Without being wildly technical, they need to ask hard questions of the developers and of themselves, said Bob Blum, director of school improvement programs at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory in Portland, Oregon. A hallmark of the legislation is its insistence that the money be used only to support research-based school reform models that have proven to produce results with all children. The bottom line is that the school is on the hook for getting results with this program, Blum said. Because of that, it s essential for schools to take a deeply thoughtful and systematic approach to deciding which, if any, of the available whole school designs would work for their school. They really ought to go through a very elaborate process of visioning, said Lew Allen, co-director of the League of Professional Schools.
Many schools really don t think through their own beliefs about schools and schooling.
A huge percentage of the schools that joined the League would have benefited from taking more time to talk about issues like these, he said. New American Schools, which helped develop several designs named in the federal legislation, has had similar experiences, said Mary Anne Schmitt, director of communications for the New American Schools. It is absolutely critical that they spend time developing the vision up front. The staff needs to share a philosophy of what the school should become and then they need to agree that the design they choose is consistent with the vision they share for their school, she said. The next step is reflecting on whether the school has the capacity to embrace the substantial change that is likely to occur when it adopts a whole school design.