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Voices in Urban Education
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Sustaining Reform
VUE Number 9, Fall 2005
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EXCERPT:
The School District That Did the Right Things Right
By Lyn Sharratt and Michael Fullan
Lyn Sharratt is a superintendent (Curriculum and Instructional Services) in the York Region District School Board, north of Toronto, Canada, and an associate with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/ University of Toronto.
> Author's Biography
Michael Fullan is former dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto and is a noted author, consultant, and international authority on education reform.
> Author's Biography
On the surface, the York Region District School Board's reforms did not achieve their
desired results. But a closer look reveals what the district did right and offers clues to
how districts can attain sustained improvement.
This is a mystery story. It is about a district that apparently did the right things but seemed not to get commensurate results across all classrooms and schools. In this paper, we look closely at the details and discover a very important lesson about districtwide reform.
The district is York Region District School Board (YRDSB), which is a large multicultural district just north of Toronto, Ontario. YRDSB is a rapidly growing district with a diverse sociocultural and linguistic population; over a hundred different languages are spoken in York's schools. The school board has been opening, on average, at least five elementary schools a year for the last five years. There are 140 elementary schools and 27 secondary schools with over 108,000 students and 8,000 teachers in total.
Districtwide reform has become increasingly important over the past decade, as educational leaders have sought to achieve larger-scale, sustainable school improvement across the system. Our paper delves deeper into what such reform looks like and what we must do to obtain substantial success in student learning.
We don't provide here a review of the research on school district reform (for lessons learned from several cases, see Fullan, Bertani, and Quinn 2004). One recent major study, however, puts our paper in perspective. The Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform (2005) contains case studies of reform in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Seattle. All three systems had the attention of political leaders at all levels of the system; all focused on many of the "right things" like literacy and math, used obvious-choice strategies such as concentration on "assessment for learning" data, invested heavily in professional development, developed new leadership, and focused on systemwide change.
And they had money – Seattle, with $35 million in external funds; Milwaukee, with extra resources and flexibility; and Chicago, with huge amounts of additional funds. There was great pressure, but success was not expected overnight. Decision-makers and the public would have been content to see growing success over a five- or even ten-year period. It would seem that the conditions were ideal to accomplish significant reform.
Yet there was not corresponding success. The upfront conclusion of the case-study evaluators was:
Archives
Sustaining Reform
VUE Number 9, Fall 2005
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
EXCERPT:
The School District That Did the Right Things Right
By Lyn Sharratt and Michael Fullan
Lyn Sharratt is a superintendent (Curriculum and Instructional Services) in the York Region District School Board, north of Toronto, Canada, and an associate with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/ University of Toronto.
> Author's Biography
Michael Fullan is former dean of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto and is a noted author, consultant, and international authority on education reform.
> Author's Biography
On the surface, the York Region District School Board's reforms did not achieve their
desired results. But a closer look reveals what the district did right and offers clues to
how districts can attain sustained improvement.
This is a mystery story. It is about a district that apparently did the right things but seemed not to get commensurate results across all classrooms and schools. In this paper, we look closely at the details and discover a very important lesson about districtwide reform.
The district is York Region District School Board (YRDSB), which is a large multicultural district just north of Toronto, Ontario. YRDSB is a rapidly growing district with a diverse sociocultural and linguistic population; over a hundred different languages are spoken in York's schools. The school board has been opening, on average, at least five elementary schools a year for the last five years. There are 140 elementary schools and 27 secondary schools with over 108,000 students and 8,000 teachers in total.
Districtwide reform has become increasingly important over the past decade, as educational leaders have sought to achieve larger-scale, sustainable school improvement across the system. Our paper delves deeper into what such reform looks like and what we must do to obtain substantial success in student learning.
We don't provide here a review of the research on school district reform (for lessons learned from several cases, see Fullan, Bertani, and Quinn 2004). One recent major study, however, puts our paper in perspective. The Cross City Campaign for Urban School Reform (2005) contains case studies of reform in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Seattle. All three systems had the attention of political leaders at all levels of the system; all focused on many of the "right things" like literacy and math, used obvious-choice strategies such as concentration on "assessment for learning" data, invested heavily in professional development, developed new leadership, and focused on systemwide change.
And they had money – Seattle, with $35 million in external funds; Milwaukee, with extra resources and flexibility; and Chicago, with huge amounts of additional funds. There was great pressure, but success was not expected overnight. Decision-makers and the public would have been content to see growing success over a five- or even ten-year period. It would seem that the conditions were ideal to accomplish significant reform.
Yet there was not corresponding success. The upfront conclusion of the case-study evaluators was:
The three districts we studied had decentralized resources and authority to the schools in different ways and had undergone significant organizational changes to facilitate their ambitious instructional improvement plans. The unfortunate reality for the many principals and teachers we interviewed is that the districts were unable to change and improve practice on a large scale. (Cross City Campaign 2005, p. 4)Pursuing these curious findings – seemingly doing the right things and not getting results – our paper gets inside district reform in a way that explains why doing the apparent right things is not sufficient.
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