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POLICIES, PROGRAMS, AND PRACTICES OF THE SELECTED DISTRICTS CONT’D Pieces of the Puzzle
and brought a clear vision for districtwide improvement, strong leadership and instructional skills, communications expertise, and high expectations for student achievement and adult performance. She worked over several years to build consensus for reform on the elected school board and to break the district’s past negative culture. The board’s leadership was further enhanced by the city’s business community, which worked alongside the superintendent to build a school board that could work with the administration on academic improvement. This coalescence of forces attracted substantial investments and grants from national philanthropic organizations like the GE Foundation, the Panasonic Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which helped seed and support the reforms. Boston, meanwhile, benefited from the consensus and support of a strong, mayor-appointed school board led by a board president (Elizabeth Reilinger and now Gregory Groover), who had strong working relations with the former and current superintendents—Tom Payzant and Carol Johnson, respectively. The board used its mandate for improvement to spearhead a comprehensive five-year plan in 1996 that focused on strengthening student achievement and advancing standards-based instructional practice. No doubt, the leadership of the district was also spurred by state action in 1998 to require students to pass the Massachusetts exams in order to graduate. Much of the original plan remains intact, though with substantial enhancements in reading, under the leadership of Superintendent Carol Johnson. In Charlotte, a relatively stable school board worked with the superintendent to ensure support for an aggressive instructional reform agenda even when the board was not always unified on other issues. In the early 1990s, Charlotte was one of the nation’s early leaders and innovators in the standards movement under superintendent John Murphy, and the district benefited subsequently from a series of strong superintendents—Eric Smith, James Pughsley, and Frances Haithcock, who focused on instructional issues even as the district was settling one of the nation’s longest running court-ordered school desegregation cases. A new theory of action was pursued in the district under superintendent Peter Gorman. In addition to the school board and superintendent, another essential element in the reform agendas of the three districts was the strategic hiring and placement of instructional leaders in key leadership roles. In fact, by most accounts, Charlotte's approach to reform was guided by the core belief that people more than programs made the difference. District leadership systematically selected central office instructional staff they felt were committed to student achievement and had a record of success. Atlanta also developed what the site-visit team found to be an extremely strong and deep cadre of central-office staff members--including the deputy superintendent for instruction, director of reading, and director of mathematics—as well as principals with considerable expertise in instructional programming. These staff leaders formed the core of the instructional team that the superintendent used to implement and drive reforms. Similarly, Boston hired a former principal to lead curriculum and instruction, a math leader with national experience and considerable expertise, and other experts skilled at building partnerships and overseeing the strategic rollout of a new concept-rich math program, paying particular attention to the management of change in the implementation process. By most accounts from interviewees in each city—Atlanta, Boston, and Charlotte—these instructional leadership teams had excellent technical and programmatic skills and were open to and eager for change and innovation, and staff members at all levels who were passionate about the reforms. 145 Council of the Great City Schools and the American Institutes for Research 164
PIECES OF THE PUZZLE: FACTORS IN THE IMPROVEMENT OF URBAN SCHOOL DISTRICTS ON THE NATIONAL ASSESSMENT OF EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS