Sun, 07 Feb 2010 07:55:55 +0000

Position Details Position Title: Found and Lead an Urban Charter School: BES Fellowship Function: Education/Training Position Type: Full-Time (Paid) Posted On: 1/27/2010 Job Description: The Building Excellent Schools Fellowship is a rigorous, yearlong, full-time training program in urban charter school creation and leadership.  There are currently 37 BES Schools in 17 cities across the country which will serve over 16,000 students at capacity.


BES is looking for the next cohort of entrepreneurial leaders who are driven to start outstanding urban charter schools that are independently managed.

After the Fellowship, BES Fellows receive additional support and coaching as they guide their schools successfully through start-up and early operations. Schools founded by BES Fellows are free-standing, locally controlled, and independently managed.

HOW IT WORKS

Building Excellent Schools believes that dramatic student achievement in urban public schools is possible within a highly structured, no excuses, results-oriented school culture in which leadership drives, communicates, and supports instructional expectations in every class every day.

Get the Training: Through 85 training days, an extended leadership residency in a high-performing urban charter school, 20 to 30 school visits and structured work in your home territory, we teach you the essential practices to ensure your students succeed. The culmination of the Fellowship year is the submission of a well-written, thoroughly researched charter application that reflects the best practices in urban school design.

Take the Lead: You become the lead founder of a charter school in your proposed territory. You choose the community; you build the board; you build stakeholder support, you make critical design decisions and write the application. Most importantly, you build an independently managed school that you will lead once it opens.

Get the Support: Your full-time job is to design, build, and lead your charter school. After your charter is approved, BES supports your school through its opening through Follow-On Support.

WHERE DO FELLOWS FOUND SCHOOLS?
For the 2010-2011 Fellowship, we welcome applicants who wish to start charter schools in:
 
    * MASSACHUSETTS: Multiple locations
    * TENNESSEE: Memphis, Nashville
    * CALIFORNIA: Bay Area and Los Angeles
    * MISSOURI: St. Louis
    * COLORADO: Denver
    * NEW JERSEY: Newark
    * NEW YORK: New York City
    * NATIONAL FELLOW: Additional Locations
Qualifications: WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

Building Excellent Schools is looking for high-capacity individuals deeply committed to creating an outstanding urban charter school. Building Excellent Schools Fellows have:

·        An absolute belief that academic achievement drives everything: leadership, school design, school culture, decisions, and governance
·        A track record of exceptional impact: in their professional pursuits and/or in their communities

Building Excellent Schools Fellows are:

    * High-capacity: strong communicators, strategic thinkers, highly flexible and urgent
    * Relentless achievers: They get the job done, no matter what
    * Humble: Always willing to learn
    * Demanding of themselves and others: Good is not good enough; only great will suffice

Qualifications

    * Professional experience that could include education, business, law, and/or public administration
    * Bachelor’s degree from an accredited institution
Benefits: COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS

·        An $80,000 professional stipend with health benefits
·        Travel budget and accommodations while in Boston for training days
·        Eligibility to apply for $250,000 in start up money for your school Salary: $75k - 90k Posting Expiration Date: 3/28/2010 How to Apply Application Instructions: HOW TO APPLY

Visit our website to begin the online application (www.buildingexcellentschools.org).

Applications are only excepted via our website. Application Deadlines for the 2010 BES Fellowship: February 15, 2010 and May 15, 2010. The BES Fellowship begins in September 2010.

For more information about the BES Fellowship, visit our website, or contact recruiting@buildingexcellentschools.org.

We also offer online Information Sessions on the following Wednesday evening 8-9pm (EST):

February 3

Join us for our Open House Event:
http://bes.squarespace.com/bes-news/ Organization Information Hiring Organization: Building Excellent Schools Domain: Education Budget $3M - $10M Mission Statement: Building Excellent Schools is guided by a set of core beliefs in its pursuit of excellent urban charter schools. BES believes that the greatest value for urban communities, desperately in need of strong educational options for their children, should be determined by student academic performance.

In more than a decade of experience with the charter school movement, Building Excellent Schools has identified and worked with those urban charter schools that have set the bar by dramatically outperforming their peers.

We believe that:

Academic performance drives Leadership: Leaders of excellent schools demand, manage, and support strong academic performance.

Academic performance drives Design: Everything about a school's design - from its schedule to curriculum to instructional strategies - helps students achieve high academic standards.

Academic performance drives Culture: To succeed academically, students need and deserve a culture that is highly disciplined, tightly structured, and motivating of their intrinsic desire to excel.

Academic performance drives Decisions: Decisions at every level of a school's operation are based on careful measurement and analysis of student achievement.

Academic performance drives Governance: An urban charter school cannot succeed without the determination of its board to hold the school fast to its ambitious standards and provide the resources necessary to meet those standards.

Academic accountability drives Academic Performance: State standards and testing systems combined with strong internal standards and assessments provide essential incentives and guidance for student academic performance.

Building Excellent Schools works with individuals and communities who share these core beliefs; who are committed to building schools in under served communities around measurable student outcomes; who embrace strong standards and are willing to set high expectations for all students; and who are prepared to do whatever it takes to help students reach and succeed in elementary school, middle school, high school, in college and beyond.

To learn more about BES, you may join our Open House on Sunday, January 31st from 4:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.  For more information on this event, please click on the link below:

http://bes.squarespace.com/bes-news/ Web Site: www.buildingexcellentschools.org City: Nationwide State: Massachusetts Postal Code: 02108 Country: United States

Transcript

TOM LOVELESS: Good morning. We do have an over-booked audience, so I'd ask you to take your seats, if you have a seat, and if you don't, there is some room in the back where you can stand. My name is Tom Loveless. Welcome to Brookings, welcome to the Brown Center on Education Policy. We're delighted this morning to have assembled a distinguished panel to discuss whole school reform.

This forum is cosponsored by the Brown Center and the Fordham Foundation, and it's my pleasure to introduce the president of the Fordham Foundation, who's going to tell you more about the panel this morning, and why we selected this topic for coverage. And so, let me turn it over to Checker Finn.

CHESTER FINN: If you are looking for Whole Foods, you drive out Wisconsin Avenue to Tenley Town, and you'll find a branch. This is whole school.

I'm Checker Finn, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. First, thanks to Tom Loveless of Brookings for hosting and cosponsoring this event. Second, thanks to Jim Traub, the very distinguished writer for, among other places, The New York Times Magazine, for agreeing to moderate the discussion that's about to occur.

Thanks to the four terrific panelists for, in three cases, getting themselves to Washington for this occasion, and in the fourth, crossing the river, in spite of crummy weather, because this is an interesting and important topic. I'm actually old enough to remember when Lamar Alexander and David Kearns a decade ago suggested that there be created, outside of the government, something called The New American Schools Development Corporation to create break-the-mold, start-from-scratch school designs, and to have nothing to do with the federal government.

A decade later, New American Schools, as it's now called, continues as an organization. Whole school reform, sometimes called school-wide reform, is very much entangled with the federal government, both in the Title I Program and in the Porter-Obey program, and we at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation have had two initial sort of takes on it ourselves, as part of our own research and publishing program.

First, none other than Jim Traub, a couple of years ago, wrote for us a consumers guide to school-wide reform designs—some of them, not all of them. And then, most recently, Jeff Mirel, of the University of Michigan, wrote a history of the New American Schools organization, going back to the Lamar Alexander, David Kearns days, and bringing it up to the present, and trying to say where has it come from, and what has it wrought, and what's come of it, and what is this movement that it is associated with?

So having published these two, we think, worthy reports, we said, you know, this is actually worth discussing. The recent ESCA reauthorization, as it seems to me, entangles the federal government even deeper in this topic than it had been. And as you go around the country, you find many many dozens of providers of whole school reform design and operators offering what they do as a solution to what ails a given school or school system.

And it seemed to us a worthy question of: how good an idea is this; how is it working; is it an appropriate activity for the federal government; what have we learned from this decade of experience with this idea, which has clearly, at least in my view, evolved a lot during the course of the decade. So I'm delighted to see folks are here to tell us about, from both the macro and the closer to the ground perspective. And without further ado on my part, take it away, Jim.

JIM TRAUB: Thanks, Checker. The sequence will be as follows: I'm going to introduce, briefly, each of our four panelists, and each one of them will speak for eight or ten minutes, and then we'll have a question and answer session. So first, I'll introduce our panelists, from right to left.

First, we have Mary Anne Schmitt, who is the president and chief executive officer of New American Schools, which, as Checker mentioned, is the organization which is largely responsible for the existence of this reform—of whole school reform—and is now the chief advocate for and, in many ways, clearinghouse for policy that has to do with whole school reform. Mary Anne has been working at the New American Schools since 1995. Prior to that, she was a staff member for Richard Riley, President Clinton's secretary of education, working on his Goals 2000 community project.

Seated to Mary Anne's right is Jeffrey Mirel. Jeffrey is a professor of educational studies and History at the University of Michigan. He specializes in urban school systems and in the history of school reform. That's a sad subject, largely, and indeed, he wrote a prize-winning book called The Rise and Fall of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1907-1981, as well as the sadly titled The Failed Promise of the American High School: 1890-1995, and of course is the author of the study that Checker mentioned, whose title is The Evolution of the New American Schools.

To his right, we have Gene Bottoms. Gene is the director of a program called High Schools That Work, which is one of the whole school reforms, though I think, as Gene will explain, it is a kind of quasi-whole whole school reform. It's focused on high schools. It's the largest program for high schools for career bound students. And as I understand it, it's been judged highly effective in the studies that have looked at these things. Gene also spent many years with the Georgia Department of Education. He has also been a local schoolteacher, principal, and guidance counselor.

And to his right, we have Ann McClellan, who is the director of program development at the Center for Reform of School Systems. She's spent 21 years in the Houston school system, from which she is currently on leave at the Center. For 11 years, she was the principal of Poe Elementary School, which has been named an exemplary school by the Texas Education Agency. During her time there, she raised over a million dollars in grant funds to support work at the school. She teaches at both the University of St. Thomas and the University of Houston. So with no further ado, Mary Anne, why don't you begin?

MARY ANNE SCHMITT: Well, thanks very much, Jim. I'd like to thank the Brookings Institution and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation for today's panel. We all benefit from honest and open discussion, and dialogue forums such as this.

Let me begin by answering the question that was posed to the panelists. Is installing a whole school reform model the best way to turn around a struggling school? No.

Educators don't install reform models. Installing implies a one-size-fits-all solution. In education, there's no such thing. Improving a school is simply not as easy as turning on the lights. It's hard work, regardless of the approach selected, and everyone interacting with the school shares responsibility for the results.

So now that I've hopefully gotten your attention, let me reformulate the question. Is engaging a school community, the parents, the teachers, administrators and local leaders around a research based, whole school model the best way? Maybe. Does the school community need a coherent, comprehensive—rather than piecemeal—plan in place, and often the hands-on support and assistance to drive a process of continuous improvement? Absolutely.

Are quality whole school reform models, and in particular, the networks that they create, one of the most powerful ways to structure a system to accomplish this at scale? I believe it is. While not without problems—and we'll talk a lot about that over the next two hours—whole school reform models have great potential for large-scale success and—Jim, in your own words—hold out the greatest hope of producing categorical change in public education. I hope you still believe that.

Compelling evidence does exist that shows externally developed, research-based approaches can and do increase student achievement. Evidence also comes from the districts that have experienced success in raising student achievement, at least in part through the implementation of research-based external programs: Houston, Sacramento, Trenton, New Jersey, Hartford, and until recently, Memphis, Tennessee.

But you don't have to take my word. In the words of the superintendent in Trenton, New Jersey, Torch Lytle—he described the benefits of whole school reform in the following way: "Our results in Trenton during the past three years have been encouraging and provide early justification for the approach New Jersey is taking. Student performance on state tests, and nationally, norm tests, have shown consistent improvement.

"The number of high school graduates has tripled, and performance on many other indicators has been equally positive. For us"—and this is Torch speaking—"the benefits of being involved in whole school reform include our teachers and principals. Principals, through engagement in national and regional networks, have become less parochial and more open to change. We've become much more focused on student performance and on evidence as we plan, much more focused on curriculum and teaching and learning as we do the work of school. Our teachers have accepted leadership roles in improving instruction. We also are doing better at involving parents and teachers, and we are learning how to make good use of consultants, as we move from reform to continuous improvement." And I think that's a critical distinction.

In brief, when implemented properly, a number of whole school reform models have shown they can improve student performance as well as enhance school climates. When managed effectively, these same organizations have demonstrated they can have impact at scale. And unless we're satisfied with a few schools of excellence, scale is vitally important. And when resourced adequately—and we should talk more about this—these organizations are beginning to bring together the dual goals of quality and scale.

But the selection of a research-based approach does not, in and of itself, cause increased student achievement. Rather, its effective use should enable a school community, in particular teachers, to develop the skills, the abilities, and the instructional strategies that result in increased student achievement. Whole school models represent an effective means to an end, and they work if principals and teachers and parents are ready for change, and believe in the approach.

If schools and teachers are not prepared to rethink and restructure what they do, no amount of money or muscle will force it upon them. They work if states and districts support the school improvement process with aligned policies, practices, and funding streams, and if providers offer high-quality programs and the support and assistance needed to facilitate successful implementation.

We need to know more about what works, why, and under what conditions. And we will if we do a better job of conducting research to evaluate student performance, and also measuring the performance of outside organizations that provide school services. The current approaches to measure and evaluate student and school performance often are misleading and do more harm than good.

Schools, students, teachers, and administrators are often unfairly stigmatized. We must begin to use student-level data to conduct research and formulate evaluations. We need to know if and how an individual student is improving year to year as well as how they compare to absolute standards. Comparing the fourth grade classes one year to the fourth grade class in another year doesn't tell us all that we need to know.

Practitioners and parents often need a more reliable resource to help them make well-informed decisions about external providers. This has become increasingly important as more organizations enter the field offering services described as both comprehensive and whole school. To address this issue, New American Schools sponsored a blue ribbon panel to develop guidelines of quality for educators to measure a provider's effectiveness.

NAS, along with a number of other organizations, including the Council for Basic Education, also helped to create the Education Quality Institute, an independent non-profit organization that will bring these guidelines to life and generate regular consumer reports on whole school as well as curricular approaches. For all these reasons, New American Schools today is focused on more than the work of its affiliated design teams.

In addition to our focus on the development of high-quality supply, we are also committed to developing more educated demand as well as more robust research and evaluation and aligned policies at the federal, state, and district levels. We're about aligning a research-based approach at the school level with the other necessary ingredients for success at the systems level: standards, accountability, flexibility, resource allocations, public engagement, choice, to name just a few.

We call this dynamic process Comprehensive School Improvement. If districts are asking their schools and teachers to implement other initiatives to compete with individual schools' selected models, something has to go. Often, it's the model, and as a result, money is wasted, and teachers become disillusioned and cynical. The bottom line is that implementation matters. It's just common sense.

We can't blame providers for low test scores if the model isn't implemented just like we can't blame Weight Watchers if we don't follow the program and fail to lose weight. This is not to absolve the model providers from the need to design programs that can be implemented, that can be adapted to local conditions, and that get results. The key here is to provide choices for consumers and enable them to make informed decisions about which approach, if any, is best for their schools and for their students.

Despite what my esteemed colleague, Jeff Mirel, has written and perhaps what he'll say here today, I believe the work of New American Schools' whole school reform has been truly revolutionary. Because of whole school reform, educators come to the table very differently than they did five or ten years ago. Questions such as what works, and under what conditions, are now commonplace as is an increasing openness to learn from mistakes and engage in a professional community that's focused on continuous improvement.

Are we mainstream? I hope so. All revolutionaries want their ideas to become mainstream, or what was the point of the revolution to begin with?

As a final thought, I'd like to say that this is not a zero sum game. There is no one way or one answer. Leaders within the education community need to stop acting as if there is and seeking to be king of the hill, and instead engage in a dynamic process and a systematic process to learn from our mistakes, find what works, and implement a variety of solutions in diverse school settings across the nation.

Those of us that are involved in the Comprehensive School Improvement movement simply seek to make this vision a reality for large numbers of educators as well as large numbers of students. Thank you.

JEFFREY MIREL: Okay, I'd also like to begin thanking Brookings and Tom Loveless for this meeting, and Checker, and Marcie, and the Fordham Foundation for both supporting this meeting and supporting my research. And Checker was kind enough not to mention that I think I set some sort of record for missing deadlines in preparing this report, so I want to thank him and Marcie for their graciousness and patience.

As Jim mentioned, I'm a historian. And consequently, when I began this project on the New American Schools, I took a historical perspective. What that means is that I was trying to look at the organization and its evolution with a series of questions, all of which focused on changes over time and the meaning of changes over time.

These questions included things like: where did New American School sit in the broader context of educational reform in the 1980s and the 1990s; did NAS continue certain traditions in American educational reform; where did it break with these traditions; how did NAS develop over time; what was its evolution? And finally, based on its short history, to try and come up with some sort of sense of what its influence is going to be and how it will affect educational reform in the new century. What I'm going to do in the few minutes that I have is try and sketch out the answers that I came up with to these questions.

In terms of the broad context of reform that NAS played a part in, NAS clearly was an important element in a continuing process that began with the publication of A Nation At Risk in 1983, the creation of the national goals later in the decade, and it reflects the continuing concern of business leaders about the poor condition of American public schools.

NAS was founded in 1991 as part of the America 2000 educational reform initiative of the first Bush Administration. But while linked to America 2000, NAS, as everyone has mentioned, is a private, non-profit corporation. It is not part of the federal government. Its leadership has been mainly composed of CEOs of major corporations, and its major goal has been to encourage the development and dissemination of break-the-mold old-school designs that would lead to, in their words early on, "A fundamental and dramatic change in American education."

Over its 11-year history, NAS has become one of the most important educational institutions in the country. In terms of where NAS fits in the broader traditions of American educational reform, in some ways, it very clearly continues traditions that were begun as long ago as the early part of the 20th century. Business leaders have been involved in school reform since at least the progressive era, the 1890s to about 1920, and business leaders at that time played often profound and influential roles in the transformation of urban public schools.

In addition, throughout American educational history, leading educators have sought to create break-the-mold schools—although they never called them that—schools whose design, they believed, would inspire similar innovations across the country. And I would urge you to take a look at a book that came out in 1915, written by John Dewey and his daughter Evelyn, in which they went around the country and looked for what they thought were schools that represented best practice of the kinds of innovations they sought to inspire throughout the country. And the book was probably one of the best and most widely circulated pieces of Dewey's work, certainly one of the most accessible.

So in both of these areas, NAS is continuing traditions that were started earlier. However, while NAS followed tradition, in some ways, it clearly broke with tradition in several others. Particularly, NAS brought together both of those strands of progressive educational reform, bringing business leaders and educational leaders together, probably bringing them together more tightly than we've ever seen.

NAS was determined to be revolutionary in its approach to educational reform, hoping to avoid the failed experiments of the past by using a venture capital model to support unconventional school designs and programs. In addition, NAS is committed to maintaining its freedom of action by receiving its funds from the private sector rather than the federal government and operating like a lean and agile start-up company, supporting promising ventures and casting off failing ones. And unlike previous business-led reform efforts, which were primarily local in their scope, the scope of NAS has always been national. Over time, however, NAS shed its revolutionary mantle and moved into the educational mainstream. The crux of my study, and what I'm going to spend the most time on in the few minutes that I have, is to talk about that evolution. We can see it in a number of areas.

NAS began its revolution with an RFP competition, which, if you think about that, it's certainly one of the great contradictions in terms. One of the problems of starting with an RFP process is that it gives an edge to people who were skilled grant writers and people who were experienced grant getters. Of the 600 and some odd proposals that NAS received, it funded 11. Many of these 11 were supported by, developed by, some well-known educational leaders including William Bennett, James Colmer, Dennis Doyle, Chester Finn, Howard Gardner, Lauren Resnick, Robert Slavin, Ted Seiser (sp), and Mark Tucker.

At the end of the first three years of NAS, four of the community-based reform efforts, ones that were not led by major educational stars, were dropped from the program, meaning that of the remaining seven, four of the seven, the majority of the programs, were headed by stars, usually university-based stars of educational reform. Now, not only did NAS, in a sense, round up many of the usual suspects, but the other consequence of this was that it rounded up many of the usual educational ideas.

The majority of NAS-supported whole school designs—and this is the university-based, star-based proposals, and the community-based ones—drew their inspiration from a set of ideas, again, coming out of the progressive era, progressive education. Associated with the work of people like John Dewey and William Hurt Kilpatrick, progressive education advocated such practices as child-centered instruction, teachers acting as guides and facilitators rather than authorities, the use of interdisciplinary instruction, project work, group work, and the introduction of multi-age classrooms.

For those of you—and there are many in this room who remember the open classroom—that was the previous attempt to employ, on a large scale, these kinds of progressive ideas. With only one or two exceptions, Modern Red Schoolhouse and the expeditionary learning, both seem to me to have avoided this. The other proposals were really dominated by these kinds of progressive ideas.

Now the major problem with relying on progressive ideas is that in their almost century-long existence, these ideas, when implemented in public schools, have rarely been successful in boosting academic achievement generally, but they have a particularly poor track record in boosting achievement of children of poor and disadvantaged families.

And I would urge everyone to take a look at the 1999 book by Jeanne Chall called The Academic Achievement Challenge in which she compares progressive style reform with more traditional styles of reform and finds, pretty consistently, that progressive reforms failed to produce the kinds of changes that people had hoped. It is a wonderful book that has not gotten nearly as much attention as it deserves.

Now, one of the things that I find most admirable about New American Schools is that it has focused its attention mainly on urban school districts, on troubled urban school districts. The problem is that I see a mismatch between the philosophy guiding the reforms and the kinds of students that these reforms are going to serve.

Beyond the problems of using an RFP process to create a revolution and relying on a very conventional set of ideas, I think that NAS moved away from its revolutionary potential, or lost some of the steam from its revolutionary potential, by not including an independent student evaluation component in its initial design for itself. I was very happy to hear Mary Anne talking more about that in her remarks. But the need for an independent, well-designed research component about student achievement is one of the major failings that I found, certainly in the early years of the New American Schools.

And finally, with the passage of the Obey-Porter Amendment, NAS moved from being a revolutionary outsider to a mainstream insider by becoming part of a long line of groups that were seeking federal funds to support their programs. Once Obey-Porter became law, NAS essentially became another inside-the-beltway organization that was dependent on federal funds for keeping its programs going. At this point, it seemed to me, the revolution was over.

Now, there's nothing wrong with that. I'm actually very skeptical of revolutions generally. But two things jumped out at me as being problematic here. First of all, Obey-Porter was based on the idea that there was a critical mass of research-based, school-wide reform designs that had been, in their words, proven effective in boosting achievement of, particularly, students from disadvantaged backgrounds. That was, at best, a questionable proposition.

The research simply has not proven dramatically that that success is there, which again points back to that earlier flaw that I found in NAS of not having a clear research component to measure what they were doing. And this includes all of the NAS designs, and most of the other comprehensive whole school designs with the possible exception of Robert Slavin's "Success for All."

The second big problem that struck me with attending whole school initiatives is that—and this was pointed out by RAND studies that NAS had contracted with folks at RAND to evaluate the progress of the NAS initiatives—what RAND kept finding over and over again was how difficult and politically involved the implementation of whole school designs was. If you think about it, that makes perfect sense. I mean, there's an incredible number of stakeholders.

School administrators, superintendents, teachers, teachers' unions, parents, all of them have to be kept on board in implementing whole school designs. If any of these groups either begins dealing in bad faith or begins to question what's going on, the structure can come crashing down. In a sense, politically the NAS program was built on a certain amount of quicksand, and no place demonstrated this better than Memphis, which, for many years, was the showcase school district for NAS reforms, the place where people were brought to see them actually working as effectively as everyone hoped they would.

But when the superintendent who supported the NAS reforms left and was replaced by another superintendent who then demanded a study to see how they were doing and found that the NAS schools, none of the comprehensive design schools, were doing terribly well, he pulled the plug on the entire venture. So Memphis turns out to be a showcase both for implementation and for elimination of these kinds of reforms.

So these two factors—(a) have they really been proven effective? and, (b) can they really be implemented given the large number of stakeholders?—in the end, made me quite nervous about this as a form of school reform.

And finally, my last concern was that while the jury is out on whether whole school reform really will produce the kinds of dramatic results that we would all hope for, my worry is that given the movement of federal dollars and the great media attention that whole school reform is getting, that it could crowd out other less dramatic, less glitzy types of reforms—things like summer learning programs, or standardized curricula throughout urban districts, or increased teacher professional development. Things which don't attract as much attention as whole school reform may not get the attention that they deserve, when, in fact, they may be as effective or possibly more effective.

GENE BOTTOMS: Good morning. I'm still trying to figure out if I want to thank Chester for inviting me. (Laughter.) I'll try to cover three items to give you a little bit of background and then to basically try to deal with two questions. What are the conditions that seem to need to be in place if you were going to improve achievement in low performing high schools? And secondly, what are a few things that seem to work in improving achievement in such schools?

SREB has historically, and for over 50 years, has been involved in improving higher education in the South, and in 1980 expanded its role to look at K-12 education as well. The historical roots of our effort goes back to the mid-80s when a group of 13 state leaders and SREB haggled for two years trying to fashion out a school improvement design for high school, focusing on that 60 or 70 percent of students in high school that one might label as general, vocational, or basic and vocational.

And after two years, we were able to reduce it to two pages. We felt that was crucial, because state departments have a way of adding a lot to it. Ours is basically a state partnership effort, historically. We've focused on trying to drive up the academic achievement, particularly reading, mathematics, and science, of that other group of students. And our basic approach was to figure out how to teach that group of youth what we historically taught to our best youth, with those youth getting a career focus.

As we have moved into high schools, focusing on all youth on CSRD, we've added the concept of an academic concentration for an awful lot of youth—began to make the senior year much more focused for them. We basically have two levels of services in the network. We have a state network that gets nominal services, and then some contracted schools, you can get more intensive services. We have a typical set of goals and framework of key practices.

One thing is different. We set out from the very beginning to use a continuous school improvement design. We formed a partnership with ETS, we're raising that authorization from Congress to use NATE ACE exams, and we give that to graduating seniors every other year, and we collect data about youths' experiences in schools. We wanted to focus on fixing the system, not on fixing the kids. Our basic tenet is: if two years later the youngsters have the same experiences in schools these youth have, they're going to look just like them. But if you want to change their achievement, you change the quality of their experiences.

And we've evolved a set of indicators, over the years, that if those indicators are represented in school practice, you see a parallel drive up in achievement. We have a number of partners we work with. We do not try to develop curriculum products. We try to use good curriculum products and staff developers that are available.

We like the College Board Pacesetter English and mathematics curriculum. It's a very good curriculum. We use a group out of Texas to help algebra and geometry teachers to figure out how you'd teach those two subjects to ordinary kids through some kind of context. We work, for example, with a group out of New York—a foundation to help implement kind of a pre-engineering curriculum in the high school that links together four years of math and science and some technical kinds of studies as illustration.

But we use data to convince folks. We've benchmarked every school against the top 25 percent of the schools in our network who have kids most like theirs. And we do that to convince an awful lot of folks that their kids can learn too.

Now, let me get to the basic answer to those two basic questions. What are the conditions that improve the chances for success of turning low performing schools around, at least start on the road of improvement? Well, one thing that's unique about us: we do take the lessons we've learned, and we do meet with state legislators and state boards of education on a very regular basis.

We believe that policies matter, both at the state and local level, particularly if you're going to change high schools. So what we've found in those states where you have higher graduation requirements, you have accountability policies where you specify which courses you have to take to graduate from high school. There's some accountability in terms of demonstrating you've learned some things. There is a higher energy level on the part of school folks in those states to make improvements. There is an energy level that those states—you have more winners in those states than you do in states you do not have that kind of configuration.

We believe that policies matter, both at the state and local level, particularly if you're going to change high schools. So what we've found in those states where you have higher graduation requirements, you have accountability policies where you specify which courses you have to take to graduate from high school. There's some accountability in terms of demonstrating you've learned some things. There is a higher energy level on the part of school folks in those states to make improvements. There is an energy level that those states—you have more winners in those states than you do in states you do not have that kind of configuration.

It's awful important to have some alignment between the district leadership policies and resources. A high school who chooses a design, the district continues to Christmas tree a whole range of initiatives with no follow through, you're going to get very low results. There has to be an alignment between the district house and the schoolhouse to change high schools.

You have to have both systems and school leaders who are focused on curriculum instruction and student achievement. Now, most high school principals who've been employed in low performing schools were chosen for reasons other than their knowledge of curriculum and instruction. You either have to substitute someone for them, you either have to build a team in the school, but you have to get a team of folks dealing with curriculum and instruction in those schools before you can make much improvement.

Quality of teaching and learning. Every low performing high schools have got a few good teachers; not near as many as some other schools. You can begin to build on those, but you have to build more of those in the school. And what you eventually discover is that great teachers can teach most youth to a much higher level. But you have to do a whole series of things. And one of the big barriers you encounter, particularly where you have tight union contracts, is finding any time to build esprit de corps, a common vision, or any depth of knowledge in their subject matter or in new teaching methods.

Now what seems to work? It's amazing these things work; it's going to surprise you; it's going to floor you. Low-performing schools who decide they're going to create kind of a very basic, functional mission—we're going to prepare graduates who can go on for further study without taking remedial courses, and who can pass employers' exams—they make improvements a little bit better than schools who just continue to operate on the notion, our basic mission is to either try to hold as many as we can and get them through high school, without preparing them with a focus.

Secondly, a thing that will surprise you. The more youth you can enroll in a rigorous academic core, you will make corresponding gains in achievement. They pattern along together. For example, the more youth you can get to take in four years of real college preparatory level language arts; that's where you read 10 or 12 books, you do a lot of writing, you analyze information. That's where you take your lowest math course in Algebra I or higher; you take four years of it. Particularly low-performing schools, if you come in behind, you're not going to catch up unless you do more of it. You get four years of real lab science, not textbook science, but where you actually do labs and reflect on what you've learned. You learn how to use computers for the purpose of doing your lessons. And you either complete a quality career concentration, or you pursue something like a math and science concentration, or a humanities. We only advocate two academic concentrations, and one of those courses ought to be at the advanced placement level.

Now, students who pursue that kind of curriculum, the more youngsters you get pursuing that, you will get a rise in achievement. Now, it takes teachers about three years, at least, to figure out how to teach a lot more youth that curriculum. It's not something you just do overnight. Schools who gradually set higher expectations and help students to meet them—for example, the more students in a school who say that most of their teachers define very clearly the amount and quality of work for making A or B; they were required to redo the work until it met standards; they were required to work hard both in and out of school—it's amazing, kids seem to have higher achievement the more youngsters in a school who have those kinds of classes. And youngsters who get extra help to meet the core standards—there's a variety of strategies—but there has to be a commitment to convince those youth that they care.

Now, we set out from the very beginning, and we continue to find that if kids in their current technical classes are given assignments in which they have to read fairly complicated technical materials to complete, they have to use mathematics to complete, you will get a value added in terms of academic achievement. Now, the challenge we still have there is we do not have enough career and technical classrooms to do that, but we're making some progress in that area.

Adapting a flexible schedule. It seems to be important in low performing schools. For example, you know, I used to go into classes. And I've spent 40 days a year in high school for the last 15 years; and if I've learned anything, it's been there, not coming to Washington. You've got to figure out how kids can take 32 credits in high school, not 24. If you're behind, you've got to figure out how to use time more. For example, I used to go in high schools, and about the middle of the years, I'd go into these Algebra I classes, and half the kids were out of it. You know, they fail the first nine weeks—if you don't get the first nine weeks, you're going to fail the second nine weeks. They either begin to act up, or withdraw, or absentee.

You have to figure out, how do you re-teach that first nine weeks? It shouldn't take you 36 weeks to fail algebra, when you really failed the first nine weeks. So you've got to figure out how to begin to use scheduling concepts differently, and when you do, it works. So the schools in our network that have made the greatest improvement in '98 and 2000 were schools that had configured a schedule so that they could teach 32 credits, not 24, and required four years of math and science. Those are the schools that made the greatest gains in achievement.

You also have to deal with changing how you teach. Now, the principals in some of our states have discovered, who have these end of course exams in core academic areas, that if you take your best senior teacher who teaches AP calculus, and all of the sudden he or she is now teaching a group of at risk kids in the ninth grade, it's amazing: they have much higher pass rates when great teachers teach ordinary kids who are at risk. So you have to have more and more teachers acquire both the depth of content and some adult-like learning methods to move on.

Literacy across the curriculum. Schools that can begin to reach some kind of notion that youngsters are going to read 20 or 25 books, or equivalents, a year across a curriculum. They're going to write about this, they're going to reflect on that, they can make that a push across the curriculum; you'd get rise in achievement.

Guidance and advisement. Youngsters who have an adult adviser, their parents are part of the process, who are encouraged to take more math and science, who have a plan of studies by the end of the ninth grade to lead them two years beyond high school, and who have that continually reviewed—those youngsters are much more likely to take the right academic core, and they are much more likely to meet the kind of performance goals we've set.

But there are a vast number of youth who go through high school, and no one ever sits down with them and have a prayer meeting about their goals beyond high school, or the kinds of courses it's going to take to get there, or much less involve their parents in this process. And you've got to deal with transitions. One of the things about low performing schools: if you raise the bar, you can turn some things around. But you burn teachers out if they look up the next year and you've got more coming in. The ninth grade does not improve.

So you've got to begin to think about transitions, grades seven through nine. Now, that means it's stretching time. That means if you come to the ninth grade not ready for Algebra I, you've got to teach them two years of math in one, you've got to teach them two years of language arts in one, you've got to begin to work towards getting everybody through algebra one and geometry by the end of grade ten, and two years of real college preparatory level language arts. And you've got to back up in the seventh grade and get youngsters on accelerated track there if you're serious about moving youngsters up. You've got to deal with the senior year. As you increase the percent of kids, we basically ask our schools, the career youth who are taking a concentration, make sure half their time this senior year—

[TAPE CHANGE.]

MR. BOTTOMS: (In progress)—one of those ought to be mathematics. If they're not in a current technical area, they ought to be pursuing AP courses or increased efforts in the core academic areas. Some of the schools have adopted block scheduling. They have nobody in school the senior year, because they've taken everything, and they wonder why youngsters are better prepared at the end of the junior year than at the end of high school at that time.

My last point: we think you've got to keep score and use data. When you look at the schools who've made the most progress, they have used data. They have used data to confront faculty. Why is it that such and such school over here got kids just like ours, they have 90 percent of these Korean kids taking Algebra II, Trig. We've got 45 percent, and you say they can't learn it. Is it genetic, or is it a system problem? Thank you.

ANN MCCLELLAN: Well, like my friend, Gene, I don't know whether to thank my boss, Tom McAdams, for putting me in this role, or Checker. My first experience with Checker was, he sounded like a chainsaw on the phone. And I said, okay, I can do this, and he listened to me. (Laughter.) So hopefully you'll extend the same courtesy.

I'd like to thank Brookings and Fordham; also Marcie, who's a delight; and Tom, I send you greetings from Houston. Being in the field, you know, you may need to know a little bit about my background. And the background is: high school person, who then decided, well, I want to have a baby. And Joan Raymond, who is our superintendent said, "You're a female, you want to have a baby, you go to elementary school."

So everything I learned was at this school. And I learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work, after having taught high school, taught middle school, and been an administrator, a lead principal in a high school. I learned that there's some things that are being done to teachers that need to change, and that the system is very different than what the people who are outside the schools actually see. So I'm going to start with that.

Schools don't exist by themselves, and so that's what I'd offer to Mary Anne; school by school efforts. When you look at scale, just in the state of Texas, there are over 1,000 school districts. Multiply that times the number of schools, possibly, times the number of states, and then look at the number of schools in your network, or in any one network. You know, even if you were to look at voucher and choice, there is no one group that could accomplish what our public school system is accomplishing.

So that being said, I say—and, of course, my new role is to work with school systems and school boards, and help them see that they are situated in a political context. And that's what I would offer to New American Schools, is you've got Washington politics; you've got to get the school district politics and the city politics together to make some of this work for the educators. There's also policy; there's also the issue of capacity within these school systems.

So what I would say is, the levers of reform really need to—you know, if I was speaking to you, and not New American Schools, or Gene, or to my research and historian here—is I think we need to go back and look at the systems. Can this system provide the support? And those levers then move into empowerment, capacity, and accountability.

We've just received some legislation from a good friend, two good friends to the State of Texas: Rod Page and, certainly, the president. The current prevailing theory is this accountability in testing is the way we're going. And so, I say we need to respond. And I'm sure that New American Schools, after reading what they've done, and visits with friends in common, with Brad Dugin (sp) and others, that I know you're trying to respond.

But in order for schools to improve, they've got to be aligned with the system. And the system has to provide a system of, or standards of, what's expected in terms of being taught. And I applaud Bush for saying, you know, here are the bigger standards; here's going to be a test. Because I've learned, there really aren't high stakes testing if you control the tests, and you know exactly what that means—that it's testing down to the test items.

Can you say that that is fact or fiction? Does a teacher really know what numeration is? Does a teacher actually understand the component pieces of reading, and mathematics, and science, and history? And I say, unless the system sets up that piece within the system, it doesn't matter what piece you lay on top of it. It's still not going to fix the broader set of school systems.

What happens as a principal, when I would see system wide improvements, those that were in what I called the box—my friends, we called them the box. When you're handed the box, the box doesn't always match the tools that you have within your school. The box assumes that you have no tools. You know, a number of the programs are, in fact, teacher proof, you know, or they'll say, this is scripted for you. And the assumption is that you, in fact, possess no capacity within the school.

What I would say is that's the next piece. Schools can't be improved without recognizing that we need to do something about our educators. I read something recently where Checker and, I think—I don't remember who the other respondent was—said, well, maybe we need to look at, you know, how we credential people. Well, I'm here to tell you that I teach in a program this semester that I worked with a physicist, a lawyer from—all kinds of people who had been execs. They would knock your socks off as first-year teachers. With limited guidance and some skill building, they were there.

So I would say to you that we need to—especially in the elementary schools, say, because that's where the work is done; it's kindergarten and first grade. You fail in kindergarten and first grade, you've failed in everything. And whether you know that or not, I can tell you, after having worked the K-16, if you are not reading in first grade, forget second, third, fourth. You're not reading for the rest of your life. You're always behind; you're always running to catch up. So I would say to you, in looking at your models, do the models actually teach how to learn? And it has to begin with the teacher as the main learner. And then it needs to expand into the community as a learner, gathering parents and saying, "You know, when you had this kid, there was a major responsibility that you chose to undertake."

I would say that some of the models that are within your system turn teaching into a job that most people wouldn't expect. Can you imagine Checker reading a script day after day, ninety minutes a day? I couldn't even imagine. I could just picture what it would sound like, you know, and how fast it would go, the change in voice, and I just can't imagine. Some of these, I feel, do not treat teachers as worthy professionals, worthy of the money that we pay them, and I think we need to look at that.

Some of the other models, you know, whether it's project based learning—and I'm going to attempt to tell you that there are pieces, you know, they miss the target. We're doing the fun stuff, but we're not reaching for the target, which is learning. And I say that you can actually do those things if, in fact, you choose to follow the following recommendations.

The first question I would have—and it works for your system, or any system—is there strong leadership? And we need to do something about that. Gene, you're right: there should be no principal, or as Page called them, no CEO or chief academic officer within any school that does not understand teaching and learning. If they don't, then you need to put a manager in, and then bring in somebody who understands teaching and learning.

What the models look like should be based on the needs of that community, and the talents and strengths that exist. Because really, it's the teacher leadership that runs the school, not the principal leadership. My job was to just gather those leaders together and keep them going forward.

Designs need to be clear and specific, and implementation should not get in the way of what some would call academic freedom. But I would call it intellectual freedom. I would tell you that, you know, the average SAT could be 450 in each of the areas for a teacher. But that really means little in the scope of the world. I don't know how many of you have your SAT posted on your shoulder, or how many of you have advanced degrees, and maybe later in life found learning was easier.

So we need to look at, there is capacity in our teaching ranks. And one of the things we have to do is stop handing the box, and hand them skills. And we need to look at repertoire and skill versus the box.

Readiness is critical. And what I see in Houston—and my job now is to go in and work with school boards and superintendents all over the United States. Every week, it feels like I'm in another place. You know, there's a political readiness, there's a policy churn that, you know, you throw in the box, and the box flies in the face of policy, and you've got a problem, and you've put the educators in a position of failure.

And then, here's the big pieces that I couldn't make sense of. Wanting to secure a grant with National Annenberg to say our school was a beacon school, I flew all over the United States and looked at some of these models. And quite honestly, some of the things we stole were bits and pieces from all the models that we thought would work with a band of merry men, you know, women. We said, well, we can make that work; that'll work.

But part of the problem is no one was willing to say, this meets the ultimate test, which is, it's aligned with the testing systems. In Houston, there are several systems. One is a standardized test and norm reference, one is a criterion reference, and then on top of that, the state layered in a progress rating. So it isn't about the average of fourth grade last year versus this year. There's a Texas Learning Index that says, guess what guys? You may have met the average, but you've failed to change those individual children's lives.

So when you throw that in against the box, the box fails to even open, for me, if it does not meet that one test. And I say, through curriculum and teaching repertoire that you can get to those tests. And it's being proven over and over in the State of Texas.

Another problem I have is—and you need to seek to address this—is you know, it tries to get everybody on the same page. And the problem is, with intellectual freedom and differing abilities, it's difficult to get people on the same page. And somewhere along the line, we need to empower our teachers to move them to a piece where they know how to teach, and we tell them what to teach, and we measure it, and all of those competing forces come together.

And I have one last piece. You know how I feel about teachers, which is, clearly, we're not treating them as professionals. Forget the money; but it's about capacity for teachers. And so, some of your models, you know, I have a great deal of respect for coalition. And we've seen various forms of coalition in Houston, and for the high school project. And we're beginning to see that roll out, that Gene's doing with our Carnegie and Houston Annenberg grant. So teachers, you get it. That you know, if we can expect the best from kids, the same is true of teachers.

The next piece is—and this is a quote, and I think his name is Pogrow. As you can see, I had this scripted, but I trashed that after listening. And I thought, I'll just give it to you right from the heart. Because without the passion, you're not going to get anything from most school leaders. So you've got my passion, a little disorganized.

Here's his quote: "Is it best to help disadvantaged kids by using specialized funding to improve the school as a whole or to use it to provide specialized help to those kids?" What I would tell you is that the pieces we stole from your model, or shared or replicated, were the pieces that actually, from the different models, that actually went in and provided specialized help for the kids.

We've learned a lot about intervention. And if you just were to single out reading, we know something about reading, which is, you can prevent reading failure. There's a great text out, Preventing Reading Failure, that gives you a script for where to begin, you know, with just an outline. And I just wonder, you know, if you put kids, especially in elementary school—picture this—with the teacher, who we assume has no capacity; she's got to read the script, at least for two of your models; and, she's reading the script to the disadvantaged kids, who, in fact, need language, and need individualized help to get them to speed up, to accelerate, which is also in your program. What are we getting? We're sending them a very clear message that their teacher is unworthy, they're unworthy of intellectual thought. And I would tell you that when you flip it around and you say, here are the intervention pieces that work with kids; now you as a teacher, let's build this, or let's make it sit within a model; and, the teacher is seen as having some capacity, and all kids are believed to be able to accelerate and move on. You start to see something very different.

And I would tell you, that is going to scale. Intervention models are going to scale. You can start to see that. Not that I brought my own historian to talk about that, but I certainly can give you that research.

The last piece is—and I had this great PowerPoint presentation for you, but then I forgot who my audience was. But it was called, "Lessons from the Flight Deck," and I had this great slide, "De-icing Memphis." You go in, and you put the models in, and then, you know, you realize you've got ice on the wings. You know, I see it as holding the school district down, or holding those educators down. You take off the ice, and what are you left with?

I can't afford to do Success for All by myself, without district support. Or in Houston, we decentralize; the money goes to total local control; the money goes to the school. No longer is anybody buying the master teacher who runs the program from the district level. You may have lost your Title I funds, so you can't afford the $50,000 price tag for a school of 500. So all of the sudden, you're left with empty boxes. And so, I'd offer to you, as those in the know, and those that have the power to do the work—for me, my belief is it's in empowerment of systems to make good decisions; it's in the capacity building of the leaders at the school level, and in the leadership in the classrooms, or teachers; it's about skill building.

And then, the last piece is that it's incumbent upon us to manage those politics so the right things get done. And Page has this great—as you can tell, I was a follower. He said, you know, "I think we may be doing some of the right things, but are we doing things right is the question I would offer to you." It's a big system. I'm only one peon in the scope of it. Certainly, I haven't taken it to scale. But I do care, and that's where it starts. Thanks.

MR. TRAUB: Here's what I'd like to do. Ultimately, of course, we'll open the questions to all of you. But I think we should start, maybe, by talking amongst ourselves. So I'd like to begin by asking a question of Mary Anne which I think is relevant to all of you. And then, you can all jump in, and then we'll talk among ourselves for some while. And I hope you'll want to ask questions of each other. I'm sure you do have things?. And then, ultimately, we'll open it to everyone else.

Mary Anne, one of the persistent reservations people have had, which you touched on and Jeffrey touched on, about whole school reform is the whole question of whether or not these admirable blueprints are implementable, and to what extent they're replicable. And certainly, the appeal and the beauty of whole school reform is often the beauty of these blueprints in the individual schools, where you see them.

But at the same time, the idea that you can replicate something as pervasive as a culture, not just individual practices—and to some extent, what Gene was telling us about, were a series of individual practices they bring into schools. But the idea that something that is pervasive, like a culture, can be brought from one school to another, is difficult, in the least.

Jeffrey talked about some of the dangers of the progressive model. And I wonder if one of the limitations of whole school reform is that, in general, the kinds of things you are doing are difficult to replicate. And then, more specifically, if many of the kinds of progressive models, which Jeffrey mentioned, are particularly difficult to take from the individual school, with its visionary leader, to 10 schools, 100 schools, a thousand schools. Could you talk about that a little bit?

MS. SCHMITT: Sure.

MR. TRAUB: Would you like to come up here? I don't know what you're more comfortable. Yeah, well then, you can stay there, and I'll just orchestrate from here, then.

MS. SCHMITT: Well, there is evidence that—I think it's important to distinguish between the concept of sort of traveling a culture, which doesn't happen, and the use of an effective and diverse set of consultants and strategies to support the development of a culture that's focused on student achievement, that's focused on continuous improvement, where you're able to build the capacity of educators to use data to drive decisions about curriculum, about instruction, about school organization, about school schedule.

And I think that that is because people are looking for quick fixes, that the easy criticism of the movement is that it's in a box. And when you put the box on the shelf at the local school level, miraculous things don't happen overnight. And that's not what we're trying to do. I think when you look at education as a very significant industry, with a very important social purpose, and then you look at what are the infrastructure, the support mechanisms to help teachers, and principals, and superintendents to actually develop these effective skills, build that culture, and succeed in classrooms around core academic areas, what we're attempting to do through this movement is to build that kind of support structure.

What we've seen for decades is a very traditional definition of dissemination. People do limited scale, scope studies that determine that something is effective in teaching reading, then put it on the printed page, and now put it on the internet, then report it at conferences. Occasionally, somebody may actually go into a school building or a district to talk about these things, and they think that the practice will change.

Our experience has been, that traditional approach does not work. We have to develop a new type of mechanism. The concept of these research based models, networks of schools, networks of districts we think is quite promising, with all of the problems inherent.

MR. TRAUB: Have you found that certain kinds of whole school reforms are more amenable to being scaled up than other kinds? For example, that the more scripted ones are easy to plug in from school to school, and the more holistic ones, like the Coalition for Essential Schools, which I guess takes the form of Atlas into American schools, are harder to plug in?

MS. SCHMITT: On that point, Jeff, you actually said two things about New American Schools. You said that we haven't invested in research, and then you referenced the RAND work. So just to clarify that point, we have invested many millions of dollars in extensive research, looking at the models, looking at our district work, looking, more recently, at our state work with. . . .And all of that is about trying to get a better sense of what works, under what conditions, why, and how do you support that taking place?

I mean, one of the RAND reports gets at this. And probably, the clearest way to answer your question, although it's not a definitive answer, is that more structured approaches get implemented more quickly than process oriented approaches. Although, there are certainly examples where a process approach, with a relatively high capacity school, has been implemented pretty well, and you get results.

Accelerated Schools talks about, in its most recent research study that FDRC put out, said you don't start to see those demonstrable changes in achievement, and other indicators that we can all agree are important, until year three, or year four, or year five, because of what it takes to actually develop the readiness and begin to really implement different instructional strategies.

A controversial topic, but I'll put it on the table and I think as a community we need to be able to talk about it more, is that you need to be able to determine the capacity of a building. And I have tremendous respect and regard for educators and administrators. But if we're all being honest, we know different schools, the skill base, and the aptitude, and ability to work well with children varies dramatically. It varies probably more dramatically within the building than between school buildings. And we've got to be able to talk about that honestly. And some of the more structured programs, with lower capacity schools, are probably the right place to start. And then, over time, as the school matures, as you develop a community of learners, adult learners and student learners, you can broaden the scope of the strategies that are employed in the school building. And we're learning more and more about that all the time.

MR. TRAUB: Do you have any thoughts on that question?

MR. MIREL: Yeah, I just want to clarify Mary Anne's clarification. When I talked about the lack of independent, effective, well designed research components for NAS, I was specifically talking about student achievement. And I'm sure, as Mary Anne knows, having read my report, I spent a lot of time talking about the RAND studies. In fact, I'm enormously impressed with the RAND studies.

The problem, though, with the RAND studies is they overwhelmingly looked at the implementation problems that the New American Schools had, as opposed to looking at questions about achievement. One of the more recent ones, one that came out in 2000, that Mark Barren, I believe, was the lead author on, finally looked at achievement. And you know, it was, I think, quite appropriate to spend time with implementation, but the achievement data, and I think rightly, comes later.

But NAS could have been collecting and examining data on student achievement from early on, in a way that would have provided at least some sense that we're getting an independent idea of how the schools are doing, and how the kids are progressing in relation to schools in their own district, and in relation to more national standards. That seemed to me to be an ongoing problem with NAS, and one that, frankly, I think, came back in Memphis, where you had a whole series of different studies, each of which was showing something quite different in terms of achievement.

So studies of implementation are great, but study of student achievement is really the bottom line here.

MR. TRAUB: You know, I'm curious, actually, about the extent to which the two of you disagree about the achievement levels that have been shown from whole school reform. I'd be curious, just in a nutshell, to hear each of you characterize what you think is the current state of research on the effectiveness, the academic effectiveness of whole school reform.

MS. MCCLELLAN: I'm going to defer to Jeff, because obviously, he's read it.

MR. MIREL: I can't talk about current. I'll go as far as the data went, and that would be what I thought was the most thorough discussion was Mark Barren's study, which came out in 2000, which found, I think—I'm not going to get the quote exactly right—but modest changes, modest improvements, but not dramatic changes.

MR. TRAUB: And Mary Anne, is that a fair characterization: modest improvement?

MS. SCHMITT: In certain situations, there were significant dramatic improvements; in others, modest. If you look at all of the programs, aggregated an analysis, a fair statement would be modest improvements, over the period of time. Just a couple of responses. One, Jeff's criticism of New American Schools, as far as really crunching school by school student level data, across all of our schools, that's there.

And I think that it's important to recognize a lesson learned, and a key shift in our strategy going forward. When we started out, we believed that we would have to be held accountable to whatever the systems, the standards, the accountability systems that were in place in the states, districts, and schools where we worked. So we accepted, as a given, those fundamental systems. And we've learned over time that that was a flawed strategy.

Most districts that we walked into, their systems of data management aggregation analysis are really poor, pathetic. And to rely on that type of system to drive this type of continuous improvement process just cannot work. So we have invested, and some significant foundations have invested, in our capacity to work with states and districts at the front end in actually building that data management system, and then developing the skills and abilities of educators to actually use that system, so that data driven decision making is no longer rhetorical. We actually have a common platform that we can stand on. So that's a significant shift.

There are a lot of studies. We have the RAND studies that people can look at, with mixed results. I think people have also seen the study that was put out by AIR, and by—making CSR work. If you look at the work of Sam Stringfield—those are studies that look at specific models. And if you look at the studies that are being put out by MBRC and others, there's a growing base of evidence of the possibility that different models can work, if implemented well. And I don't think we have time to go into detail of all of those.

MR. TRAUB: Ann, I'm curious about your sense, as a long time school person, whether it's in the nature of the difficulty of doing this, or the resistance of schools. Is it just easier to attempt various kinds of piecemeal or fragmentary reforms, and is the nature of this whole implementation process, of taking an entirely new model into an already existing school, is that insurmountable, or under what circumstances do you think it's surmountable?

MS. MCCLELLAN: I think it depends on the capacity of the organization, as you said, and leadership. I have witnessed—and I'm sure you too have seen the same—the comprehensive school reform model is working, and the leadership is gone, whether it's superintendent or principal, and it too may leave.

I just learned the hard way, replication is difficult, because replication assumes that you have similar cultures. And it has not been my experience, with two of the model projects we've worked with, or three, that you can say, you can go back and do this, and this will work for you, when you don't have buy in, you don't have similar talents.

MR. TRAUB: Can you tell us what the models were that you're talking about?

MS. MCCLELLAN: One was with best practices with Just for Kids, which has now got the big accountability project, the other is with the State of Texas for a model reading project, which was homegrown. And again, we just lifted pieces we liked from "Success for All", Reading Recovery, and Phonographics." And then, the other is through National Annenberg, as a beacon school.

And we have. . . as I told Marcie, I had 1,800 people come through the school last year from different states. Some would stay a week, some would stay a day. And what I would tell them is, is you cannot do what we're doing, but you can do some things. One, you can ask, is it research based? Two, can you produce what you need to produce in terms of student learning to match what your district is asking of your—?

Because the accountability rests on the principal's shoulder, not on New American Schools. They're just in the middle of it; Gene's in the middle. It really is the school that holds the accountability. And I would say, do you possess that capacity? And I just don't think that you're going to get there. I would rather see money invested in intervention, and also in moving systems, another bureaucracy, you know, separating out the layer of New American Schools.

Some of their work is great, but it doesn't go to scale. And getting to the system and sending down; this is what reading looks like; this is how you teach it. It doesn't matter what box; this is what reading looks like. Do you understand the component pieces of mathematics, and how in kindergarten, you're responsible for algebra so that when you send a child to seventh grade, hopefully taking pre-algebra or algebra, that they have those component skills that are necessary. So it changes.

MR. TRAUB: So what you're talking about, then, is looking for best practices, individual components, finding what works best in a particular school, and taking that piece, as opposed to looking for a whole architecture that would alter the whole school. Is that right?

MS. MCCLELLAN: I think it's an infrastructure of understanding, what is learning, that has to exist in a school system. How does that play out on a test, and how does it play out in a process oriented product driven lesson? And what skills are needed by teachers to get to that separate and discreet skill, and then, combination of skills?

MR. TRAUB: Gene, my impression is, from the way you described High Schools That Work, that it's kind of in between individual best practices and the more holistic model that some of these other whole school reforms are. I don't know if I'm right in thinking that, but do you have the feeling that it's better to go more in terms of these individual reforms as opposed to something which is more holistic?

MR. BOTTOMS: Well, the High Schools That Work framework at least gives a very clear goal that, if schools adopt it, they're saying, look, we're going to try to drive up this academic foundation of youngsters. They're buying into that, presumably. There is kind of a framework of key practices. But I've often said, improving high school is kind of like eating an elephant. You're going to eat it one bite at a time, you can't do the whole thing at once. And what you want to do is start them on a journey.

Now, there are a couple of things that we leave with. One: if you do not participate in our assessment, you're out. If you're not willing to look at how well you're doing, to what extent you're implementing certain key practices, go find another design. Secondly, we want to push hard that you increasingly enroll more youngsters into that solid academic core. Now, we've pushed very hard on those two elements.

But what we do beyond that, we have a number of ways we try to engage the whole faculty, and look at their high school, and let them begin to decide, where are you going to start with what initiative. Schools that have made progress, we put them on stage in kind of a networking conference to share what they did that they think led to the improvement, to tell their story. It's amazing how other folks will begin to pick up and adopt much of that.

So we are kind of in between, but there's certain products that seem to work, we encourage schools to look at. If they go find something else that's worked, we're sure going to put them on stage to share it with somebody else.

MR. TRAUB: By the way, you talked about issues of policy and state government. Does this mean that in whatever state you have High Schools that Work programs, you will also be operating at the level of the state education department, at the level of the state government?

MR. BOTTOMS: Yes, they must—

MR. TRAUB: Is that indispensable?

MR. BOTTOMS: To us, it is. But it's our design. They must assign at least a full time person. And states have made more progress where they begin to dedicate a core staff. We meet with state boards of education. I met with a state last week to give them a report on their school sites in that state, and this is a state that has very weak policy—I will not name the state—both in terms of graduation and accountability. And I said basically, you know, of all of our networks, your students are among the lowest academic achievers we have, and you're sending no message to back up superintendents and principals, that they can begin to confront this notion that most all kids can learn a more demanding course.

So policy is crucial in changing high schools. It's awful hard for a principal to begin to say to every kid, you need to take math the senior year; it's fundamental that you take it. It's awful hard to do that without the cover of policy. Most principals simply will not walk out there on the water and begin to push on that. But particularly low performing schools, we just lock a whole range of these youth out of opportunities because they cannot think and reason with mathematics.

And they basically are enrolled in, many of them, what I would call throwaway courses their senior year, or they're leaving for a minimum wage job at ten o'clock. That's useful, in some sense, but it's not going to prevent them having to take a remedial course at the local community college. So there are just some issues that principals need some backup support on.

MR. TRAUB: Mary, is it a limitation of much whole school reform that often you can't have—here you are trying to make this as widespread as possible, as close to universal as possible, and yet, you don't have control over what happens at the state level. I think you said, when properly implemented, when properly managed. And yet, isn't there almost inevitably going to be a tension between whatever is going on at the state level, not to mention at the level of Washington, and the kind of objectives that are going to be needed for any of these models?

MS. SCHMITT: It's a key challenge. It's why, as an organization, New American Schools is very active with federal policy developments. We try to bring actual real world stories from the field up to policymakers at the federal level. We've become active, in the last three years, in working with state departments of education, because they need to understand what we're trying to make happen in the classroom, so that they're developing their policies, their support apparatus, their funding streams to support that activity.

And it's complicated, but it's doable. And I think it required, for us, we started at the school level and thought, school by school, just ignore all of the intermediaries. They're the problem, they're not the solution. It didn't take very long to figure out that school districts could absolutely destroy anything good going on in school buildings. We had schools that had shown several years of positive gains in student achievement, but a change in the district central office said, we're not going to actually use that curriculum anymore. We're going to use this new, centralized curriculum, and the work was destroyed.

So, as a result of our somewhat naïve strategy—business leaders thinking we'll just solve the problem and ignore all these people in the middle—we had problems and roadblocks, and then developed a strategy to support school districts, really rethinking their roles, moving from top down compliance operations to value added partners for schools. The concept of charter districts is another area that we're moving forward in. And at the state department, particularly in Maryland and Illinois, we've been working with those leaders and central office staff and supporting the development of a network of school districts within that state to begin to take this work to scale.

Will it happen overnight? No, it won't. Is it highly political at times? Absolutely. Can it be managed effectively? We believe it can be.

MR. TRAUB: But I would only think that, for example, some of the more progressive models would have a big problem with the education law that just passed which will now mandate testing in grades three through eight, that is, the models that are more averse to the ideas of standardized and high stakes testing. I'd be curious to hear what any of you have to say about the question of what the relationship will be between this new generation of reform, high stakes testing and accountability, and what is, I guess, the immediately previous generation of reform, which is whole school reform.

MS. MCCLELLAN: I want to jump in, because another learning lesson is that the test doesn't control what you teach. And you can control the results on that test. And I would say to Mary Anne, it doesn't matter. I mean, we worked with a group of schools that used Lucy Calkins' Writer's Workshop, which is a very process oriented model. And then we had to dump to a state test in writing, and write to a—very different pieces.

But we figured out, as a system, what is the test, and to make sure we are teaching in our process and product to get to that result. And I think some of the work that I saw, and see in Houston in some of the schools that I've visited, is they neglect that piece. You know, the market is the test. You have to play to that test. Well, in doing so, you can still do your process, very progressive work, as long as you're really getting to those skills. And that's the crux of the problem.

Teachers don't know what that looks like. They teach, but they don't know whether they're getting the learning needed. And at least the test gives you a floor for the learning.

MR. TRAUB: Jeffrey, I'm curious: are you inclined to think that testing and accountability is going to be a kind of limiting factor for the development of whole school reform?

MR. MIREL: Well, if you think about this in terms of the ongoing debate between progressive and more traditional types of education, what's always seemed to me the problem with the progressive argument is that, if it's really effective in terms of teaching kids, giving them the kinds of information, the kinds of skills, the kinds of knowledge that they're going to need, that it should do that as effectively as is, supposedly, more traditional.

The test is simply a measure. And I think Ann is right; there's no reason for the test to drive what's going on in the classroom. If the methods are genuinely effective, we should see the results. If they're not, which is generally my suspicion, then we ought to be rethinking their iconic status in educational thought.

MR. TRAUB: But progressive educators are already outraged about the whole teaching to the test aspect, and so forth. And so, I would think that this is going to be—you, Mary Anne also—will be hearing a lot of fear and maybe dire predictions, that in the face of this new testing and accountability regime that is now becoming national, some of these models are going to have to completely alter their pedagogy, their curriculum, their whole approach.

MS. SCHMITT: Well, I agree with Jeff's statement. And I really get very frustrated in a conversation where somebody's trying to make the case that their strategy works differently and should be measured differently. Because ultimately, if kids cannot read and cannot do basic computation, they're not going to be able to function in today's society. And so, I don't see these things as mutually exclusive.

First of all, I think that the reform agenda has three parts. It is testing and accountability; it's also flexibility, and it's capacity. Whole school reform is a strategy that has been at work for a number of years, imperfect, but promising, and gets at this issue of building capacity in school buildings and districts. I sometimes think that every argument in education is an either/or. Is it whole language or phonics? It's both. Is it high stakes testing and accountability, or whole school reform? It's both. And every other argument we tend to have, in 100 different sessions that we each participate in throughout the year, seems to create these polarized views. That's not particularly productive to what actually needs to get done.

MR. TRAUB: Gene, I would think that high schools that work would work very happily with the new testing and accountability standards.

MR. BOTTOMS: Well, testing is, you know, it's kind of a double-edged sword, in some sense. Certainly, we see a lot of evidence in our data that in states where you've had some end of course exams in core academic subjects, that poor minority youth in those states performed higher than they do in other states. It means all of the sudden, you can't have five levels of algebra. You've got to begin to teach everybody to a solid standard in algebra.

But you also—teachers must have some enlightened school leadership who understand the curriculum and instruction. Unenlightened school leadership can pressure teachers to do the wrong things better. As one principal said to me: "Well, if they didn't get it the first time, we're just going to cover it louder the second time around." (Laughter.)

So the progressive instructional methods do, in fact, drive up achievement. It gets kids engaged, it gets them motivated. More adult-like learning methods do do that. You get nominal gains from doing the wrong things better. You'll get a little gain in achievement, but you'll not get the long-term gains that one needs to get.

So that's the reason this whole emphasis on a team of folks at the building level who have a deeper understanding of curriculum and instruction, and can support teachers in learning how to teach differently. High school faculty probably, in Texas, would not have volunteered to teach everybody algebra and geometry on their own. It had to be mandated. But by receiving support over the years, they've gained confidence that you can do it. They've learned more about how to do it; and, that's where, I think, the kind of end of course exams, in fact, help in high school. It may help at the end of grade eight as well. You know, the primary mission of many middle grades is to get kids through grade eight. You've got to re-focus that. You've got to begin a sense of standards at grade eight that the intent is to get kids ready for high school.

So there has to be kind of a shift. We kind of bogged down the middle grades in this notion that they're growing so fast that their minds are disengaged. And we have to unlock that, and begin to get teachers in the middle grades who have depth of subject matter in their field, who understand the developmental nature of children, but who understand how to teach in very engaging ways.

So I think the assessment in the middle grades can help accelerate learning there, if the exams are not pegged too low.

MR. TRAUB: So let me throw it open now to the audience. So please, when I call on you, stand up and speak your question clearly. Sir.

Q: Yes, I'm Chris Connell. I'm a writer. But Ann gave us the sense that whole school reform is really taking something off a box and trying to implement it, lock, stock, and barrel in the school. Is that what whole school reform. . . is that what it's worked out to be? And perhaps, Professor Mirel's the person I'd ask that to.

MR. TRAUB: Let me just repeat the question so that the television camera will pick it up. The question was: is whole school reform principally a matter of taking things off the shelf or out of the box, or is it something broader than that?

MS. SCHMITT: The whole school reform was a response to what was seen as being the prevalent strategy of having more piecemeal, scattershot activities that were incoherent within a school building. You didn't have a team based approach looking at data to drive decisions, and curriculum, and instruction, and the Christmas tree effect, that I believe Gene spoke to.

So really, what it's about is creating a coherent plan within a school building, a unified vision that the faculty truly buy into, that's not imposed on them, and then providing the support to enable teachers to develop new skills, abilities, and function as a learning organization. It should not be thought of as an in-the-box, plug-in type of strategy. It's a new model and a new infrastructure to provide the schools with access with coherent, research based programs and the assistance to implement them.

MR. TRAUB: Sir.

Q: [Inaudible.]

MR. MIREL: No, that certainly corresponds with the things that I read in doing my research. I mean, some of the RAND studies went so far as to point out that we should not be looking at New American Schools as an envelope that the school would get—open the envelope, take out the blueprint, and there you go. It's not something to plug in.

MR. TRAUB: Yes, sir, why don't you go ahead?

Q: The problem with your discussion, for me, is we started talking about a remedy without any clear idea, that I don't have, of what whole school reform is. Now, they wouldn't build a battleship with scraps because there was something wrong in the kitchen. So that's the problem I have with your discussion. What is whole school reform, and what kind of problems—why aren't people trying to solve the other reforms that we should seek to improve whole school reform?

MR. TRAUB: Let me rephrase the question. The question is: exactly what is it that whole school reform is uniquely supposed to be suited to do, as opposed to all the other things out there? And I guess one way of asking it is: what is the supposed virtue of wholeness that makes whole school reform better than the piecemeal things, whatever they are, that exist as alternatives?

MS. SCHMITT: Well, first of all, again, I feel like we're setting up a false distinction. There are a lot of effective pieces that need to be brought together coherently in a school building. So it's not suggesting that individual pieces, professional development standards, other things that Jeff refers to in his work, need to be dismissed for this thing that's called whole school reform. It's about actually taking those pieces and putting them together at the school building level.

What we're seeking to remedy is, I think everybody in this room would agree, that far too many children in this country are not being provided with the skills and abilities to succeed and go on after elementary, middle, and high school. What we're seeking to remedy is that far too many schools still function with teachers that are isolated in their classrooms, doors closed, and data is not being used to drive an effective process of teaching and learning.

What we're seeking to remedy is this belief that everything in education has to be an art, a craft. There is some science and effective strategies around teaching that we should be much more systematic in ensuring that schools, districts, and states avail themselves of that information. What we're seeking to remedy is a belief system where people feel that they have to come up with all the solutions themselves, that they have to be the expert on everything, rather than looking outside of their particular classroom, school district, and being able to tap into professional networks that can enable them to accelerate their learning process and be lifelong learners.

We have a pervasive culture within the education community that has not been particularly receptive to this very practical strategy that seeks to provide the hands on support that will enable a lot more people to succeed.

MR. TRAUB: Yes, sir.

Q: Tony Wagner. I'd like to frame another question for the panel to comment on, particularly as it relates to my being a recurring English teacher and school principal, and that's the issue of teacher and student motivation. It seems to me one of the questions that any reform model needs to address is: how do we motivate teacher and student excellence?

And a couple of observations—and Mary Anne and I have talked about this. One of the interesting things about Memphis was the differentiation among the various schools, some of which were very, very successful. And when you really look at which schools were more successful, you find a very high degree of ownership. In other words, we're not going to motivate adult excellence through externally imposed, top down changes.

But there is another whole school reform model that hasn't been mentioned at all this morning that I'd be interested in comments on, and that's the small schools. There is now a decade of research that small schools, more than any other single change—progressive versus traditional curriculum—small classes, small schools, particularly for at risk kids, make the greatest difference between the two. Why? Well, you talk to students and they tell you. When asked the question, what's the one change that would make the greatest difference: I need teachers who know me, and who care about me. It seems to me, we have another benchmark to assess any kind of reform, and that is the benchmark of motivation for adults and kids. It seems to me equally clear that small schools create an opportunity?.

MR. TRAUB: So the question was, first, what about the all important issue of motivating teachers and students to learn? And second of all, aren't small schools a powerful device, and perhaps the most powerful device, for creating that motivation or buy in that will promote learning? Anybody?

MR. MIREL: I'm a big fan of small schools. I think that it's the kind of simple and elegant reform that has great promise. My one concern about it is that one of the people who works down the hall from me at Michigan, Valerie Lee—whose work has inspired a lot of the comment on small schools—in one of my more recent conversations with her, is a little bit more cautious about the effectiveness of small schools than she was earlier.

But I think, at least theoretically, small schools are, for exactly the reasons you said, a simple and elegant reform that may be able to make some substantial difference. High schools are the biggest problem that we have, particularly in urban areas. But I think generally, and reducing the size of some of these massive high schools with 4,000 kids, 2,500 kids. My own children went to a high school with 2,200 kids, and you know, one of them got completely lost. The other two managed to make it through. But you know, I think it's the kind of reform that we ought to be thinking more about.

MR. TRAUB: Anyone else?

MS. MCCLELLAN: There's a lot to learn from small schools. It's the relationship between the teacher and the child that matters most, and you get to that. But there's another piece that would be productive that could be mapped onto the bigger efforts. And I've recently begun to understand more of what New American School is doing as I go out and look at these schools and the separate models.

When you individualize, you can make that classroom smaller. The problem is, it doesn't work in middle school and high school in the same way it does in elementary school. And then, there's another piece. Good solid teaching, whether it's progressive or traditional, if the kid gets it, it's comprehensible input. Guess what? It's motivating, you know, and we forget those pieces. If you can read in first grade, and you're reading, and it's fun, it's motivating. So that's another piece that I don't think you have to go to small scale. I don't know that Houston and—school district could go to small scale, but you can learn from it, and it's about relationships.

MS. SCHMITT: I guess I would just add one thing. When Tony talks about motivation, I use that term readiness. I consider motivation to be a piece of it. I'd also recommend Tony's new book, Making the Grade. I actually think he does a very good job laying out the issues tied to creating a community that's really open and committed to, and focused on, productive types of changes.

On the small school side, I know of six research studies; they're important studies, one that uses more of a randomized, experimental design. There are more studies on lots of other programs, so I think we all sort of pick and choose our research, but I respect it very much. And I think Ann's point about the relationship between the adults and the student learners is important.

The financial implications of the small schools movement, it's overwhelming to try to imagine how you scale that nationally. If you run the numbers, you run out of money really quickly, and you can have small schools that do the same old things and don't get any better result. So I'm not disagreeing with you, but just putting some of the practical limitations. And I think those two work together. You can have small schools with effective research based programs, and to me, that's a dynamite combination.

MR. TRAUB: There's one more note of reality, which is that small schools have small football teams; small football teams lose to big football teams, which is why, in many parts of America, you're not going to have very many small schools that will last. (Laughter.)

Q: Just a clarification. When we talk about small schools—we're not talking about building new buildings.—Education Complex in New York City has four new small schools in it. And by the way, they share one large building-wide—the girls' volleyball team is highly successful. (Laughter.)

MR. TRAUB: Yes, go ahead.

MR. BOTTOMS: Let me just add a couple of other things based on walking around experience, as opposed to reading formal research. When you go into certain rural communities—we have a lot of low performing small high schools that join our network in rural communities—they sort as bad as any urban district. And if the kid is a son of a bootlegger up on the ridge, and the teacher knew his grandfather, knew he was no good, then that kid is going to get placed in the lowest level class.

So what you have to do—the reason we didn't lead with small schools, we decided you have to lead with teaching everybody a solid academic core. Now, the career academy has a way to break high schools down into small schools, but they haven't yet committed to teaching a more demanding academic core as part of that career—my notion.

So you've got to get personalization; there are different ways of doing it. But in many large schools, we do recommend going to a small arrangement. But we also insist that they teach that solid academic core as part of that.

MR. TRAUB: Yes, please.

Q: Dan Goldman from Urban Institute. Mary, you had mentioned that there was some district or school where they had shown significant achievement gains, but the new district personnel came in and abandoned the model, which seems strange. If the gains are clear to people, then you wouldn't expect that kind of behavior. So what I'm wondering is, in the absence of anything that is clear, at least, to the public and the officials, what is it that leads to sustainability of models when there are regime changes, and perhaps just a natural inclination for new actors to put their stamp on institutions.

MS. SCHMITT: A couple things. One, there is a document that we put out that's a relatively short paper on our first decade of experience. We do talk about the Memphis experience, because obviously, lots of people are asking us questions about it. In that case, we did have four years where we saw value added gains, looking at student level data, looking at real kids progressing from one year to the next, to the next, and looking at where they started, which in Memphis, unfortunately, was very low, in the 20th percentile, and the incremental improvements they were making over four years.

A new regime came in, and the way that they structured the Memphis study—and we also have a copy of an independent review of the Memphis study, which you can look at as well, by Jim McClain—the way that they structured the study, they had a very simple metric. They were just looking at the percentage of students and schools that had achieved above the average for the district, the 50th percentile.

Now, if you had a school that went from 24th, to 36th, to 48th, it actually, in that type of study—and I'm simplifying it for the conversation—would be deemed a failure. So some really important information was missing in the way that they structured the study, went through their analysis, and made a policy decision to dismiss all models.

I'm not saying everything was perfect. There were certainly schools where implementation did not go well, and we did not see the type of results we were looking for. We're very up front about that. But something pretty powerful and dramatic was happening in Memphis, Tennessee, and that was dismissed, which we think was a bad thing for students.

Q: Isn't that a real indictment of the system if—and I'm not questioning the study—but you have a system where there are, as you say, demonstrated academic gains, and somehow, the people, the decision makers don't recognize this, and abandon something that's been successful?

MS. SCHMITT: It is.

Q: So what does that say about whole school reform?

MS. SCHMITT: I don't know that it's an indictment of whole school reform.

Q: [Inaudible.]

MS. SCHMITT: Well, it gets back to the issue that I talked about that we had made significant investments in, which is helping the system to develop the type of data management systems and value added assessment systems that enable them to track student progress, so you can see that positive trend line, plus track students' progress against absolute standards, because you need both.

I'm not trying to say that it's okay for disadvantaged students just to improve and not exceed at exceptionally high levels. That's not what I'm trying to say. What I'm trying to say is, when you introduce these types of continuous improvement programs, you've got to be able to give it the time, look at the positive trend lines, and then keep marching towards an absolute high standard. And the traditional systems, by and large, have not subscribed to that, and haven't built the type of mechanisms to do that. The big problem is the use of data for "gotcha" types of systems, rather than diagnostic, and that's a big challenge that we have going forward.

MR. TRAUB: Yes, sir.

Q: [Inaudible.]

MR. TRAUB: Can I stop you there? I just want to give them a chance to answer.

Q: [Inaudible.]

MR. TRAUB: So just to restate that, Jeff's report implied that the whole school movement had been, in effect, captured by progressivism. But the point was that, indeed, many of these old school designs are either traditionalist in their basic method, or traditionalist in their objectives.

MR. MIREL: Okay, first of all, the report was on New American Schools, not on comprehensive school reform or whole school reform, generally. What struck me as incredibly curious when I first started doing this research was, what seemed to me, this amazing mismatch between these hard headed business leaders, who were setting up New American Schools, and the kinds of really, I'd have to say, old fashioned progressive style reforms that appeared in the—proposals.

Some of them sounded like they'd been written by Harold Rogg (sp) in 1928. I mean, the language, the philosophy just echoed the kinds of things that any educational historian would come across in looking at the Dewey era. But that didn't necessarily mean that they were going to be awful and terrible, all right. I mean, I think you're right in characterizing Ted Seiser as somebody who wants to use progressive means for traditional ends.

In fact, you know, depending on what you read among the progressives, sometimes the—kids will learn the same things as other kids, but they'll just learn them differently, which goes back to my comment earlier that they should be performing as well on tests. But that was just one theme in there. I mean, it's not the killer theme. If that's all I found, that they had progressive roots, and that was my damning indictment, it would be, I think, a pretty poor study.

The problem, as I indicated earlier—nd again, I think Gene Shaul's work on this is terrific—is that by and large, with poor and disadvantaged kids, progressive methods have not been terribly successful. Again, one of the things I really admire about New American Schools is they've gone right at the problems of urban systems. I just think there's a philosophical mismatch.

MR. TRAUB: Jeff, can I ask a sub-version of that question, which is, you criticize the New American Schools for not being revolutionary, as their initial impulses seemed to be, and you also criticized them for choosing all of these progressive models. Are there revolutionary traditionalist models out there, which you wish they had selected?

MR. MIREL: Yes. E.B. Hirsch.

MR. TRAUB: That's a good answer.

MR. MIREL: In terms of whole school design and reform, I mean, I think that this goes to Gene's argument about the curriculum—ah, core knowledge is, for me, the one winning proposal that I would —

MR. TRAUB: I'm with you on that one. Yes, anyone else?

Q: [Inaudible.]

MR. TRAUB: Sir, you have to ask your question because we're running a little short of time.

Q: [Inaudible.]

MR. TRAUB: So, sir, is your question about the absence of standards in these models? I'm just not quite sure what it is you wish to ask.

Q: [Inaudible.]

MR. TRAUB: Okay, so the question is: how can you prevent even an admirable looking model from being corrupted and practiced by people who don't understand how to carry it out?

MS. SCHMITT: That's a very complicated question. We've tried to get at it in our paper. RAND has written about it extensively, the conditions. I mentioned Tony's work around motivation, readiness, ownership, buy in. That's what's key. While I have the floor, just a final comment. New American Schools originally selected a group of models, and worked with those models, winnowing some of them out, learning a lot along the way.

And it's important for people to understand that we're agnostic on this progressive-traditional divide. We believe schools and districts should make those decisions. We're trying to help provide more choices along that spectrum. We're actively recruiting new approaches into our network, traditional as well as progressive, as well as everything in the middle.

We think our work, our organization has a lot to offer to building that high quality supply. And I just want to make sure people understand that that's an important part of the evolution of our work.

MR. TRAUB: Well, I guess that does it. Thank you very much for coming. I think it's been a very fruitful two hours, and I hope you've all enjoyed it.

[END OF EVENT.]