Pieces of the Puzzle Also important in Atlanta, Boston, and Charlotte was sustaining a commitment to the district’s vision for reform and its implementation throughout the jurisdiction. Despite initial pushback from teachers who disliked the systematic approach of the reading program in Atlanta, the district pressed forward with the implementation of its literacy reforms and gained and sustained teacher support over a number of years. Along the way, according to focus-group participants, teachers districtwide began to embrace the changes. In Boston, the district’s math reforms also met with considerable initial resistance and a lack of immediate results districtwide over the first several years. But the school board and superintendent resisted efforts to change course and abandon the new math program. Instead, the district redoubled its rollout efforts, engaging and communicating with schools and the community around the strategic plan and building broad-based understanding and ownership in the direction and success of the city's public schools. Charlotte also experienced initial resistance to its reforms but stayed the course until results were evident. The district was able to do this even as it saw turnover among some of its leadership and staff. Interestingly, Cleveland—like the three other study districts—had a long-serving, reform-minded superintendent during the study period, Barbara Byrd-Bennett. The city also had a mayorappointed school board, but that board did not have the same decision-making authority that Boston’s mayor-appointed body had. The superintendent vetted her decisions through the school board, but the board did not have the power to reverse her decisions. Many in Cleveland saw the superintendent as a visionary leader. She improved the district’s standing on state indicators, started to break down some of the organizational silos that had characterized the district for many years, improved student attendance and graduation rates, initiated a literacy program, and made other substantial instructional reforms that the district had never seen before. But, ultimately, the district as a whole lacked a well-defined and coherent theory of action or a strong underlying program of instruction to guide its reforms. Instead, the district let principals shape their schools’ instructional efforts with little guidance, oversight, or technical assistance from the central office. The consistency of instructional reforms may have been further undermined by district staff members that did not seem as strong as those the research teams observed in the other three districts. In addition, the district saw numerous changes in central-office instructional staff members during the study period, and this turnover was accompanied by ever-changing tactical agendas and programs that added to the inconsistency in program implementation. Overall, this lack of coherence at the program level led to an instructional effort that, while an improvement over the past, remained incapable of boosting academic performance on anything other than state tests. The district, in fact, did show substantial gains on the Ohio Proficiency Test (OPT) in reading, math, and science until it was phased out in 2005. Once it was replaced with the more rigorous Ohio Achievement Test (OAT), Cleveland showed only modest gains in math and little progress in reading in grades 3 through 8 during the remainder of the study period.
Goal Setting and Accountability The ability of the school districts to set clear academic goals and hold school and district staff accountable for instructional improvement appeared to be at the heart of reforms in Atlanta, Boston, and Charlotte. These districts articulated systemwide targets for improvement, as well as school-specific goals, promoting collaboration among staff at all levels to reach these goals. 146 Council of the Great City Schools and the American Institutes for Research Council of the Great City Schools • American Institutes for Research • Fall 2011
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