The Ambitious Elementary School

Its Conception, Design, and Implications for Educational Equality

Elizabeth McGhee Hassrick, Stephen W. Raudenbush, Lisa Rosen

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780226456652, 9780226456515
• eBook ISBN: 9780226456799
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The challenge of overcoming educational inequality in the United States can sometimes appear overwhelming, and great controversy exists as to whether or not elementary schools are up to the task, whether they can ameliorate existing social inequalities and initiate opportunities for economic and civic flourishing for all children. This book shows what can happen when you rethink schools from the ground up with precisely these goals in mind, approaching educational inequality and its entrenched causes head on, student by student.
           
Drawing on an in-depth study of real schools on the South Side of Chicago, Elizabeth McGhee Hassrick, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Lisa Rosen argue that effectively meeting the challenge of educational inequality requires a complete reorganization of institutional structures as well as wholly new norms, values, and practices that are animated by a relentless commitment to student learning. They examine a model that pulls teachers out of their isolated classrooms and places them into collaborative environments where they can share their curricula, teaching methods, and assessments of student progress with a school-based network of peers, parents, and other professionals. Within this structure, teachers, school leaders, social workers, and parents collaborate to ensure that every child receives instruction tailored to his or her developing skills. Cooperating schools share new tools for assessment and instruction and become sites for the training of new teachers. Parents become respected partners, and expert practitioners work with researchers to evaluate their work and refine their models for educational organization and practice. The authors show not only what such a model looks like but the dramatic results it produces for student learning and achievement.
           
The result is a fresh, deeply informed, and remarkably clear portrait of school reform that directly addresses the real problems of educational inequality. 
 

PART I

LESSONS FROM RESEARCH AND PRACTICE

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The premise of our book is that increasing the amount and quality of schooling can substantially reduce economic and racial inequality in children’s educational outcomes. We don’t make this claim lightly, because the root causes of inequality lie largely outside the school walls. Indeed, it may seem naive to suppose that schooling can help us overcome problems it did not create.

However, considerable empirical evidence, reviewed in the next chapter, supports this claim. Research suggests that increasing access to early childhood education, increasing the amount of instructional time during the school day, and increasing the length of the school year have potential to boost the educational outcomes of the most-disadvantaged children and thereby reduce inequality in educational outcomes. Similarly, increasing the quality of schooling by reducing class size, improving teachers’ knowledge and skill, tailoring instruction to students’ varied needs, making instruction more coherent and explicit, and systematically supporting children’s social and emotional development all have potential to improve achievement, on average, and to reduce inequality.

Encouraging this hopeful view, recent studies identify schools that are remarkably effective for disadvantaged children. These studies use a random lottery system to compare children attending new schools to statistically similar children who did not.1 Many of the most-effective schools provide extra instructional time for all students and intense tutoring for children who are behind. All of them set high expectations for students. Some emphasize the centrality of a schoolwide culture that allows “no excuses” for failure: the school leaders, the staff, and the students themselves do not tolerate the argument that family difficulties or neighborhood disadvantage prohibit success in school. The most-effective schools typically use assessments of students’ skill to guide instruction.2 Certain comprehensive school reform programs—particularly Success for All, America’s Choice, and Core Knowledge—have exhibited significant potential to increase the learning of students attending comparatively disadvantaged elementary schools.3 This emerging body of research has generated considerable optimism about the notion that school improvement can reduce inequality in educational outcomes.

Unanswered Questions

In contrast to this optimistic view, however, is a history of failed attempts to improve elementary schooling for the children in greatest need, which Charles M. Payne analyzes well in his book So Much Reform, So Little Change.4 For fifty years, overcoming economic inequality in educational achievement has been the central aim of federal education policy. That goal has gone unfulfilled.5 Indeed, recent research suggests that economic inequality in educational attainment is increasing.6 Moreover, a century-long march toward racial equality in educational outcomes stalled around 1990.7 The current reality is that less than two-thirds of all poor minority children in the United States ever earn a regular high school diploma; a minority of those ever attend a four-year college; and a fraction of those attending such a college ever receive a college diploma.8 These facts would perhaps have been less troubling in past times, when unskilled laborers often earned sufficient wages to support a family. Given the importance of educational credentials and cognitive skills in the current labor market, the dismal results of urban schooling constitute a crisis. We can’t say that school reform over the past fifty years hasn’t made a positive difference, because we don’t know how bad things would be had the country not engaged in school reform. But there is no doubt that school reform has not been sufficient to help low-income children gain the skills they need to be successful.

If school improvement holds great potential for reducing educational inequality, why have forty-five years of sustained and varied attempts to improve schools been so unsuccessful in achieving their goals? And why are the schools that produce excellent results for low-income minority children so exceptional?

The studies reviewed in chapter 2 examine the impact of particular interventions holding constant all other factors, but they don’t tell us how to combine knowledge from the entire body of research to create powerful schools. We have discovered, for example, that when we randomly assign teachers and students to small versus large classes, the students attending the smaller classes learn more than do the students attending the large classes. And we have discovered that students exposed to summer instruction learn more than do similar children who stay on summer recess. Similarly, we’ve seen the isolated effects of particular approaches to reading or science instruction or tutoring. In principle, a school that simultaneously enacts a list of such interventions might produce large gains for students. But effectively implementing a series of interventions in the daily life of a school is not like plugging new appliances into an electrical outlet. New interventions have to be integrated together and meshed with current teaching practice to improve the overall life of a school. Achieving such integration is a problem of school organization about which the research has comparatively little to say. Hence, although the research findings we summarize have potential to substantially improve student learning, the question of how to realize this potential by transforming the daily life of students and teachers within particular schools remains unanswered.

Studies of highly effective elementary schools tend to emphasize the importance of particular school characteristics. But for anyone who wants to create an effective school—or to improve the effectiveness of an existing school—large questions remain unanswered: What are the most important academic skills for children to acquire starting in preschool through the elementary years? What kinds of instruction are needed to ensure that children from varied backgrounds obtain these skills? How can we organize the schoolhouse to make sure that such instruction occurs reliably, so that the vast majority of children become skilled readers and mathematical problem–solvers by grade 3? Specifically, what kinds of skills and practices do teachers need to provide such instruction? How can school leaders help teachers gain the skills they need and support them to work in new ways? How can they assure that skilled teachers are encouraged and promoted while persistently ineffective teachers find other lines of work? What strategies can school principals and teachers use to engage parents productively in this enterprise? How do school leaders identify children and families who need supplementary academic and or social support—and ensure that such support is forthcoming in time to prevent school failure and to prevent unaddressed problems from undermining the broader instructional enterprise?

The answers to these questions lie scattered in the archives of research and in the minds of expert practitioners. Developmental scientists know a lot about the skills students need to gain and in what sequence, but they know little about how to organize instruction to ensure that these skills emerge. Economists know that teachers vary considerably in skill; they have ideas about how to hire the best teachers, but know little about how to improve the skill of practicing teachers. Sociologists have learned a great deal about how schools manage and coordinate teachers’ work, but not so much about how the work of teaching most efficiently produces student learning. Research on clinical practice tells us a lot about how to train social workers, but little about how social workers and teachers should coordinate their efforts. Unfortunately, social scientists in these disciplines interact rarely with one another and virtually never discuss how to mobilize their collective knowledge to ensure excellent schooling for the children who need it most.

Similarly, expert practitioners have devised working solutions to many of these problems. Some teachers are masterful at teaching early reading, some at teaching early math. Some principals are powerful instructional leaders, and some social workers take a comprehensive approach with troubled children and families. However, their knowledge is often implicit in practice and is rarely coordinated deliberately to shape the school as an organization. Even more fundamentally, scholars and practitioners rarely engage in the sustained interaction required to clarify and integrate what they know and test it in practice.

Our Research Project

In this book we describe a concerted effort to enact a coherent model of effective elementary schooling rooted in knowledge about learning, teaching, and school organization derived from both scholarly research and expert practice. The founders and subsequent leaders at the University of Chicago Charter School (UCCS) developed this model. UCCS consists of four campuses: two elementary, one middle, and one high school campus on the South Side of Chicago. These are public schools operated by the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute (UEI) and serve African American children. Our book focuses solely on the two elementary school campuses, North Kenwood/Oakland (NKO) and Donoghue. During the time we collected data at the elementary campuses, from 2008 to 2012, about 80 percent9 of these children were low income as defined by eligibility for the federally subsidized lunch program.

We knew that the designers of the school had sought to integrate the best available research on reading instruction, math instruction, and school organization in order to create a coherent model of school practice, and that these designers had worked to hire skilled leaders to help refine and implement that model. So we launched a research project that aimed to make the elements of the model explicit and to test the impact of the school on its students. Over a period of five years, we interviewed school leaders, teachers, and social workers at the two campuses to clarify the aims and design of their practice. We gathered documents and visited classrooms to discover visible traces of the model in practice. We used the random assignment of students by means of an annual lottery to evaluate the impact of the school on reading and math achievement. This book describes what we learned and explores implications for reducing educational inequality.

High dropout rates and low levels of literacy among low-income, minority youth in US schools are intolerable. But the aims of those who created the school we describe went far beyond correcting this problem. Our book is about the conception and design of the school they created, and the implications of their experience for anyone who wants to tackle educational inequality.

Those who designed and ran this school reasoned that being committed to children’s success, adopting good curricula, and hiring good teachers were essential but not sufficient to achieve their ambitious aims. One needed also to know what children need to know, when, and in what sequence, and what kinds of teaching are required to generate the requisite learning opportunities. But even with that knowledge, a complex engineering problem emerged because children come to school with remarkably heterogeneous skills. Tailoring instruction to those varied children is challenging work, requiring considerable collaboration and professional development. In the view of those we interviewed and observed, solving this problem required a new conception of teachers’ work and a fairly radical reorganization of the school and its leadership. It required new tools and practices, new relationships among teachers, new partnerships with parents, and mobilizing time in highly strategic ways. Above all it meant keeping close track of every child’s progress and taking pains to ensure that every child got on track for academic success. If this was a “no excuses” school, it’s the adults who refused to make excuses.

A powerful instructional system is not, however, constituted merely by a list of tools such as textbooks, assessments, teaching strategies, or summer school schedules; or by a set of new professional roles—though new roles prove essential in the work we describe later in this book. Also essential are a set of norms within a culture of commitment to ambitious learning, a culture that motivates the invention and use of such tools and roles to serve collective purposes. And knowledge is required to use these tools and roles well. For example, educators at UCCS would hold that one has to assess every child frequently, evaluate each child’s recent progress, then set a new instructional plan for every child; otherwise some children will fall through the cracks. The specific tools—that is, the assessment instruments and the instructional plans—do not themselves constitute the model we describe apart from the school culture that compels their invention and use. But a school culture without such tools would not likely produce ambitious learning or be sustained. Using the tools well promotes teacher learning and builds the culture. The culture, the knowledge, and the tools stand in dynamic relation, and together produce evidence day by day that the children can indeed rise to the high level of the adults’ expectations. Adults use this evidence to reinforce their efforts.

Emerging from our research project is the sense that instructional improvement within conventional schools is extraordinarily difficult work and that schools that are reliably effective for low-income children look remarkably different from conventional schools. These insights suggest that school reform has failed because it has not been powerful enough, by itself, to transform the core work of teaching and school organization in ways that are essential if we are to reduce socioeconomic and racial inequality in educational outcomes.

Origins of the Model

Our story begins by gauging just how difficult it is to significantly improve fairly typical inner-city schools. In chapter 3, we trace efforts of a team of highly committed and deeply knowledgeable researchers and practitioners from the University of Chicago—led by Anthony S. Bryk, Sharon Greenberg, and Sara Spurlark—to improve literacy instruction in a network of South Side Chicago schools during the early 1990s. Theirs was a sustained effort with many small successes and many lessons learned. The most important lesson they drew from this endeavor, however, was that the organizational structure and culture of these schools posed formidable barriers to schoolwide instructional improvement. The school day was too short to provide the instructional time the children needed to catch up, and too short to enable teachers to collaborate to solve the daunting problems they faced. Teachers’ work was so individualized that it was difficult to create a coherent schoolwide instructional program or a schoolwide system of assessing children’s skills. As a result, teachers lacked objective evidence of students’ skills, and each teacher tended to struggle alone to solve instructional dilemmas that many shared. Because many urban schools have large numbers of inexperienced teachers and high teacher turnover, teacher skills varied enormously. However, these differences were hard to discern because each teacher worked alone with little support. These conditions made it difficult to sustain hard-won gains and in some cases generated low staff expectations for children’s learning.

These experiences seemed to suggest that if the aim was to put an ambitious instructional program in place, it would make sense to start a new elementary school free of the organizational and cultural constraints described above. This realization inspired Bryk, Greenberg, Spurlark, Marvin Hoffman, and their colleagues to create the North Kenwood/Oakland (NKO) campus of UCCS in 1998. In 2005, Timothy Knowles, Linda Wing, Nicole Woodard-Iliev, Todd Barnett, and their colleagues established the Donoghue campus.10 UEI now operates both campuses for Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Chapter 4 tells the story of how efforts to ensure that every child in those schools had the opportunity to succeed in reading and math led to the model we examine in this book.

Key Elements of the Model and Impact on Student Learning

The model we describe in this book entails new conceptions of teachers’ work, an expansion of instructional time, a redesign of school leadership, and new strategies for allying with parents. As a result, daily life in the school looks quite different from life in not only most schools on the South Side of Chicago, but also most elementary schools in the United States.

The Organization of Teachers’ Work

Teachers in the United States generally conceive their work as highly personalized. They exercise considerable autonomy as they privately pursue their favored approac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: LESSONS FROM RESEARCH AND PRACTICE
• PART II: A MODEL OF INSTRUCTIONAL PRACTICE AND SCHOOL ORGANIZATION
• PART III: IMPACT AND IMPLICATIONS
• Notes
• References
• Index