Moving Beyond the Conventional Wisdom of Whole-District Reform

By Stacey M. Childress

Faced with dismal international comparisons and federal 'Race to the Top' Fund pressures, school districts must take on two difficult tasks at once: raising the outcomes of top-performing students, while accelerating the learning of students who are behind. And they must find ways to do this in every school, not just in a few exemplars.

Experts offer deceptively simple advice: Hire great principals and teachers, make data-driven decisions, hold everyone accountable, build a strong school culture, and engage stakeholders. Districts seem to be listening: Strategy documents posted on many of their Web sites routinely contain some version of these five prescriptions. Yet few are delivering excellence and equity for all of their students.

The Montgomery County, Md., public school system is not one of them. It enrolls 140,000 students, about half of whom are African-American or Hispanic, and has a performance story different from those of many other districts of similar size. As its top quartile of performers did better from 2003 to 2008, the lower quartiles improved even faster. Montgomery County cut in half the literacy and math gaps between early-grade African-American and Hispanic students and their white counterparts, and doubled the number of African-American students passing Advanced Placement exams. Hispanic kindergartners’ reading levels were 25 points lower than white students’; today the gap is...