A Nation Reformed? American Education 20 Years After A Nation At Risk Edited by David T. Gordon

A Principal Looks Back: Standards Matter Kim Marshall   After fifteen years as principal of an inner-city elementary school, I am a battle-hardened veteran with his ideals still intact. I welcome this opportunity to look at how the introduction of standards affected the day-to-day struggle to bring a first-rate education to all students. I became principal of Boston’s Mather School after three experiences that neatly framed some of the challenges of school leadership. Fresh out of college in 1969, I taught sixth graders in a Boston middle school and operated pretty much as a lone wolf, writing my own curriculum and at one point actually cutting the wires of my classroom public address speaker to silence the incessant schoolwide announcements. In my nine years in the classroom, I know that students learned a lot, but I was never held accountable to any external standards. In 1980, intrigued by the "effective schools" research (including the work of Ron Edmonds and the British study, Fifteen Thousand Hours), I spent a year at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and sat at the feet of Edmonds himself.1 I steeped myself in his research on what seemed to make some urban schools work (strong instructional leadership, high expectations, a focus on basics, effective use of test data, and a safe and humane climate) and said "Amen" to his searing comment on failing urban schools: "We can, whenever and wherever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us. We already know more than we need in order to do this. Whether we do it must finally depend on how we feel about the fact that we haven’t so far."2 But while I was in graduate school, the voters of Massachusetts passed a tax-limiting referendum that sent Boston into a budget tailspin and closed twenty-seven schools. This nixed any chance I had of being made a principal in the near future, and I prepared to return to my classroom. Instead, I was hired as chief architect of a new citywide curriculum by Boston’s Superintendent of Schools, Robert Spillane, a forceful advocate of higher student achievement and more accountable schools. This was right around the time A Nation at Risk came out, and I found myself in the thick of Boston’s response to the "rising tide of mediocrity." Later, under Spillane’s successor, Laval Wilson, I directed an ambitious systemwide strategic planning process. My colleagues and I did some useful work, but throughout my years in the central office I felt that our efforts were often like pushing a string. Without like-minded principals pulling our initiatives into the schools, we often didn’t make much of a difference. When I finally became a principal in 1987, my experiences as a teacher, graduate student, and bureaucrat had shown me three aspects of the urban school challenge: (a) talented but often cussedly independent teachers working in isolation from their colleagues and external standards; (b) provocative research theories about the key factors associated with effective urban schools; and (c) the limited power of the central office to push change into schools that had a great deal of autonomy and very little accountability. Now that I was in the principal’s office, I thought I was ideally situated to make a difference for teachers and kids. Was I right? First, the good news. Over the last fifteen years, Mather students have made significant gains. Our student attendance went from 89 percent to 95 percent and our staff attendance went from 92 percent to 98 percent. Our test scores went from rock bottom in citywide standings to about two-thirds of the way up the pack. A recent in-depth review gave us a solid B+ based on an intensive inspection of the school and standardized test scores. And in 1999, the Mather was recognized for having the biggest gains in the MCAS (the rigorous Massachusetts statewide tests) of any large elementary school in the state. I am proud of these gains and of dramatic improvements in staff skills and training, student climate, philanthropic support, and the physical plant. But now some more sobering news. The gains we made came in agonizingly slow increments, and were accompanied by many false starts, detours, and regressions. Graphs of our students’ test scores did not show the clean, linear progress I had expected. Far too many of our students score in the bottom category on standardized tests, too few are Proficient and Advanced, and our student suspension rate is too high. Serious work remains to be done. When judging schools, everyone is an expert. If the Mather’s student achievement was extraordinary, people would attribute it to certain "obvious" factors: the principal’s leadership, his 78-hour workweek, recruiting great teachers, raising money and bringing in lots of resources, using the research on effective schools, and so on. But our student achievement is not extraordinary. This means that despite a lot of hard work, some key ingredients were missing. I have a theory. I think that the absence of meaningful external standards before 1998 prevented our strenuous and thoughtful efforts from having much traction. I would like to test this theory by examining ten notorious barriers to high student achievement, our struggle with each of them before the introduction of external standards, and what changed when Massachusetts finally mandated high-stakes tests. 1. Teacher isolation. In my first months as principal, I was struck by how cut off Mather teachers were from each other and from a sense of schoolwide purpose. I understood teachers’ urge to close their classroom doors and do their own thing; I had done the same thing when I was a teacher. But my reading of the effective schools research and my experience in the central office convinced me that if Mather teachers worked in isolation, there would be pockets of excellence but schoolwide performance would continue to be abysmal. So I struggled to get the faculty working as a team. I circulated a daily newsletter (dubbed the Mather Memo) and tried to focus staff meetings on curriculum and effective teaching strategies. I encouraged staff to share their successes, publicly praised good teaching, and successfully advocated for a record-breaking number of citywide Golden Apple awards for Mather teachers. I recruited a corporate partner whose generosity made it possible, among other things, to have occasional staff luncheons and an annual Christmas party. But morale never seemed to get out of the sub-basement. Staff meetings gravitated to student discipline problems, and as a young principal who was seen as being too "nice" to students, I was often on the defensive. We spent very little time talking about teaching and learning, and did not develop a sense of schoolwide teamwork. The result? Teachers continued to work as private artisans, sometimes masterfully, sometimes with painful mediocrity—and the overall results continued to be very disappointing. 2. Lack of teamwork. Having failed to unite the staff as one big happy family, I decided that grade-level teams were a more manageable arena in which to work on improving collegiality. I began to schedule the school so that teachers at the same grade level had the same free periods. Teams began to meet at least once a week and held occasional afterschool or weekend retreats (for which they were paid). A few years later, a scheduling consultant taught me how to create once-a-week 90-minute team meetings by scheduling Art, Computer, Library, Music, and Phys Ed classes back-to-back with lunch. This gave teams even more time to meet. After much debate, we also introduced "looping," with the entire fourth-grade team moving up to fifth grade with the same students (fifth-grade teachers looped back to fourth). Teachers found that spending two years with the same class strengthened relationships with students and parents and within their grade-level teams, and a few years later the kindergarten and first-grade teams decided to begin looping. But despite the amount of time that teams spent together, there was a strong tendency for the agendas to be dominated by field trips, war stories about troubled students, and other management issues, with all too little attention to sharing curriculum ideas. I urged teams to use their meetings to take a hard look at student results and use the data to plan ways to improve outcomes, and I tried to bring in training and effective coaches to work with the teams, but I had limited success shifting the agendas of these meetings. In retrospect, I probably would have been more successful if I had attended team meetings and played more of a leadership role, but I was almost always downstairs managing the cafeteria at this point in the day and reasoned that teachers needed to be empowered to run their own meetings. 3. Curriculum anarchy. During my early years as principal, I was struck by the fact that most teachers resisted using a common set of grade-level standards. In the central office, I had been involved in creating Boston’s citywide curriculum goals, and I was stunned by the degree to which they were simply ignored. While teachers enjoyed their "academic freedom," it caused constant problems. While teachers in one grade emphasized multiculturalism, teachers in the next grade judged students on their knowledge of traditional history facts. While one team focused on grammar and spelling, another cared deeply about style and voice. While one encouraged students to use calculators, the next wanted students to be proficient at long multiplication and division. These ragged "hand-offs" were a frequent source of unhappiness. But teachers almost never shared their feelings with the offending colleagues in the grade just below theirs. That would have risked scary confrontations on deep pedagogical disagreements, which teachers were sure would undermine staff morale. But the absence of honest discussion—culminating in an agreed-upon grade-by-grade curriculum—doomed the Mather to a deeper morale problem stemming from suppressed anger—and lousy test scores. I saw curriculum anarchy as a major leadership challenge, and tried again and again to get teachers to buy into a coherent K–5 sequence. At one staff retreat, I asked teachers at each grade level to talk to those at the grade just below and just above theirs and agree to better curriculum hand-offs. People listened politely to each other, but made very few changes in what they were teaching. Undaunted, I brought in newly written Massachusetts curriculum frameworks and national curriculum documents, but they did not match the tests our students were required to take and could therefore be ignored with impunity. When the Boston central office produced a cumbersome new curriculum in 1996, I "translated" it into teacher-friendly packets for each grade level—but these had little impact on the private curriculums in many classrooms. As a result, far too many of our students moved to the next grade with uneven preparation, and our fifth graders, although better prepared than most Boston elementary graduates, entered middle school with big gaps in their knowledge and skills. It was not a pretty picture, and I was intensely frustrated that I could not find a way to change it. 4. Weak alignment. As I wrestled with the curriculum issue, I saw that tests were a vital part of getting teachers on the same page. But virtually all of the standardized tests that students took were poorly aligned with the classroom curriculum (whatever that was) and were not well respected by most teachers. Boston’s attempt to write citywide curriculum tests in the 1980s was not well received, and the tests quickly fell into disuse. The tests that teachers gave every Friday and at the end of each curriculum unit were of uneven quality and covered a wide variety of topics with an even wider range of expectations and criteria for excellence. The only tests that got a modicum of respect were the Metropolitan Achievement Tests, which were given in reading and math at every grade level except kindergarten, with school-by-school results published in Boston newspapers. Sensing that teachers cared about the Metropolitan, I thought that it might be a lever for getting teachers on the same curriculum page and making predictable hand-offs of skills and knowledge to the next grade. I did a careful analysis of the Metropolitan and, without quoting specific test items, told teachers at each grade level what the test covered in reading and math. Did teachers use my pages and pages of goals? They did not. And hard as it was for me to admit it, they had a point. Teachers did not think they could improve their students’ scores by teaching toward the items I had extracted from the tests—or toward Boston’s curriculum, for that matter. The Metropolitans, being norm-referenced tests, were designed to spread students out on a bell-shaped curve and were not aligned to a specific set of curriculum goals or "sensitive" to good teaching (you could work hard and teach well and not have your efforts show up in improved scores). What’s more, I was pushing the ethical envelope by briefing teachers on the standards that were covered by a supposedly secret test. If Mather scores had skyrocketed, there might have been a major scandal. But I had stumbled onto an important insight. The key to turning around teachers’ well-founded cynicism about the tests they were required to give and the curriculum they were supposed to teach was to make sure that tests really measured a thoughtful K–12 curriculum. We needed to find both missing elements—a clear grade-by-grade curriculum and aligned tests—at the same time. I could not persuade teachers to buy into one without the other, and without both I could not coax teachers out of the isolation of their classrooms. 5. Low expectations. Another barrier in my early years as principal was teachers’ pessimism about producing significant student achievement gains. Hamstrung by the lack of aligned curriculum and tests, gun-shy about addressing their colleagues’ idiosyncratic classroom goals, and discouraged by the visible results of poverty (85% of our students qualified for free and reduced-price meals and the community around the school was plagued by unemployment and violence), most teachers regarded themselves as hard-working martyrs in a hopeless cause. Going for broke in my second month as principal, I brought in Jeff Howard, the charismatic African American social psychologist, and his "Efficacy" message hit home. Jeff spoke of combating our students’ lack of achievement motivation by getting them to see that you are not just born smart—you can get smart by applying effective effort. He grabbed the faculty’s attention with the notion that we could dramatically improve our results by directly confronting the downward spiral of negative beliefs about intelligence and effort. Over lunch, most of the staff buzzed with excitement. But after lunch Jeff had to go to another school, and the consultant he left in charge was swamped by defensive and increasingly angry reactions. Was he suggesting that teachers were racist? Was he saying that teachers were making the problem worse? And what did he suggest they do on Monday? By late afternoon, it was clear that my gamble to unite the staff around this approach had failed. Licking my wounds, I took a more incremental approach over the next few years, using private conversations, team meetings, the Mather Memo, and research articles to drive home the message that much higher student achievement was doable at the Mather School. I sent small groups of teachers to Efficacy training, and eventually brought in one of Jeff Howard’s colleagues to train the whole staff. It was an uphill battle, but gradually Efficacy beliefs were accepted as part of the school’s mission and it became taboo to express negative expectations about students’ potential. But we still did not see dramatic increases in our Metropolitan test scores. Belief was not enough. We needed something more to boost achievement in every classroom. 6. Negativism. The area in which I was least effective in my early years was dealing with some strong personalities who declared war on my goals as principal. It’s been observed that inner-city schools attract and nurture strong personalities and can develop a negative culture. When a leader starts to mess around with the unspoken expectations and mores of such a culture, he is playing with fire. When I appeared on the scene preaching that "All Children Can Learn," these teachers reacted with disbelief and active resistance. A parody of the Mather Memo ridiculed my idealism: "For Sale: Rose-Colored Glasses! Buy Now! Cheap! Get that glowing feeling while all falls apart around you." I was often aghast at the vehemence with which these teachers attacked me. Monthly confrontations with the Faculty Senate invariably got my stomach churning, and I took to quoting W. B. Yeats: "The best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity." I jokingly dubbed my antagonists the Gang of Six, but I could not hide my dismay when it was reported to me that on the day of the first Efficacy seminar, one of these teachers was overheard to say in the bathroom, "If I had a gun, I’d shoot Jeff Howard dead." I was continually off balance, and every mistake I made became a major crisis ("People are outraged! Morale has never been worse!"). On several occasions, I failed to set limits on outrageous and insubordinate behavior and assert my prerogatives as principal. Over a period of years, the most negative people realized that I wasn’t going anywhere and transferred out. They had understudies, and there were struggles almost every year in which I battled with them (not always very skillfully) for the hearts and minds of the silent majority, but the school gradually developed a more positive culture. However, it was only when we were confronted with a compelling external mandate that the positive folks found their voice and the remaining negative staff members fell silent. 7. A harried principal. As every busy principal knows, the hardest part of the job is making time for instructional leadership while dealing with the myriad administrative and disciplinary challenges of running a school. The limitless number of tasks that need to be done can also serve as a very plausible excuse for not dealing with the more intractable work of improving teaching and learning. After my initial setbacks with the staff, I plunged into a major campaign to raise money for a gala 350th anniversary celebration and was successful in sprucing up the aging and neglected building and garnering a great deal of publicity for the school. Although these improvements were important, I had no illusions that they were the heart of the matter. As I got better at handling the constant stream of "over-the-transom" demands on my time, I prided myself at being able to juggle several balls at once and often quoted an intern’s observation that I had two hundred separate interactions in a single day—and that did not include greeting students in the halls. I became an "intensity junkie," addicted to being frantically busy and constantly in demand. I had fallen victim to H.S.P.S.—Hyperactive Superficial Principal Syndrome—and was spending far too little time on teaching and learning. This realization led me to devise a plan for dropping in on five teachers a day for brief, unannounced supervisory visits.3 These visits and my follow-up conversations with teachers gave me a much better handle on what was going on in classrooms, improved my rapport with the staff, and formed the basis for much more insightful performance evaluations. But like a recovering addict, I continued to struggle with H.S.P.S. on a daily basis. I gradually accepted that I could not (as I had naively hoped) be the school’s staff developer. I began to bring in "coaches" in literacy, math, and science to work with teachers in their classrooms and team meetings. I stopped sending teachers off to isolated workshops and invested in training within the building. These changes greatly improved the quality of staff development for teachers—but test scores were still not improving as much as we hoped. 8. Not focusing on results. I became increasingly convinced that the most important reason for our disappointing scores was that we were spending too little time actually looking at what students were learning. The teachers’ contract allowed me to supervise classroom teaching and inspect teachers’ lesson plans, but woe betide a principal who tries to evaluate a teacher based on student learning outcomes. Resistance to evaluating teachers on results is well-founded at one level: unsophisticated administrators might use unsuitable measures like norm-referenced tests or unfairly evaluate teachers for failing to reach grade-level standards with students who were poorly taught the year before or had significant learning deficits. But not looking at the results of teaching during the school year is part of a broader American tendency to "teach, test, and hope for the best." The headlong rush through the curriculum (whatever that might be) is rarely interrupted by a thoughtful look at how students are doing and what needs to be fixed right now or changed next year. For a principal to ask for copies of unit tests and a breakdown of student scores is profoundly counter-cultural. These private artifacts are none of the principal’s business. Teacher teams don’t use them much either. They rarely pause at the end of a teaching unit to look at which teaching "moves" and materials produce the best gains, which are less successful, and which students need more help. With one notable exception, I failed to get teachers to slow down, relax about the accountability bugaboo, and talk about best practices in the light of the work students actually produced. 9. Mystery grading criteria. Looking at student work, especially writing and other open-ended products, is virtually impossible without objective grading tools. In many schools, the criteria for getting an A are a secret locked up in each teacher’s brain, with top grades going to students who are good mind readers. The absence of clear, public, usable guides for scoring student work prevents students from getting helpful feedback and robs teacher teams of the data they need to improve their performance. In 1996, the Mather made a successful foray into the world of standards-based thinking. Spurred on by a summer workshop with Grant Wiggins, the author of two books on assessment, including Assessing Student Performance, we wrote rubrics (scoring guides) for student writing that described in a one-pager for each grade the specific criteria for getting a score of 4, 3, 2, and 1 in Mechanics/Usage, Content/Organization, and Style/Voice. It was striking how much higher our standards were once we had written these rubrics; now we knew what proficiency looked like! We could also guarantee that the same piece of student writing would get the same scores no matter who graded it. Encouraged by our success, we began to give students a "cold prompt" writing assignment (a topic they had never seen before, no help from the teacher) in September, November, March, and June. Teachers scored the papers together and then discussed the results. This process was a breakthrough. We had found a way to score student writing objectively; we were sharing the criteria with students and parents in advance (no surprises, no excuses); we were giving "dipstick" assessments at several points each year; teachers at each grade were working as a team to score students’ work; and teachers were analyzing students’ work, giving students feedback, and fine-tuning their teaching. We began to see significant improvements in our students’ writing. But after a few years of regular scoring meetings and charting of students’ progress, our efforts began to flag. Finding enough time was always an issue, especially since the scoring/data analysis meetings were hard to fit into our 90-minute team meetings and many teachers had after-school family commitments. It takes very strong leadership—or another equally powerful force—to sustain this kind of work. 10. No schoolwide plan. Over the years, we eyeballed many different programs to turn around student achievement—Effective Schools, Efficacy, Success for All, Core Knowledge, Accelerated Schools, Comer, Schools Without Failure, Multiple Intelligences, Whole Language, Multicultural, and others—but none got the buy-in needed for successful implementation. As a result, we kept trying to "grow our own"—an exhausting and frustrating process. In the late 1990s, one "whole school" reform program was mandated as part of a Boston grant program. We appreciated the help (and the money!) but felt there were crucial pieces missing and drove the program administrators crazy by constantly second-guessing their model and adding components of our own. Perhaps we were asking for too much. Perhaps we should have committed to a less-than-perfect program and given it a chance to work. But we were on a constant quest for a better mousetrap. As we continued our search, two more narrowly focused programs had a big impact. The first was Reading Recovery, a highly effective, low-tech, data-driven program for struggling first graders. What caught the attention of the whole staff was that most of the students who appeared to be doomed to school failure got back on track after twelve weeks of hard work with the highly trained Reading Recovery teachers. After a few years of successful implementation, there was enough support to get all primary-grade teachers to buy into the Literacy Collaborative program, which was created by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell to align the way reading and writing are taught in regular classrooms with Reading Recovery. All of our K–3 teachers bought into the program and were trained by one of their colleagues through in-class coaching and a 40-hour after-school course in which teachers looked at student work and data (using a new scale of reading proficiency) and talked constantly about best practices in a low-stakes, collegial atmosphere. The program produced significant gains in our student achievement in the lower grades, and during the 2001–2002 school year we introduced the upper-grade version of Literacy Collaborative. But these very effective literacy programs were not part of a coherent schoolwide change plan. And this, along with all the other factors discussed above, prevented us from getting the kinds of achievement gains we knew our students could produce. Looking over this list of ten barriers to student success, it’s clear that there are powerful forces at work that tend to widen the achievement gap and create the "Matthew effect" ("To those who have, more will be given, and they will have abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away." Matthew 13:12). Children who enter school with middle-class home advantages tend to do well, even if they attend ineffective schools. But disadvantaged children desperately need effective schools to teach them key life skills and launch them into success. Unless there is strong leadership pushing back, the ten factors will make things much worse for these children. If teachers work in isolation, if there isn’t effective teamwork, if the curriculum is undefined and weakly aligned with tests, if there are low expectations, if a negative culture prevails, if the principal is constantly distracted by non-academic matters, if the school does not measure and analyze student outcomes, and if the staff lacks a coherent overall improvement plan, then students’ entering inequalities will be amplified and poor children will fall further and further behind, widening the achievement gap into a chasm. This presents a tremendous professional—and moral—challenge to principals, because they are ideally situated to influence each of these factors. If the principal is an effective instructional leader, the forces will be pushed back (at least for the time being) and the gap will narrow. For vulnerable, school-dependent children, this is a godsend. How did I measure up to this challenge? For more than a decade, I had limited success pushing back the powerful gap-widening forces. Mather students only began to make real progress when strong external standards were introduced, and that did not happen until Massachusetts introduced high-stakes tests (the MCAS) in 1998. When we heard that 800-pound gorilla knocking on our door, the turnaround happened with amazing speed. As our fourth graders took the first round of MCAS tests, one of our most effective teachers (who taught fourth grade) burst into tears at a staff meeting and proclaimed, "No more Lone Ranger!" She pleaded with her colleagues in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and third grade to prepare students with the necessary building blocks so that she would never again have to watch her students being humiliated by a test for which they were so poorly prepared. Some of our colleagues joined the handwringing across Massachusetts about making students the victims of a forced march to high standards. But in a subsequent meeting, the staff sat down and actually took portions of the MCAS and came to these conclusions: (a) although the test is hard, it really does measure the kinds of skills and knowledge students need to be successful in the twenty-first century; (b) the MCAS is a curriculum-referenced test whose items are released every year, making it possible to align the curriculum and study for the test (we are lucky to live in Massachusetts; some states use norm-referenced tests and keep their tests secret); (c) our students have a long way to go; but (d) most of our kids can reach the proficient level if the whole school teaches effectively over time. The only problem was that the Massachusetts frameworks and tests were pegged to grades four, eight, and ten, leaving some uncertainty about curriculum goals for the other grades. But the grade-four tests and accompanying "bridge" documents gave us much more information than we had before. We set up committees that worked with consultants to "tease back" the standards, and we then worked as a staff (with parent input) to create booklets with clear grade-by-grade proficiency targets accompanied by rubrics and exemplars of good student work. We also set a schoolwide achievement target four years into the future (an idea suggested by Jeff Howard), and then spelled out SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timebound) for each grade level to act as steppingstones toward the long-range target. Each year since, we have updated the SMART goals with higher and higher expectations. I believe that the rigorous, high-stakes MCAS tests had a dramatic impact on all of the areas with which we had struggled for so long. The grade-by-grade MCAS-aligned targets put an end to curriculum anarchy and kicked off the process of locating or writing during-the-year assessments aligned with those goals. This in turn focused the curriculum and produced data that teams could sink their teeth into, giving much more substance to their meetings. The rubrics we had developed just a year before were key tools in objectively measuring student writing and displaying data in ways that encouraged effective team discussions on improving results. As teachers gave up some "academic freedom," their isolation from each other was greatly reduced and grade-level teams had a common purpose. Our staff confronted the issue of teacher expectations when we took portions of the MCAS ourselves, and there was much less negative energy as we united in a relentless push for proficiency—a term we had never used before. My work as an administrator was much more focused on student learning results, which helped in the continuing struggle with H.S.P.S. And, finally, the perennial search for the perfect school improvement program came full circle to a very straightforward mission: preparing students with the specific proficiencies needed to be successful at the next grade level and graduate from fifth grade with the skills and knowledge to get on the honor roll in any middle school. We began to focus all our energy on continuously improving each of the components of a "power cycle": clear unit goals, pretests, effective teaching, formative assessments, data analysis, feedback to students and parents, and a safety net for students who fall through the cracks.4 The elements for greatly improved achievement are falling into place, and there’s help from the central office: Boston’s citywide curriculum goals are being aligned with the MCAS and reframed in a compact format for each grade level, and additional coaching and professional time are being given to all schools. I believe that the Mather’s student achievement will take off as the staff hones all the elements and captures big enough chunks of focused staff meeting time to process student work and data effectively. The most important work is hard to do within the school day, even in 90-minute meetings. Special afterschool retreats have to be in teachers’ calendars well in advance, money has to be available to pay stipends, and teachers need some initial coaching on making these data analysis meetings really effective. With strong leadership and continuing staff buy-in, these ingredients ought to make it possible for virtually all students to reach at least the proficient level. In closing, I want to return to the Ron Edmonds statement cited earlier. Edmonds often said that the existence of even one effective urban school (and he found a number of them) proved that we knew how to turn around failing schools—which meant that there was no excuse for any urban school to be ineffective. With these words, Edmonds laid a colossal guilt trip on urban educators who were not getting good results. His stinging rebuke may have jolted some educators out of fatalistic attitudes and gotten them thinking about ways to improve their schools. But was Edmonds right that we knew in 1978 how to turn around failing schools? Was he fair to thoughtful, hard-working school leaders? Was he a little glib about what it would take to close the gap? From my experience as a principal, I can testify that Edmonds and his generation of researchers did not provide a detailed road map to help a failing school find its way out of the woods. Without that, success depended too much on extraordinary talent, great personal charisma, an impossibly heroic work ethic, a strong staff already in place, and luck—which allowed cynics to dismiss isolated urban successes as idiosyncratic and say they proved nothing about broader school change. But Edmonds’ much more basic contribution was in getting three key messages into the heads of people who cared about urban schools: 1) demographics are not destiny, and inner-city children can achieve at high levels; 2) some specific school characteristics are linked to beating the demographic odds; and 3) we therefore need to stop making excuses and get to work. Turning around failing schools is extraordinarily difficult. My 15-year struggle to make one school effective has brought me face to face with my own personal and professional limitations and made me a student of school effectiveness and the key factors that get people and institutions to work more successfully. I have learned that the starting point has to be an almost religious belief that it can be done, and Edmonds served as high priest in that regard. A second necessity is an outline of what an effective school looks like, and the correlates of effective urban schools (which have held up remarkably well over the years) have given me a vision of the pieces that need to be in place for all children to learn at high levels. A third key piece is real expertise on turning around failing schools. Craft knowledge has increased by leaps and bounds. If I could go back to 1987 and start over again as principal with current knowledge about school improvement, progress would be made much more rapidly. But student achievement would still not have reached its full potential without a fourth tool: strong external standards linked to high-stakes curriculum tests. I believe that the arrival of standards and tests in the late 1990s provided the traction needed for a principal to push back the powerful gap-widening forces that operate within all schools. Building on the accumulated lessons of researchers and practitioners, today’s principals are in a much better position to be successful. If they believe passionately that their students can achieve proficiency, if they have a clear vision of what makes a school effective, if they learn the lessons of school change, and if they take advantage of external assessments, principals should be able to lead a school staff to bring a first-rate education to every child. Ron Edmonds would have smiled about that. So should all of us. Notes: 1. See Michael Rutter et al, Fifteen Thousand Hours: Secondary Schools and their Effects on Children (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). 2. Ronald Edmonds, "Effective Schools for the Urban Poor," Educational Leadership 37, no. 1 (October 1979), 15–24. I was eager to become a school leader and put these ideas to work. 3. Kim Marshall, "How I Confronted HSPS (Hyperactive Superficial Principal Syndrome) and Began to Deal with the Heart of the Matter," Phi Delta Kappan 77 no. 5 (January 1996), 336–345. 4. This power cycle is based on the most recent work by Jeff Howard’s Efficacy Institute: the Self-Directed Improvement System.

About A Nation Reformed?

On April 26, 1983, the blue-ribbon National Commission on Excellence in Education issued "an open letter to the American people" on the state of our nation's schools. "A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform" was one of many such reports that year, but its title and incendiary language set it apart almost immediately. We were warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity" in our schools that imperiled the nation's future. The symbolic opening salvo in a two-decade-long struggle to improve schools, A Nation at Risk helped put education reform at the top of the national agenda.

A Nation Reformed? takes stock of twenty years of school reform. Was the nation really ever "at risk" and, if so, is it still? Which reforms have made a difference and which haven't? And where do we go from here? The leading education scholars and practitioners assembled here-Richard F. Elmore, Susan H. Fuhrman, Nathan Glazer, David T. Gordon, Patricia Albjerg Graham, Pam Grossman, Jeff Howard, Timothy Knowles, Kim Marshall, Robert B. Schwartz, and Maris A. Vinovskis-present a balanced, thoughtful look at the past, current, and future effects of school reform on our nation's students, teachers, and communities.

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Table of Contents for A Nation Reformed?

Foreword
Patricia Albjerg Graham

Introduction
David T. Gordon

Riding Waves, Trading Horses: The Twenty-Year Effort to Reform Education
Susan H. Fuhrman

Change and Improvement in Educational Reform
Richard F. Elmore

The Academic Imperative: New Challenges and Expectations Facing School Leaders
Timothy Knowles

A Principal Looks Back: Standards Matter
Kim Marshall

Teaching: From "A Nation at Risk" to a Profession at Risk?
Pam Grossman

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Still at Risk: The Causes and Costs of Failure to Educate Poor and Minority Children for the 21st Century
Jeff Howard

The Limits of Ideology: Curriculum and the Culture Wars
David T. Gordon

Missed Opportunities: Why the Federal Response to the Report Was Inadequate
Maris A. Vinovskis

The Emerging State Leadership Role in Education Reform: Notes of a Participant-Observer
Robert B. Schwartz

The American Way of School Reform
Nathan Glazer

A Nation At Risk
The National Commission On Excellence in Education

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Publishing Information

A Nation Reformed?
American Education Twenty Years after A Nation at Risk
Edited by David T. Gordon
© 2003
ISBN 1-891792-09-1 $42.95 library
ISBN 1-891792-08-3 $21.95 paperback
232 pages

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