Improving Student Learning Requires District Learning: A School Improvement Initiative in Connecticut Points to Lessons That Can Benefit All Districts Seeking Systemic Changes That Support Student Learning

The strong and growing pressure to raise academic achievement for all students has focused educators' attention on student learning. More than ever before, teachers and administrators at all levels know they must do something to ensure that all students reach challenging standards. But, what exactly must educators do to raise achievement? Accountability systems seem to assume that the desire to avoid sanctions will encourage schools to do the right thing. But it's not at all clear that all educators know what will raise achievement for all students, particularly in schools that are struggling. After all, teachers want to do right by their students; if they were aware of effective practices, they would have employed them already. Even less clear is what school districts should do to ensure that all schools are effective. Virtually all districts can point to a few schools that are successful and to schools that have made impressive gains. And some districts, such as the districts that have won the Broad Prize, have demonstrated substantial improvements in achievement and narrowed achievement gaps. But no district can say that every school in its borders is high achieving. And most districts are struggling to provide the right mix of policies and supports to ensure that every school succeeds. How can districts create systemic improvement--improvement that affects every classroom? For seven years, a handful of Connecticut districts have tried to find out and have been supported by the Connecticut Center for School Change to do so. As part of the Systemic Instructional Improvement Program (SIIP), the districts have pursued strategies designed to yield large-scale instructional improvement and to ensure that every aspect of their operations supports schools and students. After five years in the program, district officials took stock of their efforts. All of the districts could point to genuine systemic improvements and, most important, evidence of substantial student achievement gains. And in the process of pursuing this strategy, the districts and the center have learned a great deal about what it takes to bring about systemic improvement. At the outset, there was no road map, and everyone who was involved forged a new path. Their successes, as well as their challenges, provide lessons for themselves and for others. PRELIMINARY ASSUMPTIONS Although the center didn't have a precise recipe to follow in its work with districts, it did start with some basic assumptions. The first was to focus on the district as the unit of change. While there has been increased attention to districts in recent years, when the center started this work in 2001, the district focus wasn't the logical or popular choice. Many reformers tried to bypass districts entirely by creating schools that would be free from district rules or involvement or by placing authority over schools at the state level. These reforms reflected the widespread--and in many cases, legitimate--view that districts were dysfunctional entities that thwarted, rather than fostered, improvement. But the districts didn't go away. And a growing body of evidence suggested that districts could, and in many cases did, support large-scale improvement. (Annenberg Institute for School Reform 2002; Snipes, Doolittle, and Herlihy 2002; Togneri and Anderson 2003). Indeed, the evidence showed that, because of their scope, districts were essential to ensure that all schools, not just the few favored by freedom from rules, improved. A second key assumption was that the goal should be improvement in instruction. Any other kind of improvement would not do. This, too, was a shift from conventional practice. Although the rhetoric of reformers suggests otherwise, schools and districts make changes frequently. They're constantly introducing new programs and policies. But such changes have seldom led to improvements in learning, because they've failed to address the instructional core (Elmore 1996). …