Every Blue Ribbon School is measured against the U. S. Department of
Education's high standard for excellence in education. At the same time,
every Blue Ribbon School is the unique, though winning, combination of a
specific set of people, vision, community, and program. There is no
"Blue Ribbon formula" that can be applied wholesale to a struggling
school and turn it around. There are, however, certain features all Blue
Ribbon Schools seem to share. All the Blue Ribbon Schools observed had
strong organizational structures. Their teaching practices were aimed at
high standards and grounded in student needs. The school philosophy
valued all students and expressed the belief that all students can and
will learn. All Blue Ribbon Schools shared a spirit of cooperation; as
one teacher put it, "all the students belong to all the teachers and all
the teachers belong to all the students."

Their individual expressions vary, but perhaps the most powerful common
factor in all Blue Ribbon Schools is **tenacity**. These schools not
only hold together (one meaning of tenacity), they are persistent. Blue
Ribbon Schools don't give ground on high standards and don't give up on
any student.

At a more instrumental level, Blue Ribbon Schools all share the
qualities of:

-   **Coherence.** The curricula in a Blue Ribbon School are
    consistently aligned with state and district standards. Students are
    assessed according to these standards, and instruction is adapted
    according to data from student assessments.

-   **Leadership.** The school leadership, primarily the principal, so
    clearly sets a school's tone that few schools can succeed, much less
    excel, in the absence of strong leadership. The principal is a
    school's North Star. A Blue Ribbon principal creates a culture of
    respect for students and teachers, holds high expectations for both
    students and teachers, values and rewards achievement, and takes
    responsibility for ensuring that the whole school works and all
    students progress. Blue Ribbon principals see their goal as making
    themselves expendable, of setting systems and processes in motion
    that will outlive their tenure. Where principals are supported by
    parents, community members, and education leaders at the district
    and state level, sustaining one principal's success seems more
    likely.

-   **Organization.** Blue Ribbon Schools use time and money
    efficiently. Materials are available when they are needed, reporting
    systems for teachers are clear and consistent, and the school
    environment is safe, clean, and orderly.

-   **Collegiality.** Teachers and other staff members regard each other
    as team mates, willing to meet conflict head on, and to share
    success and failures alike. Blue Ribbon teachers seem eager to
    discover talents among themselves and drawn on them; they are
    committed to furthering their own learning, and hold themselves and
    their students accountable for high achievement.

In interviews, teachers, parents, and other school leaders offered
metaphors to describe their schools, such as "an accurate watch," a
laboratory, a garden, a butterfly, and a family. Each metaphor
highlights some features of a good school and hides others.

The **watch** metaphor envisions a school as a well-oiled machine whose
parts all work together to create something of value (an educated
student, a reliable measure of time). Despite its mechanical heritage, a
watch as a metaphor suggests an organic entity where each part performs
its duties very well---a metaphor that has been applied to the universe
itself. This metaphor neglects, however, the irreducible singularity of
each person. Our unpredictability and idiosyncrasies make us anything
but interchangeable parts of a machine; our complexity belies the
metaphor's implication of super-specialization.

The **laboratory** metaphor highlights the often messy and experimental
place a school can be. It speaks to the rigor essential to a good
school---the commitment to think and act with precision, to cultivate
the habits of careful observation, to plan future experiments on past
results, and to put ideology aside. In many cases, schools are literally
laboratories, and scientists conduct experiments with students to
determine the effects of a curriculum or an instructional style. As is
the case with the watch, however, the laboratory metaphor downplays
individual characteristics and self-determination. People will never be
as experimentally tractable as bacteria in Petri dishes, or even rats.

The **garden** metaphor is more natural and organic. It reflects reality
insofar as a gardener is only as good as soil, climate, and weather
allow. It highlights the nurturing that is so vital in young people's
lives. Like plants in a garden, students grow and unfold in their own
time. And the metaphor reminds us that most plants, except for certain
hothouse plants, cannot be forced. The best gardeners are "constant" in
the sense of attentive, but are rarely intrusive. Finally, a garden is
intentional; it benefits from a coherent design and careful planning:
the gardener should know in advance whether he or she is growing a bed
of cheerful annuals or arranging a group of trees and shrubs. The garden
metaphor still under-emphasizes, though less than the other two
metaphors, students' incredible variety and drive to self-determination.

By far the most commonly cited metaphor was that of **family**. Schools
mimic families in important ways, not least of which in their structure
of adult authority over and responsibility for children and young
people. Like families, schools are usually associations of people of
different ages and roles bound together through ties of affection as
well as obligation. This is the sense of family schools draw on when
they stay open for children who need extra help, when teachers spend
their own time and resources to get students what they need, and when
school staff members hold the same high aspirations for their students
that they hold for their own. Familial relationships extend far beyond
the merely contractual; great schools seem to embody this deeper caring
as well.

To capture some Blue Ribbon School stories, two-person research teams
visited six 2003 Blue Ribbon Schools winning schools in March 2004. The
research team chose the schools based on high numbers of students
eligible for free and reduced lunches, high state test scores, and a
diversity of size, grade levels, and geographic locations. Eight
researchers all keenly aware of current school reform issues
participated in the visits. They used a common interview protocol but
drew on their own "eyes and ears" to gather the information and
photographs for the school profiles that follow. These profiles are not
meant to list math or reading and English curriculum materials, nor do
they describe step by step how to carry out a specific instructional
program. The purpose of these Blue Ribbon School profiles is to "unlock
the doors," look inside an exemplary school, and investigate how and why
it works so well.

Please enjoy these school profiles; we hope you will take away some new
ideas and hopes that will make a difference for all children in your
school and community. The 2003 Blue Ribbon Schools visited in March 2004
are:

Brentwood Elementary School, Victorville, CA

> Charter Oak Primary School, Peoria, IL

Frank T. Simpson-Waverly Elementary School, Hartford, CT

> Joseph Rodman West Elementary School, Washington DC
>
> Skidmore-Tynan Elementary School, Skidmore, TX
>
> Turtle Hook Middle School, Uniondale, NY