Center for the Study of Systemic Reform
   in Milwaukee Public Schools

 


School Improvement research
 

Jennifer O’Day
Assistant Professor, Department of Education Policy Studies,
University of Wisconsin-Madison
 

Abstract 

The focus for this research area is on district policies and programs that are school-based  (rather than district-wide) and that seek explicitly to improve the functioning of the school as a community and instructional unit. Our goal is to understand what strategies MPS is currently using to foster school improvement directly, and how those efforts might be refined or altered for greater effectiveness. Our particular interest is directed to schools with a history of low performance. Our plan for the upcoming year focuses on three general research activities: 1) district level interviews, 2) analysis of data from school sites, and 3) investigation of Target Teach as a school improvement effort for low-performing schools. 

I. Introduction  

School improvement lies at the very heart of systemic reform efforts. This assertion is based on two simple, yet profoundly important assumptions. The first of these is that to improve learning on a broad scale, we must improve instruction on a similarly broad scale. The second is that both learning and instruction are embedded in, and deeply influenced by, the social and organizational context.  For teachers and students, the primary context is, of course, the school; and research over the past two decades has demonstrated the influence of school context on student learning. From the effective schools research (e.g., Purkey & Smith, 1983) to studies of teachers’ work and teacher learning (McLaughlin & Talbert, 1993; Hall & Resnick, 1998) to the current literature on school restructuring and high performance school organizations (Newman & Wehlage, 1995; Mohrman & Lawler, 1996; Darling-Hammond, 1996), evidence abounds that if you want to improve student learning, you must improve the schools in which that learning takes place

These bodies of research have also identified critical components of effective school organizations. Most commonly cited are the following:  

·        A common mission focused on teaching and learning;

·        A strong professional community based on collaborative work and collective responsibility for student learning;

·        Instructional leadership (usually, but not always, coming from the principal);

·        Adequate resources (human, material, instructional, fiscal);

·        Timely and accurate information about student learning;

·        Well qualified instructional staff;

·        Opportunities for professional learning;

·        Community support and “relational trust” (Bryk & Schneider, 1966) between parents and teachers. 

Knowing the characteristics of successful schools, however, does not necessarily translate into effective strategies for creating them. Systems theory (Axelrod & Cohen, forthcoming) and research on school change (Fullan, 1991) emphasize the complexity of schools, the myriad of potential intervention points, and the unpredictability of the outcomes of those interventions. Educational historians (Cuban, 1990), implementation researchers (Weatherly & Lipsky, 1977; McLaughlin, 1987), and institutional theorists (Scott, 1995; Metz, 1989) emphasize the tenacity of traditional school norms and structures and the difficulty of new district and state policy even reaching, much less deeply affecting, classroom practice. Nonetheless, examples of successful change, such as that of Community School District 2 in New York City, provide existing proofs for the possibility of real improvement (Elmore, 1996). 

Research Questions

Lessons from the literature, plus the hope generated by successful exemplars, lead to the central question for this aspect of SSR-MPS research:  

How can the MPS create the conditions for improved student learning in every school in the district, but particularly for those schools that are currently plagued by persistent low performance?  

In general, districts attempting to accomplish this aim follow one or both of two basic strategies. The first is to establish district-wide policies and programs that seek to develop the various components of effective instruction but that do not necessarily take the school as the primary unit of intervention. Thus, a district might institute an extensive professional development program and incentives to promote teacher learning; it could allocate resources to the creation of standards and assessments to guide improvement efforts; it might redesign data systems to make useful information available and comprehensible to teachers and schools; and it might put in place incentives and accountability structures to motivate effort in the desired direction. These four areas— professional development, standards and assessments, data systems, and accountability— each of which is investigated in other studies in this project, obviously have implications for school improvement, since they address some of the attributes needed for effective schools. One task with respect to school improvement, therefore, is to determine how such broad policies and programs are playing out in the schools and the extent to which they contribute to the overall effectiveness of MPS school organizations. This task is a project-wide concern of the SSR Center and will be taken up in each of the research areas and synthesized across them.

The focus for this particular study, however, is mainly on the second approach to school improvement: that is, on district policies and programs that are school-based  (rather than district-wide) and that seek explicitly to improve the functioning of the school as a community and instructional unit.  At the national level, such an approach is exemplified by the current interest of Congress in “whole school reform” and replication of successful school models. Adopting a model-based strategy is only one possibility, however, and most districts put in place a combination of accountability and capacity- building policies that address the school as the unit of change. Our goal for this research is to understand what strategies MPS is currently using to foster school improvement directly, and how those efforts might be refined or altered for greater effectiveness. Our particular focus is on schools with a history of low performance. 

Our more specific questions include: 

·        What is the theory (or theories) of action  (Argyris & Schon, 1978) operating in the district with regard to school improvement?  What is the balance of accountability and capacity building?  In what ways is the theory of action likely to change under the new MPS administration?

·        What are the major current activities and strategies focused on school improvement?

·        To what extent are these efforts coordinated with other district strategies, such as the development of standards and assessments?

·        What are the effects of these efforts in schools, particularly in low-performing schools?

·        What are the strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in the district approach?  What changes in strategy or program might lead to more effective results?  

II. Progress to Date  

To address these questions requires a two-pronged approach: one prong focused on the district perspective, goals, and strategies, and the other focused on the perspectives, needs, goals, and strategies of the schools themselves. Although the fieldwork for the school improvement research was not scheduled to begin until the second year, we have been able to participate in and make use of work connected with other parts of the SSR-MPS research. This includes the district-level interviews and events (such as Data-Driven Seminars), as well as our fieldwork in three elementary schools this spring (which incorporated questions and respondents relevant to the school improvement study). 

III. Findings

Several findings from this work are relevant to the plans for the school improvement research: 

1.      The school is the unit of accountability in MPS. This is exemplified in the school planning process, the school report cards, and the audits and accreditation visits to schools. In each case, it is the school unit that must account for its plans and its results. However, we have found few, if any, consequences accompanying the accounting and very limited district authority to directly intervene in troubled schools—at least, in the area of personnel.

2.      The district has obviously given some attention to the issue of leadership development through its leadership specialists and their meetings with school principals. We know very little about this process, however—about either its goals, or the nature of the interaction with principals. We do not even know yet whether the district emphasis is on accountability or capacity building in this work.

3.      The data-driven seminars appear to be a potentially useful mechanism for building capacity of school sites to use data for improvement. Ideally, they bring in teams from schools to work in a supervised way with school-based achievement data: to learn how to read these data, how to interpret them in light of school practices, and how to apply them to the evaluation and revision of school plans. In practice, however, we noted substantial unevenness among the schools in terms of which and how many staff were selected to participate, the limited time and assistance provided to school teams for the analysis process, the lack of follow-up after the seminars, and the failure of most teams to even begin to address the connection to school improvement planning.

4.      With respect to instruction, Target Teach appears to be one of the critical, school-based, central district-initiated improvement efforts. Our understanding is that Target Teach is a schoolwide curricular reform that focuses on one content area (currently, it is focused on reading in elementary school, mathematics in middle school) involving the lowest performing schools in the district. The goal of the program is to raise the school’s aggregate performance in reading or mathematics.  Two of the schools visited by our research teams this spring were Target Teach elementary schools. While the data collected from our school visits have not yet been completely analyzed, questions have already been raised among members of the team about the degree to which this effort is directed toward whole-school change, the degree to which it is informed by knowledge of organizational change processes, and the degree to which it is coordinated with the school plan and other reforms activities at the school. We clearly need to know much more about the theory of action and design of Target Teach to understand its potential as a school improvement strategy. 

IV. Next Steps: Policy Recommendations and Future Research 

Our plan for the following year focuses on three general activities: 

·        District-level interviews;

·        Analysis of data from school sites; and

·        Investigation of Target Teach as a school improvement effort. 

Summer 1999

This summer, we will focus on the first two activities. In conjunction with the accountability study, we will conduct interviews of central office staff that focused on the school improvement theory of action and strategies. In addition to the new superintendent and deputy superintendents, we plan to interview leadership specialists, district staff involved in such programs as Target Teach, the Milwaukee Urban Systemic Initiative (MUSI) and Title I, and others who are involved in support and accountability.

The second activity will be to assist in the analysis of the data from the site visits conducted in May. We will use these data to gain initial insights into Target Teach as well as into school perspectives, MPS district context, site needs and strategies, and implementation of district initiatives. 

Fall 1999 and Spring 2000  

During the academic year, our focus will be on Target Teach as a strategy for school improvement. We have chosen this focus because of the program’s high profile in the district, its school-based orientation, and its targeting of low performing schools. We will use the analysis conducted in the summer to refine our questions, identify additional respondents, and select a sample of schools for further study. We will visit the schools twice during the year to collect data at differing points in the implementation process. Data collection in Target Teach schools will also allow us to learn more about planning processes, use of data, leadership development and professional development of teachers, and accountability issues in these schools. We will be particularly interested in the degree to which, and the conditions under which, Target Teach is incorporated as part of a coherent standards-based approach to instructional improvement in the school. If resources permit, we hope to conduct a simple survey in a larger sample of schools on emerging findings. 

References 

Argyris, C., & Schon, D. (1978). Organizational learning: A theory of action perspective. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. 

Axelrod, R., & Cohen, M. D. (forthcoming).  Harassing complexity. Boston: Free Press. 

Bryk, A. S., & Schneider, B. (1996). Social trust: A moral resource for school improvement. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement. 

Cuban, L. (1990).  Reforming again, again and again.  Educational Researcher, 19 (1),3-13. 

Darling-Hammond, L.D. (1996). Restructuring schools for high performance. In S. H. Fuhrman & J. A. O’Day (Eds.), Rewards and reform: Creating educational incentives that work. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 

Elmore, R.F. (1996, March). Staff development and instructional improvement: Community District 2, New York City. Paper prepared for the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future. 

Fullan, M. G., & Stiegelbauer, S. (1991). The new meaning of educational change (2nd Ed.). New York: Teachers College Press. 

Hall, M.W., & Resnick, L.B. (1998). Learning organizations for effort-based education: A discussion paper prepared for the Institute for Learning Partners. Pittsburgh, PA: The Institute for Learning. 

McLaughlin, M.W. (1987). Learning from experience: Lessons from policy implementation. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 9 (2), 171-178. 

McLaughlin, M.W., &  Talbert, J.E. (1993). Contexts that matter for teaching and learning. Stanford, CA: Stanford University School of Education, Center for Research on the Context of Teaching. 

Metz, M. H. (1989). Real school: A universal drama amid disparate experience. Politics of Education Association Yearbook, 75-91. 

Mohrman, S.A., & Lawler, E.E. III. (1996). Motivation for school reform. In S. H. Fuhrman & J. A. O’Day (Eds.), Rewards and reform: Creating educational incentives that work. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 

Newmann, F. M., & Wehlage, G. (Eds.). (1995). Successful school restructuring: Highlights of findings. Madison: University of Wisconsin, Center on the Organization and Restructuring of Schools. 

Purkey, S., & Smith, M. S. (1983). Effective schools: A review. The Elementary School Journal, 83 (4), 427-452. 

Scott, W.R. (1995). Institutions and organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. 

Weatherley, R., & Lipsky, M. (1977). Street-level bureaucrats and institutional innovation: Implementing Special Education reform. Harvard Educational Review, 47 (2).

 

 

 

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