Closing the Achievement Gap in Urban School Districts

A Forum — June 7, 2002

Since early 2001, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) and the Council of the Great City Schools (CGCS) have collaborated on a study of changes in the minority achievement gap in large urban school districts throughout the country. In particular, MDRC and CGCS are conducting an exploratory study of large urban school districts making progress in improving overall achievement and reducing racial differences in student performance. This work follows the Council's previous work on student achievement and achievement gaps. It attempts to initiate a line of discourse and research regarding the role of the district in reform. It also explores the factors that differentiate districts that have made progress in improving student achievement, particularly reducing racial differences in student achievement, and those districts that have experienced less success.

The study is organized around four basic questions:

• In the districts under study, what is the historical, administrative and programmatic context within which these changes in student achievement patterns took place?
• What district level strategies for improving student achievement and reducing racial disparities were used in these districts?
• How can we characterize the overall changes in student achievement in these districts?
• What is the relationship between policies and practices at the district level, and changes in teaching and learning in the classroom?
• Our panelists presented findings from an upcoming report from CGCS, focusing on the challenges faced by these districts, the process of reform in each location, and the implications of these experiences for reform in large urban school systems.

Michael Casserly, Executive Director of CGCS, noted that urban schools are currently under more pressure than any other institution-public or private-to improve. While U.S. schools have been making headway in increasing student achievement, this has sometimes come without any progress in closing the achievement gap. The CGCS study looks for districts that have improved reading and math achievement across the board while closing the achievement gap. He emphasized that the results presented at the forum were exploratory and preliminary.

Fred Doolittle, Vice President and Deputy Director, MDRC's Department of Education, Children, and Youth, provided an overview of the research questions and study design, as well as emerging research findings from the first phase of the study.

The study draws on the experiences of three large urban school districts and a part of a fourth district (Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NC, Sacramento City, CA, Houston, TX, and District 85, NYC) that have experienced some success in improving student achievement and reducing racial disparities in performance and two comparison districts that have not made such progress. The research team made two site visits to each of the three study districts, each for two days. The first visit focused on district leadership and reform strategy, and the second focused on following the story down to the classroom level. Each of the study districts has generally improving trends, though gains often have been stronger at lower grade levels and among disadvantaged and minority children. In general, improvements have been concentrated at the elementary school level, with districts not yet making progress at the high school level. The districts' overall patterns do not appear to be explained by changes in only a few schools.

All of the case study districts have worked to create the political and organizational pre-conditions for real change and have adopted a common set of educational improvement strategies. For example, all have created a new role for their school boards, gradually shifting them from involvement in administrative decisions to policy setting. Each board has found a superintendent who shared its basic vision for change. This shared vision often boiled down to doing a few key things intensely and continuously. The boards have required their superintendents to be held personally accountable for achieving specific goals.

Jason Snipes, Senior Research Associate, MDRC, and co-principal investigator for the Closing Achievement Gaps Project, discussed educational improvement strategies employed by the case study districts, including:

• Creation of a culture of accountability and administrative infrastructure to support it
• Focus on low performing schools
• District-wide adoption of uniform curricula aligned with state standards and centralized instructional strategies
• Focused, substantive, intensive professional development to support implementation of curricular reforms
• Focus on thorough implementation of district strategies at the school and classroom level
• Use of data to drive instruction and resources
• Efficient business operations, with a focus on customer service to schools
• Initial focus on elementary schools

The case study districts encountered similar challenges in implementing reform, including changing the role (and attitudes and district-wide perceptions) of the central office, facing controversy when staff were removed or demoted, building infrastructure to meet data needs, building support among teachers for more prescriptive curricular reforms, and confronting charges that their educational focus was too narrow or that reforms undercut academic excellence.

The study includes comparisons to districts which see themselves as making many of the same reforms as the case study districts but which were, in fact, less successful. These comparison districts were different from the study districts in a number of significant ways:

• The districts lacked a clear consensus around a vision for reform.
• District goals were not specific. District leadership was less clear about or had not committed to specific achievement targets, and goals were not associated with times, deadlines or consequences.
• There was less focus on a unified instructional strategy and often multiple and conflicting curricula and instructional expectations.
• Improving student achievement was not the specific focus of the day-to-day operations in the central office.
• The central office was not committed to ensuring their strategies were actually being implemented at the school level.

Snipes discussed several themes emerging from the study. Overall, the study finds evidence that underscores the importance of district-level policy and practice, particularly in large urban school districts, in addressing major challenges facing American education systems. In addition, study districts share a stable consensus for change, created and maintained by the board and superintendent, and they maintain a culture of accountability to support the implementation of reform. The case study districts also demonstrated that quality teachers and instructional coherence, made possible by focused, consistent, and extensive professional development, may improve learning in urban systems. Finally, providing early and on-going assessment data, and training teachers and administrators to use these data to diagnose weaknesses and develop instructional responses, may improve instructional practice and increase student achievement.

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