Achieving 'Success at Scale'

By Tom Vander Ark

Following the pioneering work of the Coalition of Essential Schools, the College Board, and others, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has worked over the past five years with dozens of foundations and hundreds of organizations in efforts to improve the nation’s high-school-graduation and college-ready rates.

The biggest lesson learned to date? It is even harder than we thought to create widespread improvement. My father is a brain surgeon; this is more complicated.

As a country, we’re beginning to build the will, knowledge, and tools to address the complex challenge of improving high schools, particularly those in communities that historically have not been well served. There have been pockets of success—individual schools that have posted impressive results. Yet the question of scale continues to dog our reform efforts: How do we create networks of successful schools, or districts that post consistently strong...