Table Of ContentMaking
School
Reform
Work
New Partnerships
for Real Change
Paul T. Hill
and
James Harvey
, Editors
Making School
Reform Work
Making School
Reform Work
New Partnerships
for Real Change
Paul T. Hill
James Harvey
editors
brookings institution press
Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2004
THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
www.brookings.edu
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Making school reform work : new partnerships for real change / Paul T. Hill and James
Harvey, editors.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8157-3641-X (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. School improvement programs—United States. 2. Community and school—United
States. 3. Business and education—United States. 4. Education, Urban—United States.
I. Hill, Paul Thomas, 1943– II. Harvey, James, 1944– III. Brookings Institution.
IV. Title.
LB2822.82.M35 2004
371.2'00973—dc22 2004016554
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication meets minimum requirements of the
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for
Printed Library Materials: ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Typeset in Sabon
Composition by Stephen D. McDougal
Mechanicsville, Maryland
Printed by R. R. Donnelley
Harrisonburg, Virginia
Contents
Foreword vii
1 A Fresh Assessment: Why Reform Initiatives Fail 1
Paul T. Hill and James Harvey
2 The Need for New Institutions 8
Paul T. Hill
3 New Capacity for Civic Oversight 17
Paul T. Hill
4 Getting out of the Facilities Business 26
Michael DeArmond
5 Incubators for New Schools 41
Abigail Winger
6 Taking Advantage of Teacher Turnover 52
Sarah R. Brooks and Paul T. Hill
7 Institutions to Find, Prepare, and Support
School Leaders 65
Paul T. Hill and Sarah R. Brooks
v
vi contents
8 Rethinking Data Capacity 83
Marguerite Roza
9 A School Inspectorate 98
James Harvey
10 Toward a “Third Way” 115
Paul T. Hill and James Harvey
Contributors 123
Index 125
Foreword
in 1997, recognizing that big city public school
systems were continuing to struggle despite more than a decade of reform
initiatives, Brookings and its Brown Center on Education Policy set out to
create new, more powerful options for city leaders. We designed our work
to help mayors and leaders of business and philanthropy as well as school
boards and superintendents. Brookings nonresident senior fellow Paul T.
Hill, a professor at the University of Washington’s Daniel J. Evans School
of Public Affairs, led the work. The effort was funded by the Alcoa Foun-
dation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the
Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, and the Joyce Foundation.
This is the third and final book to emerge from Brookings’s urban pub-
lic education initiative. Our first book, Fixing Urban Schools (1998), ana-
lyzed the proposed strategies for urban education reform, including
standards, teacher training, school chartering, and vouchers, and showed
that each addressed only a subset of the problems that urban public edu-
cation must overcome. It concluded that effective reform initiatives must
both strengthen existing public schools and create independent options
that would compete with existing schools and create choices for families
stuck in unproductive schools.
The second book, It Takes a City (2000), studied reform initiatives in
cities considered at the time to be making the most progress toward school
improvement. It reported that none of the cities’ reform strategies was as
deeply thought through or as well implemented as advertised. Even rela-
tively weak reform initiatives, when implemented, were often abandoned
vii
viii foreword
as soon as their effects on the work of teachers and administrators stimu-
lated resistance.
It Takes a City concluded that reform initiatives strong enough to change
the overall quality of public education in a city must combine three
elements:
—Incentives to reward good performance and sanction bad, including
giving families choices so that people and resources can move from less-
to more-successful providers of instruction;
—Investments in capacity, to encourage new approaches and ideas that
can be optioned by educators and parents; and
—School freedom of action, so that people with new ideas about how
to use money, children’s and teachers’ time, and instructional methods
can put them into practice and also abandon their own practices in favor
of better ones they see elsewhere.
The book also concluded that school boards and superintendents are
too politically vulnerable and unstable to implement deep and lasting
change. It suggested that communities need new leadership structures with
wider constituencies than the teachers union and PTA and that reform
requires institutional capacities that school districts are unlikely to de-
velop. It Takes a City ended with the promise of a third book, one that
would show city leaders how they could construct civic coalitions that
could build and sustain effective reform strategies, and how cities could
build other institutional capacities necessary for reform.
This new book fulfills the promise made at the end of It Takes a City.
It explains why cities need to create stronger leadership and deeper ca-
pacities than school districts can provide and shows how they can do it.
The seven chapters, all written by research staff members at the Univer-
sity of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education, show how
cities can create
—Long-lasting civic reform oversight groups to formulate and sustain
support for reforms;
—Incubators to create new schools;
—Real estate trusts to break the school district’s monopoly on school
buildings and find facilities for new schools;
—Independent institutions to analyze school performance data and re-
port on the progress and sticking points of reform;
—Ways to strengthen the teaching force by attracting teachers from
among the ablest college graduates;
foreword ix
—New ways to identify and develop principals who can lead schools
in an environment of performance pressure and competition for students;
and
—Inspectorates that can diagnose schools’ performance more richly
than is possible via test scores alone.
Volume editors Paul Hill and James Harvey conclude the book by de-
fining the “third way philanthropy”—by which foundations and businesses
help public education by creating institutional capacities that school dis-
tricts need but cannot provide for themselves—and estimating the costs
of such institutions in a typical metropolitan area.
Brookings is proud of this book and the work that has led to it. It helps
fulfill our commitment to developing constructive new ideas that serve
the public interest.
STROBE TALBOTT
President
Brookings Institution
August 2004
Washington, D.C.
Description:Bringing change to our public school system is hard, and the current system of education governance creates barriers that can make that reform even harder. Here six authorities in public education discuss how local philanthropies can overcome them even if school districts cannot. Making School Refor
