From Good to Great Schools

To make good schools better, we need to look at factors other than adequate yearly progress.

By Patrick F. Bassett

While the nation works to "leave no child behind" in poor and underperforming schools, we must be equally concerned about our best-performing schools, public and private. Are they world-class? Will they produce students who can compete well in a global economy and be worthy citizens of the new millennium? How many of our good schools can become great schools?

We need to ask these questions, because even our best students are losing ground to their peers in other countries. The United States could once take solace that, regardless of a wide achievement gap between high-performing and low-performing students, our best and brightest compared competitively with their counterparts in other nations. But this is no longer the case. Today, American 12th graders taking Advanced Placement courses are average or below-average performers on international comparisons of student achievement in calculus and physics, for example.

New forms of mandated accountability for public schools, such as measuring adequate yearly progress, will ensure that more schools pay attention to nontraditional learners and differentiate instruction for every student and student subgroup. But "adequate yearly progress" will not motivate successful schools to raise performance beyond their own status quo, or ratchet up the richness of student portfolios, or ensure that high-achieving students will be concerned about the world beyond their own résumés and Advanced Placement scores. Adequate yearly progress will not help schools better identify ways to use technology to accelerate learning or create new virtual demonstrations of knowledge that have real-world...