Looking Back over a Decade of Whole-School Reform: The Experience of New American Schools

Federal and state policy makers need to think critically about their current stance of simultaneously promoting high-stakes testing, comprehensive school reforms that center on innovative curriculum and instructional strategies, and the adoption of multiple additional reforms, the authors warn. WHEN THE New American Schools (NAS) launched its efforts on behalf of whole-school reform in 1991, at least part of the motivation was that the piecemeal approach to school reform had produced little change in the nation's test scores. A private, nonprofit organization, NAS was charged with helping schools and districts raise significantly the achievement of large numbers of students by implementing whole-school reforms and by taking advantage of the assistance offered by the design teams. The core premise of NAS was that all high-quality schools possess a unifying design that allows all staff members to perform to the best of their abilities and that integrates research-based practices into a coherent and mutually reinforcing set of effective approaches to teaching and learning for the entire school. The best way to ensure that lower- performing schools adopted successful designs was to fund design teams to develop "break the mold" school designs that could be readily adopted by communities around the nation. After developing the design, teams would go on to implement their designs in schools across the country. This adoption would lead to the fulfillment of NAS's primary goal of improving the performance of large numbers of students. This whole-school approach to educational improvement was a dramatically different way of initiating and disseminating large-scale changes. It was a unique combination of 1) private-sector involvement, using a venture capitalist approach; 2) the choice of whole-school designs as a vehicle for reform; and 3) the ambitious goal of scaling up across the country. Moreover, the experimental approach adopted by NAS required careful development and demonstration of designs prior to moving to the scale-up efforts. Thus it had a phased approach including: * competition and selection phases (1992); * a development phase of one year (1992-93); * a demonstration phase of two years (1993-95); and * a scale-up phase of three years (1995-98). This approach to educational improvement offered an unprecedented opportunity to study and understand a unique attempt at school reform from its beginnings to its completion. RAND's Role NAS approached RAND to provide analytic support to its school reform efforts. This support took many forms, but it was primarily intended to document and analyze the conditions under which NAS made progress toward its goals of widespread use and implementation of the designs and improved student performance associated with that use. The support included the following analytic tasks: * to document the efforts of NAS to assess its contributions to education reform; * to describe the designs and analyze changes in them over time; * to assess the level of implementation in design-based schools during the demonstration and scale-up phases; * to identify factors that impede or encourage implementation in the demonstration and scale-up phases; and * to measure whether adopting the designs resulted in the outcomes desired by NAS and its partnering districts in the scale-up phase. These tasks were conducted over the first seven years of the NAS initiative, from the demonstration phase through the scale-up phase. The results have been documented in a series of RAND reports. Over these years, RAND's program of studies has included: * a longitudinal sample of more than 100 NAS schools that began implementation early in the scale-up phase, including data on implementation and performance from principals, teachers, and districts; * case studies in 40 schools to analyze implementation and the role that districts play in impeding or enabling comprehensive school reform; * a description of how designs have evolved from the initial proposal stage to implementation "at scale" in schools across the nation; * analyses in one urban school district of how designs promote changes in classroom instruction, in teaching and learning, and in individual-level student achievement scores; * an analysis of performance differences in high-implementing NAS sites; and * ongoing discussions with NAS staff and design team leaders. …