is a layman's guide to ten of today's best-known school designs, meant for those "consumers"parents, teachers, school board members, philanthropists, civic leaderswho must evaluate which, if any, of these models they may want to pursue. The designs examined here are Accelerated Schools, America's Choice, the Coalition of Essential Schools, Core Knowledge, Direct Instruction, the Edison Project, Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound, Multiple Intelligences, Success for All, and the (Comer) School Development Program.

Each entry has three parts: an essay describing what the model is like, an account of a visit to a school that has implemented the model, and a table providing basic facts about the model, including (for eight of the ten models) information as to its effects on student achievement.

Each entry begins with a thoughtful essay on the origins, assumptions, and philosophy of the model. These marvelously readable pieces were penned by James Traub, who writes for the New York Times Magazine and authored a fine book on the academic decline of New York's City College. If you've read any of Jim's other work on education, you know that he brings a sophisticated and discerning eye, as well as a deft prose style, to his reports on our nation's classrooms.

Following his exploration of the ideas behind the model comes a close look at what it feels like in a school that has adopted this model. These are based on visits Jim made to schools that the designers identified as good examples of the implementation of their models. (No two schools are quite alike, and no single school is a perfect representation of the entire design; but Traub did his best to find reasonably "typical" specimens.) We are delighted to publish these accounts of Jim's school visits, the first we've seen that capture what makes these reform models tick and evoke how they differ.

At the end of the entry (for most models) is a table that presents the results of a formal evaluation of its effectiveness, together with some practical information. While many of the school designs depicted here sound enticing, what most consumers really want to know is how well such an approach actually works. The evidence of a model's success in boosting pupil achievement, though often preliminary or fragmentary, was recently analyzed by the American Institutes of Research (AIR) and a summary of those findings is presented here, together with information about the cost of installing the model, the quality of the support provided by the developer to schools seeking to implement it, the number of schools actually using each model in 1999-2000, and whom to contact for more information.

The AIR report from which we draw most of this information was published in February 1999. Spanning twenty-four school designs, it was commissioned by the American Association of School Administrators, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Association of Elementary School Principals, the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and the National Education Association. The results of AIR's evaluation were published in the Educators' Guide to Schoolwide Reform, a valuable resource that should serve as a model for future research and evaluation projects. The Educators' Guide is available on the world wide web at www.aasa.org. It can also be ordered by contacting the Educational Research Service at 703-243-2100. We are most grateful to the sponsoring organizations for allowing us to reproduce some of the key findings here. Regrettably, two of the school designs included in this report, the Edison Project and Howard Gardner's Multiple Intelligences model, were not evaluated by AIR for the Educators' Guide. We hope they will be included in future editions. Meanwhile, however, the Educators' Guide is also a valuable resource for people interested in the effectiveness of some whole school designs that are not examined in this report. (It also contains lots more information about the eight that we did include.)

The rating that AIR assigned to each model for the evidence of its effects on student achievement will doubtless be seen by many as the "bottom line." Just two of the models described in this book, Direct Instruction and Success for All, received top ratings from AIR for their evidence of positive effects on student achievement. We note that both employ rather traditional instructional methods and that both are rather costly to install. Food for thought.

While we urge consumers to take these ratings seriously, every grading system has its quirks. Though AIR is to be lauded for its pioneering effort to appraise the reform models, some parts of its analysis we might have done differently. For example, the AIR system assigns highest marks to designs that have been the subject of the most studies that use rigorous methodology and show positive results. Designs supported by fewer studies did not get equally high ratings for effectiveness even if those studies include multiple sites. Note, too, that designs showing larger effects are no more highly rated than designs that show smaller, but still positive, effects. It seems to have been the number and quality of the studies, rather than the size of the school design's effect on student learning, that AIR was seeking. Because of its emphasis on the number of studies, AIR also tended to favor designs that have been around longer. The two top-rated designs have both been in use for more years than many of the others to which they are being compared.

Our goal in bringing this information together is to assist education consumers both to choose the right school designs for them and to form some judgment of the broader concept of whole-school reform. The first section of this report consists of an introduction written by Jim Traub. He provides an overview of what whole-school reform is, identifies its place in the universe of school reforms, and traces the history of the concept. It includes some of the author's reflections on features that distinguish one design from another and on the difficulty of translating ideas into practice.

An overview of the ratings of the ten whole-school reform models can be found on page 12. There you will find a table summarizing what is known about the effectiveness and costs of eight of them and additional information about all ten. A general explanation of the features of this report appears in the "How To Use This Guide" section following the introduction.

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation is a private foundation that supports research, publications, and action projects in elementary/secondary education reform at the national level and in the Dayton area. Further information can be obtained from our web site (http://www.edexcellence.net) or by writing us at 1627 K St., NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20006. (We can also be e-mailed through our web site.) This report is available in full on the Foundation's web site, and hard copies can be obtained by calling 1-888-TBF-7474 (single copies are free). The Foundation is neither connected with nor sponsored by Fordham University.

Chester E. Finn, Jr., President
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
Washington, DC
December 1999

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Better By Design? A Consumer's Guide to Schoolwide Reform

Contents

Foreword