The Effective Schools Process: Alive and Well

The Effective Schools Process is a tried and true process of school change that can create schools in which all children make progress and are ready for study at the next grade level, Ms. Taylor maintains. IN THE MAY 2001 issue of the Kappan and in the March 2001 issue of School Administrator, articles written by M. Donald Thomas and William Bainbridge presented five "fallacies" and so-called facts that the authors felt reflected the status of the Effective Schools movement today. The material that appeared in these articles was originally written as a brief for the plaintiffs in the case Abbeville vs. State of South Carolina. The plaintiffs sued the state for equitable funding of schools in South Carolina, particularly exceptionally underfunded schools in low-income districts that served large numbers of minority and disadvantaged children. The case went to the state supreme court, which held that the remedy was to be handled by the South Carolina legislature. The court ruled that this legislation must be in place by June 2002. Thomas and Bainbridge wrote the brief as consultants acquainted with comprehensive school reform processes, especially the school improvement process begun decades ago that became the Effective Schools movement, in which Thomas had played an important part. Thomas was ombudsman in South Carolina during the tenure of Gov. Richard Riley, who oversaw, with his wife, Anne Riley, the first statewide implementation of Effective Schools reforms. Gov. Riley, of course, went on to become secretary of education in the Clinton Administration. These two articles constitute arguments in favor of the type of comprehensive school reform that the early Effective Schools movement intended to achieve. The authors did not check with the National Center for Effective Schools Research and Development - now called the National Alliance for Effective Schools (NAES) - and thus their brief was decidedly dated. Indeed, the so-called fallacies they attribute to the present movement never existed in the conceptual evolution of the Effective Schools Process. This article and the two that follow - by Judy March and by Janet Chrispeels - address the current status of the Effective Schools Process and the Effective Schools Research and offer some examples from the field. The National Alliance for Effective Schools and those who have developed the Effective Schools Process and conducted decades of Effective Schools Research have never subscribed to the "five fallacies" that Thomas and Bainbridge list. The extensive body of work that has descended directly from the research of Ronald Edmonds, Wilbur Brookover, Larry Lezotte, John Frederickson, George Weber, Matthew Miles, Daniel Levine and Eugene Eubanks, and many others is now referred to as Effective Schools Research and is the applied research currently used by trainers and consultants who are members of the NAES. The NAES, now headquartered at the Gevirtz School of Education, University of California, Santa Barbara, is the successor to the National Center for Effective Schools Research and Development, which was affiliated with Phi Delta Kappa in Bloomington, Indiana. Why the upper-case designations? When the National Center was founded in 1986, its purpose was to disseminate and maintain the consistency of the Effective Schools Process, a school improvement process that was evolving from the collective experiences of educators nationwide who were using the correlates of Effective Schools as organizational and programmatic dimensions of their strategy for school improvement. In truth, the center was formed in an attempt to keep to a minimum the contradictions and misrepresentations of the process, such as those Bainbridge and Thomas mentioned. In general, the National Center was successful in achieving this goal. School reform programs and processes that were advocated and advanced by the chief trainers and consultants of the center - known as the Cadre of Fellows - were held consistent through the 1980s. …