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Illinois School Board Journal
July/August 2003
Measures short on follow-through
by Albert T. Azinger and Paul J. Baker
Albert Azinger is an associate professor and Paul Baker is a professor emeritus in educational administration. Both are in the Department of Educational Administration and Foundations at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois.
Many reform movements have swept through America in the past two decades. The most recent and most powerful is the highly orchestrated campaign to establish statewide learning standards that raise the bar for student achievement. During the past decade, state agencies have been busy drafting standards for learning at every grade level and for virtually all areas of the curriculum. These standards are intended to elevate and unify rigorous academic expectations for all students from primary grades to high school graduation.
Once state officials have set the standards, a battery of mandated tests is administered to determine each school's success in reaching expected levels of learning. Throughout the nation, state officials and local educators have expended considerable time and energy to implementing standards and standardized tests that are intended to elevate educational gains in a continuous upward spiral.
Despite this massive movement to upgrade learning expectations in schools, an inconvenient fact persists: While most schools have become involved in learning standards, the results are meager.
Outstanding scholars who see merit in establishing high standards know the biggest challenges come after standards are in place. Setting standards is important, but in many ways, it is the easy part of the improvement agenda. Getting results proves to be a much more elusive and difficult task.
The connection between standards and results can be made, but the journey from high expectations to high achievement is extraordinarily complex. While the standards movement is a major development in the current era of school reform, it is not a quick fix for troubled schools.
Fortunately, a number of dedicated research scholars have been unraveling the complexity of school reform. They offer important observations and insights on the promises and pitfalls of setting standards and getting desired results. This recent scholarship offers hope for local educators who are challenged to translate the demands of higher standards into greater learning results for students.
But to what extent does the ubiquitous drive to set high standards lead to greater learning achievement?
Promises of standards
For the past several decades, educators have insisted that schools must have a curriculum that sets explicit expectations for student learning. Reformers have used various terms to specify the formal guidelines of the curriculum, terms like "learning objectives," "learning goals" and "learning outcomes." By the early 1990's, another term had been added: performance standards (also known as content standards).
The rapid popularity of this new term began in 1989 when national leaders such as Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Colorado Governor Roy Rommer, chairman of the National Education Goals, called for a bold educational policy that demanded high learning standards for all students. Major foundations like the Pew Charitable Trust, professional associations like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and business groups such as the Business Roundtable joined the reform project to assist states develop high, internationally benchmarked performance standards. Within a few years, most states responded by adopting standards for a variety of disciplines and identifying mandated tests to accompany the standards.
Advocates of performance standards argue that their approach to school improvement is a significant advance over previous efforts at planned educational change because standards are defined according to international criteria of high quality performance. Since students in several advanced industrial societies such as Germany and Japan outperform American students on international assessments, it is imperative to raise the bar for the United States.
Secondly, the new standards must eradicate the long-standing double standard of public schools in which some students are held to high expectations, but many others are allowed to get by with minimal effort. All students must be held to the same high standards. This imperative is driven by new demands for a high quality labor force in the competitive markets of a global economy.
Finally, standards are to be grounded in the core academic disciplines that define the essential knowledge and skills required in a modern society. Schools had allowed their curriculum to become too unwieldy with an array of interests and textbooks that covered too many topics superficially. The call for high standards required a more focused curriculum. These three aspects of higher standards allowed local educators to re-design their programs with greater commitment to high academic achievement for all students.
Two other aspects of the standards movement deserve mention. In the past decade, standards have been introduced as a crucial means of strengthening accountability. In the minds of most policymakers, accountability requires assessment of learning results that are linked to each standard. States, school districts, publishing companies and others have made huge investments to design tests that are aligned to the standards.
While the connection between standards and assessment is complex and highly controversial, insistence on making the connection has caught everyone's attention. Standards have consequences when they are measured and made public. In addition, the standards agenda is a national and state initiative that claims to take a systemic approach to school improvement.
In the 1990's, national and state leaders recognized the need to go beyond the simple steps of adopting standards and mandating tests to determine levels of learning achievement in the schools. They saw the need for a more comprehensive strategy that attempted to align standards to other aspects of school improvement, such as curriculum planning, in-service training of teachers, parental involvement, assessment and continuous review of assessment results. In short, they realized that standards cannot stand alone. They are part of a larger system of school betterment.
The Illinois State Board of Education joined the standards movement in 1997 by adopting the Illinois Learning Standards (ILS). In the state's official document 98 standards in seven disciplines -- English Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Social Science, Physical Development and Health, Fine Arts and Foreign Languages -- are presented for five levels of schooling -- Early Elementary, Late Elementary, Middle/Junior High School, Early High School and Late High School.
According to then-State Superintendent Joseph Spagnola, "The statements in this document define what Illinois citizens believe all students should know and be able to do as a result of their public schooling." This ambitious project is perhaps the most successful reform initiative of the 1990's.
Thousands of teachers, administrators, parents, business leaders, university professors and ordinary citizens were given the opportunity to participate in the development and refinement of the Illinois Standards. After adoption by the State Board, staff members carried out an extensive campaign to disseminate the Illinois Learning Standards to every public school in the state.
Many local educators have become familiar with content standards in various disciplines and have recognized the merits of the Illinois approach to learning standards. Principals and teachers throughout the state were receptive to standards. There was broad approval among educators that the Illinois Learning Standards represented a worthwhile improvement in public education.
Many of standards proponents see great promise in this recent innovation. Several aspects of the standards program have been elevated to a new level of legal necessity in the recent federal legislation known as No Child Left Behind. There is every reason to believe that local educators and school board members will be fully engaged in serious deliberations about performance standards for many years to come. It is not an educational fad that will vanish soon.
But questions remain. Are the standards really working? Does this movement offer evidence of success that matches its rhetorical promises? Is the call for higher standards simply the latest reform jargon about an enticing belief that official expectations lead to greater learning achievement? In short, setting performance standards has made great inroads in educational reform, but will greater student learning follow?
Organizing for systemic school improvement
In the 1980's many states created curricular frameworks that stipulated essential learning objectives and attempted to hold schools accountable to these objectives by administering mandated tests. But this approach to accountability did not lead to greater achievement gains in most schools. By the 1990's, policymakers knew they needed to develop a more systematic approach to standards-based reform. They realized that standards and tests are not sufficient levers for successful change for the vast majority of schools.
A broad consensus emerged among policymakers, researchers and administrators who saw the need to examine the school as a dynamic system with many parts to be organized in a coherent fashion. Two aspects of systemic thinking are crucial to a coherent understanding of successful change in schools.
First, because schools are made up of many parts, any attempt at improvement must bring the parts together as a whole working system. Second, processes of change are constantly under way in schools and must be understood in terms of actions and reactions that inevitably lead to countless anticipated and unanticipated consequences.
The framework for systemic educational improvement, which is essential for standards-based reform, rests on these two ways of looking at the school as a system. Those who commit to systemic school development must find a coherent pattern that connects the parts and the whole, and they must recognize the constant flow of actions and reactions over time.
In the past decade, much attention has been given to identifying critical components of schooling that must work together to achieve successful outcomes. There is no definitive list of these parts, but dozens of major initiatives by state departments of education, foundations, universities and school districts have identified a set of core components worth mentioning.
First, systemic reform begins with a focused and public agenda on learning. A broad group of leaders -- school board members, administrators and teachers -- work in concert to insist on learning as the primary purpose of schools. This central purpose drives the priorities of the school. Such a collective commitment to learning is contrary to conventional practices that allow teachers to work as solo practitioners. Significant advances in school learning are not likely to occur in settings where teachers define learning expectations according to their own inclinations. Systemic improvement rests on the precept that learning is high priority public work in a professional community of educators who share a common commitment to make a difference for students.
A second feature of systemic development is the rigorous scrutiny of learning through a series of tasks dealing with alignment. Alignment is both the individualized work of teachers and the collaborative work of teachers and administrators who develop a coherent set of relationships between the curriculum (what is taught), instruction (how it is taught) and assessment (measurement of what is learned).
The work of alignment often begins with state curricular guidelines that are also linked to statewide assessments of student outcomes. But this is only a small part of the alignment agenda. District groups, school wide committees and individual teachers also develop local assessments.
In open settings in growing numbers of school districts, colleagues scrutinize instructional strategies to determine their effectiveness in achieving desired student learning. This practice is sometimes called "lesson study." It is fully institutionalized in Japan and is becoming more significant in the United States.
Student work is also critically examined to better appraise the appropriate fit between teacher expectations and the level of student performance. Students sometimes keep a comprehensive set of their work in portfolios. A learning-centered school requires continuous analysis of student results that are generated from externally mandated tests as well as a variety of local assessments. These analyses of learning results drive the planning process, and planning becomes a collective endeavor that is well served by public evidence of student performance.
Two core components of schooling are setting the learning agenda and aligning curriculum, instruction and assessment. These activities cannot occur as isolated activities of the teaching staff. Systemic improvement requires the formation of collaborative structures that bring administrators and teachers together as working groups with a learning agenda. In the past two decades, work groups have taken various names: Building Leadership Team, School Improvement Team, Improvement Steering Committee. But they all have one thing in common: they develop agendas that examine a range of topics that bare on teaching, the learning environment, instruction, and student progress.
This often takes the form of assuming major responsibility for writing and revising the school improvement plan. These internal networks of collaboration are essential for moving the school forward, but the same can also be said for external networks. All too often the daily demands of schooling contribute to schools that are cut off from the circle of supporting adults who have the potential to provide essential human and material resources. To be successful, schools need to develop strong relationships with a larger world of families, community agencies, educational institutions, and professional networks. During the past two decades considerable attention has been given to building strong working partnerships with families, according to a study by Bruce Joyce.
Added to a need to enlarge working partnerships, educators now work in demanding environments that are constantly changing. As a result, the capacity to remain productive requires a major commitment to professional development.
Professional development is undergoing significant changes throughout the public school system. Previous practices of eclectic use of staff development days have been replaced with systematic efforts to link the continuing education of educators to the critical agendas of school development. Local educators are expected to advance their knowledge and skills in areas that are directly related to the learning programs of the school.
In Joyce's terms, professional development is a process of "total immersion." Time must be given for appropriate training opportunities, including continuous support for mastering new skills. There is greater awareness of the strategic importance of professional development and states and school districts are dedicating additional resources to targeted projects that are designed to enhance the learning agenda of professional educators.
We have identified five key components of systemic school improvement: a focused learning agenda; alignment of curriculum, instruction and assessment; internal networks; external networks; and professional development. These five pieces come together in a learning-centered school as an interrelated system that requires continuous scrutiny and adjustment. However, the five parts are not a context-free formula that guarantees high student achievement.
The five components are adaptive to the unique history and circumstances of each district and school. Furthermore, leadership on the part of many key participants is needed. Many aspects of leadership are critical: disciplined use of time; high energy; trusting relationships; playful imagination; and a persevering spirit. Systemic development is always challenging, but under the right circumstances the five components can move together to build better schools.
Brief consideration must be given to systemic aspects of the processes of change over time. Schools are often accused of stagnation and the failure to change. Nothing is further from the truth.
Schools everywhere are embroiled in the pressures of reform and change. An important aspect of systemic thinking for those who study successful schools is an awareness that all participants in the educational enterprise -- school board members, superintendents, principals, parents, teachers -- are moving through time in a continuous flow of actions and reactions. Everyone is caught in a moving web of interactions that defy simple description or prediction.
Change is ubiquitous, but it is never linear. Planners of standards-based education are challenged to harness the change process to shared goals and strategies that can be sustained as ongoing commitments. Standards have little meaning if they are not connected to a continuing improvement process.
In its most elementary form the educational change process involves planning, implementing plans and evaluating results (PIE). The processes are continuous and can be imagined as a moving PIE that never stops rolling. Once the first cycle of evaluation is completed, it is time to use the knowledge gained in the evaluation, plan again, and move forward with a second commitment to implementation. The second cycle is systematic because the elements of PIE are in place. But it is not a simple replication of the first cycle; new unanticipated developments will have occurred that must be taken into account.
Key people may have resigned and new staff must be trained. Original ideas looked good on paper, but actual experiences were disappointing. Additional time and training will be needed for professional development. For these and other reasons, the complex nature of standards-based education will require several years to be fully implemented.
Even then the work will not be finished, because in the changing world that engulfs schools, few things stay fixed for very long. Since standards reform is about learning and helping students reach their potential, the improvement agenda will never come to rest.
Most reformers of public schools have failed to understand the systemic nature of the change process. They have repeatedly initiated reforms as final solutions that can be quickly absorbed into the system as a self-contained episode of improvement. But imposed solutions often become one more problem for local educators, and school reform is perceived as a series of disconnected episodes that seem to lead to little improvement, but much frustration.
That frustration has resulted in school improvement planning being difficult to sustain. For the past several decades most school improvement plans were dead on delivery because they were not able to overcome the isolated and fragmented nature of teaching. In most schools, teaching and learning occurs in highly structured age-graded arrangements that allow each teacher to go into the classroom and conduct business-as-usual irrespective of the quality of the report. As long as teachers are loosely connected to their co-workers and most documents about the conditions of the school and its future are inconsequential, the chances of systemic school improvement are highly unlikely.
In short, in school arrangements that are segmented, school planning becomes one of those episodic events imposed from above and soon forgotten by the teachers who continue to show up and do what they have always done -- teach their classes in isolation.
Research studies about reform
Standards-based education and systemic school development represent the most recent attempt to launch a major reformation of public education. What are the chances of success? In the past decade, several researchers have attempted to answer this question with major studies of the standards movement.
The past quarter century witnessed an outpouring of research on effective schools and the merits of various school reform models that claim to connect academic standards to higher achievement results. Highlights of some of the major research projects offer insights into the complex world of planned change and school improvement.
The first clues about systemic school improvement came from a series of studies known as the "effective schools" movement. Researchers like Brookover, Edmonds and Rutter demonstrated the power of strong principal leadership, which they characterized by high standards being shared with the staff and expected of all students. In effective schools, everyone knew learning counted because the principal worked with teachers to monitor student progress and teachers worked together on articulated curriculum and encourage parental involvement.
In the 1980's, a number of researchers and practitioners designed and promoted a second generation of effective schools known as "whole-school" models. Examples included Accelerated Schools, Success for All and the School Development Program. By the middle 1990's, thousands of schools were implementing comprehensive school-wide reform (CSR). Studies on CSR schools provided support for the value of whole-school reform. Numerous researchers identified key factors such as extensive professional development and collaborative networks as crucial to translate standards into higher achievement.
In recent years, no city received more bad publicity about its schools than Chicago. Political and civic leaders responded to the challenge, and educational leaders launched major reforms that have yielded positive gains in most of the elementary schools of the city.
Anthony Bryk and his associates at the Consortium on Chicago School Research have conducted numerous studies to examine those factors that account for successful school development. They found several contributing factors essential to successful change and improved student achievement:
The key factors in Chicago are the same factors we mention as crucial in systemic school improvement.
It is important to note that the five factors mentioned by Sebring and Bryk are the formal structures that only provide "the skeleton for a productive school." They further state, "How people behave, interact, learn and work together is what breathes life into the school." They are quite clear that a cooperative spirit and social trust is needed among teachers, between teachers and parent, between teachers and principal, and between teachers and students for success to occur.
Finally, Bryk and his associates have argued that the major components of systemic school improvement must be held together by coherence. They observe that many local educators feel overwhelmed with too many reform initiatives that become disconnected fragments in the school program. Successful improvement planning must sort through this clutter and bring a sense of coherence to the instructional program.
Another prominent scholar of school reform, Richard Elmore, has found similar patterns of success in the implementation of standards-based education. Elmore conducted a case study of Community District Two in New York City, which is "by any standard, one of the highest performing urban school systems in the country." With a student population that is 60 percent low income, fewer than 12 percent of the students score in the lowest quartile. In comparable urban districts, 50 percent of the students would be expected to score in the bottom quartile.
What is the key to this high level of performance? Once again, the essential components of systemic improvement are identified:
In short, the district and school leaders identified and addressed problems of isolated teachers coping with fragmented projects that seemed to be adrift. A coherent long-term agenda on learning was established and reliable support kept the schools moving forward.
David Cohen also has studied the work of educational leaders who develop systemic school improvement strategies. He argues that successful leaders develop a "learning policy" to guide their decisions, saying that standards, assessments and accountability only succeed "if they are accompanied by extended opportunities for professional learning that are grounded in practice." Successful implementation of standards occurs when teachers have "a chance to study and use student curriculum and assessments and see examples of student work."
Cohen's notion of a learning policy focuses on student learning, but it also extends to adults and the priority of intensive on the job training. Professional development involves extended learning opportunities that are firmly situated in the school setting as colleagues work together on the challenging issues of curriculum, instruction, and assessment.
Since the pioneering studies of effective schools in the 1970's, researchers have repeatedly identified schools and districts that establish high expectations and motivate all students to reach the expectations. The logic that follows is if some schools can reach high levels of achievement, it seems reasonable to legislate such a standard for all schools.
It may seem like a good idea, but large-scale implementation of standards-based education faces many uncertainties. Several experts on school reform share Elmore's appraisal: "Most public schools and school systems, as they are now organized, are not equipped to meet the demands of standards-based reform."
In 1997, Illinois followed the prevailing logic and mandated Illinois Learning Standards. The ISBE offered extensive guidelines regarding the necessary steps for implementation. Questions arose regarding the degree to which this large-scale reform has taken place in the schools of Illinois and whether schools have implemented the standards.
ISBE sought answers by awarding a four-year evaluation to a research team at the University of Illinois-Urbana. The researchers, Lizanne DeStefano and Nona Prestine, surveyed more than 2,500 teachers in 61 schools. Another survey was sent to 137 building principals. And finally, field studies were conducted in six districts.
This impressive study provides a wealth of detailed information about the implementation of standards in Illinois public schools, but their findings cannot be summarized as a simple case of success or failure.
The good news is there appears to be a broad commitment to the Illinois Standards and a willingness to take the first steps toward implementation among most schools. DeStefano and Prestine constructed a five-point scale to identify degree of implementation. They report that most schools (57 percent) have reached Level 2. Several (42 percent) reached Level 3, but only one school reached Level 4.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this data is that it suggests many schools may be leveling off at the half-way point on the journey to full implementation of standards-based education. DeStefano and Prestine report that principals and teachers in Level Three schools "are generally satisfied with their progress and do not have either a clear sense of how to further ILS implementation or a strong desire to do so."
Most schools in the study report the same level of development. School leaders have aligned the Illinois Learning Standards to their curriculum, and they have conducted professional development workshops to help teachers gain greater knowledge of the standards and benchmarks for various grade levels and disciplines. Some have district committees in place and have established procedures for school improvement planning, formalizing policies and working out assignments for central office personnel.
All of these are important initiatives for standards-based education, but they alone are not sufficient to get the job done. DeStefano and Prestine further report three major aspects of systemic school development that have not taken place: "They (local educators) express concern that although district and school curricula are now aligned with standards, changes in classroom instruction and assessments have not followed suit. Content has changed, but instruction has not. Finally, local stakeholders acknowledge that parent and community awareness of ILS is low and do not see a clear course of action to improve it."
Superficial alignment has occurred, but the deeper and more labor-intensive work of connecting the curriculum to new approaches to teaching and new ways to assess student performance has not developed. Furthermore, little progress has been made on establishing new partnerships with parents. The implementation of standards-based education in Illinois may be stalled.
The importance of the University of Illinois study is confirmed by similar findings that are reported in a series of studies conducted at Illinois State University by Baker, Rau and Ashby in 2000, by Baker and Floit in 2002, and by Mehall in 2001. The ISU teams also found widespread support for standards and school improvement planning. Schools throughout the state reported significant progress in aligning the curriculum to Illinois Learning Standards. Teachers and administrators were also busy attending professional development workshops, and forming new procedures and committees to keep track of various records created by the requirements of alignment.
In the vast majority of schools, however, these early developments were not leading to the next phases of standards-based education, which are more challenging tasks for classroom teachers. Teachers were not making serious efforts to change to teaching strategies that would be more closely adapted to the standards. Furthermore, the work of assessing student results remained superficial and perfunctory.
The initial alignment work had not led to the development of a new local system of assessment that would provide rigorous analysis of student results that could be used in a systematic planning process. In short, two research teams studying the implementation of Illinois Learning Standards come to the same conclusion: School leaders in most schools have begun their journey, but they are only half way home.
Is there any way to account for the partial and superficial development of standards-based education in Illinois public schools? No simple answer appears, but the research at U of I and ISU suggest four possible explanations.
The first issue centers on the local educator's frustration with the state mandated test (ISAT) that is supposed to be aligned to the Illinois Standards. Most local educators do not perceive ISAT as a useful way to gain meaningful feedback on the standards. As one superintendent noted: "If the assessment itself doesn't provide adequate feedback to administration, teachers, students and parents, then the learning standards are useless, and that is the state of things. I do not believe the state assessment is helpful to either the school improvement process or the Illinois Learning Standards adoption."
A second factor is the abrupt termination of ISBE's Quality Assurance and Improvement Planning (QAIP) program that was designed to help local educators develop a systemic improvement planning process. QAIP began as a pilot program in 1997. Early efforts offered some evidence that local educators were willing to make the necessary changes required for systemic change. But the resources to help all schools work out the details of systemic improvement exceeded ISBE's capacity. The program was abandoned in 2001. At this time the state is not providing assistance to schools that have begun the alignment work, but need further guidance for full implementation.
A third reason for the incomplete development of the standards-based model for schools is the extra effort required for the next stages of development. Greater training is needed to acquire the skills necessary to assess student learning and obtain the kind of results that can be analyzed for purposes of changing teaching practices, revising curriculum, and making other improvements essential for increased improvements over time. Greater technical skills and additional time is needed for rigorous collaborative work. Unfortunately, these changes are not occurring in most schools in Illinois.
Lastly, standards implementation may have stalled because local educators think that their work is finished. Curriculum is aligned to standards, and everyone has become familiar with the new terminology. New curriculum materials such as textbooks and computer software are selected according to claims of alignment with the standards. Teachers are free to make other adjustments that seem helpful. The new curricular guidelines are no longer a problem for local educators.
Added to this is the perception that the change is really one of replacing one set of labels (Illinois Learning Goals) with new ones (Illinois Learning Standards). For many educators it became a smooth transition. The date would suggest that, in most districts, no one is examining the critical questions of re-organizing schools in order to use the new standards as a significant lever for major changes in curriculum, instruction, assessment, and continuous school improvement.
State officials want to know if the first five years of the implementation of the standards has contributed to gains in student achievement. DeStefano and Pristine examine the relationship between implementation and achievement in their final report. After studying four years of trend data, the researchers are still unable to establish a strong and clear relationship between standards, implementation and achievement.
A major problem facing the researchers is the limited development of schools according to their five-point scale of development. After four years, most schools were still on Level 2 and most that had moved to Level 3 had stalled. "Because schools have slowed in their ILS implementation," they said, "it is still difficult to examine the relationship between ILS implementation and ISAT performance." DeStefano and Pristine searched for correlations examining a number of scales and achievement data for various grade levels and subject areas. A few were found, but in most cases there was no correlation.
In another investigation, they found that the highest achieving schools in the state had lower implementation scores than the random sample representative schools.
The researchers claim: "Relationships between ISAT performance and ILS implementation are beginning to emerge." But a careful study of their findings suggests that the relationship is not robust, and there is no evidence to suggest it will grow stronger in the coming years.
Implications for school boards
What are the messages for boards of education about setting standards, getting results and the lessons learned from school reform? First, and foremost, is the overwhelming evidence that establishing standards is one tool among several necessary if the goal of increased student learning is the result desired. The findings of most researchers studying school reform suggest that benchmarking or setting standards is a necessary part of school improvement. However, those same researchers are equally clear that improved student learning is a complex process that requires an intentional blend of multiple factors to be successful. As a result, school boards need to be aware that establishing standards is only the beginning of a continuous process that will be repeated throughout the tenure of each board member if the district is serious about improving learning in the district.
Another message centers on the relationship of what we call "parts to the whole." It is only through some understanding of this issue that alignment of components necessary for effective school reform can occur. Standards are one of the parts, but to produce desired results, they must be aligned with and imbedded in the district's curriculum, instruction and assessment practices.
Recent studies in Iowa and Kansas suggest that boards of education that effectively help their districts address the relationships of the parts to the whole do so by engaging in open discussions, particularly about student learning, and establishing decision-making processes that include study of learning issues, use of data to inform deliberation, asking questions and only then making decisions. Such boards see the need to educate all students as a challenge.
We suggested earlier that systemic reform begins with a focused and public agenda on learning. Boards need to send a clear public message that the work of the board and the district is guided by a commitment to learning ,and that no student will be allowed "to fall through the cracks."
Alignment issues also have an external component. Much of the curricular material used in schools is dependent upon publishing companies. While districts are advised to develop curriculum to meet the district's unique needs, and most district leaders make concerted efforts to purchase materials that address the content of their curriculum, they are still dependent on what is offered in the marketplace. Few school districts have the resources to operate with only district-made instructional materials. However, one of the leadership roles within school districts is to ensure that materials align with mandated learning outcomes.
One of the frustrations reported over the last several years concerns the lack of alignment of the learning standards and the assessment instruments (ISAT). While a task force is making progress in addressing this issue, it will be several years before the state assessments and the state learning standards are aligned at all levels of testing. Discussion of the role of testing and its relationship to student performance within the district is an essential activity for boards to engage in as they develop strategy for implementation of improved student learning.
School boards also must consider the issues inherent in the need to remain focused on school improvement and the nature of school districts. Because schools are dynamic organizations that exist in a state of constant change, boards are constantly confronted with each meeting's current crisis. In the midst of such urgency the too common trend is to address school improvement as a series of discrete tasks to be acted upon.
At this juncture there is always danger of district leadership rapidly changing focus and the most recent issue becomes the new most important issue. Once this cycle begins the commitment that effective school improvement requires erodes into episodic events that arise as time permits. Board members are among those district leaders who must keep the district focused on what is most meaningful.
In the midst of turmoil that is characteristic of school districts, it becomes imperative the board, administrators and teachers share a common understanding about the centrality of the learning agenda and systemic school development. To be successful, the urgent cannot replace the important no matter how tempting.
Additionally, our review of literature suggests that, after several years of study by numerous researchers, there is common understanding of the pieces that are necessary for improving student learning. While names may differ (goals, objectives, outcomes), the critical issues are the same. Successful schooling rests on a clear sense of direction about what is worth learning and a support system that assures authentic learning opportunities for all students. Standards are only one of those pieces.
But even with all of the pieces in place, success is not guaranteed. There is no formula with the appropriate ingredients properly measured and mixed that will result in instant success.
One of the lessons of school reform is that it is hard work, which in turn requires strong leadership and trusting relationships. Sebring and Bryk comment that even when all components are present, school reform only has a skeleton upon which to build. For the skeleton to walk, the local district must add muscle.
And so the final message is that even after all the difficult work to build the "skeleton" of learning standards, boards must have the determination, insistence and faith to support activities that show promise of developing unique knowledge, trusting relationships and needed connections to give the skeleton life in their district.
References
Baker, Paul; Rau, William; Ashby, Dianne. Quality Assurance Improvement Planning Pilot Program: Third Annual Report, Illinois State Board of Education, Springfield, Illinois, 2000.
Bryk, Anthony & Schneider, B. Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002.
Cohen, David, & Hill, H.C. Learning Policy: When State Education Reform Works, New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 2001.
Desimone, Laura; Porter, A.; & Garet, M. "Effects of Professional Development on Teachers' Instruction: Results from a Three-year Longitudinal Study," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol. 24, pp. 81-112, Summer 2002
DeStefano, L. & Pristine, N. Evaluation of the Implementation of Illinois Learning Standards: Year Three Report. Springfield, Illinois: Illinois Board of Education, 2001.
DeStefano, L. & Pristine, N. Evaluation of the Implementation of Illinois Learning Standards: Year Four Report. Springfield, Illinois: Illinois Board of Education, 2002.
Elmore, Richard. "Building A New Structure for School Leadership," American Educator, Vol. 24, pp. 6-19, Winter 1999-2000
Illinois State Board of Education. Illinois Learning Standard, Springfield, Illinois, 1997
Joyce, Bruce; Showers, Beverly; & Rolheiser-Bennett, C. "Staff Development and Student Learning: A Synthesis of Research Models of Teaching," Educational Leadership, pp. 11-23, October 1987
Newmann, Fred; Smith, BetsAnn; Allensworth, Elaine; & Bryk, Anthony. "Instructional Program Coherence: What It Is and Why It Should Guide School Improvement Policy," Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Vol 23, pp. 297-321, Winter 2001.
Rau, William; Shelley, Mark; & Beck, Frank. "The Dark Engine of Illinois Education: A Sociological Critique of a 'Well Crafted (Testing) Machine'," Educational Policy. Vol. 15 pp. 404-431, July 2001
Sebring, Penny & Bryk, Anthony. "School Leadership and the Bottom Line in Chicago," Chicago, Consortium on Chicago School Research, February 2000