In recent months, I’ve had a number of conversations with state and district leaders about implementing the ESSA evidence standards. To its credit, ESSA diminishes federal micromanaging, and gives more autonomy to states and locals, but now that the states and locals are in charge, how are they going to achieve greater success? One state department leader described his situation in ESSA as being like that of a dog who’s been chasing cars for years, and then finally catches one. Now what?
ESSA encourages states and local districts to help schools adopt and effectively implement proven programs. For school improvement, portions of Title II, and Striving Readers, ESSA requires use of proven programs. Initially, state and district folks were worried about how to identify proven programs, though things are progressing on that front (see, for example, www.evidenceforessa.org). But now I’m hearing a lot more concern about capacity to help all those individual schools do needs assessments, select proven programs aligned with their needs, and implement them with thought, care, and knowledgeable application of implementation science.
I’ve been in several meetings where state and local folks ask federal folks how they are supposed to implement ESSA. “Regional educational labs will help you!” they suggest. With all due respect to my friends in the RELs, this is going to be a heavy lift. There are ten of them, in a country with about 52,000 Title I schoolwide projects. So each REL is responsible for, on average, five states, 1,400 districts, and 5,200 high-poverty schools. For this reason, RELs have long been primarily expected to work with state departments. There are just not enough of them to serve many individual districts, much less schools.
State departments of education and districts can help schools select and implement proven programs. For example, they can disseminate information on proven programs, make sure that recommended programs have adequate capacity, and perhaps hold effective methods “fairs” to introduce people in their state to program providers. But states and districts rarely have capacity to implement proven programs themselves. It’s very hard to build state and local capacity to support specific proven programs. For example, due to frequent downturns in state or district funding come, the first departments to be cut back or eliminated often involve professional development. For this reason, few state departments or districts have large, experienced professional development staffs. Further, constant changes in state and local superintendents, boards, and funding levels, make it difficult to build up professional development capacity over a period of years.
Because of these problems, schools have often been left to make up their own approaches to school reform. This happened on a wide scale in the NCLB School Improvement Grants (SIG) program, where federal mandates specified very specific structural changes but left the essentials, teaching, curriculum, and professional development, up to the locals. The MDRC evaluation of SIG schools found that they made no better gains than similar, non-SIG schools.
Yet there is substantial underutilized capacity available to help schools across the U.S. to adopt proven programs. This capacity resides in the many organizations (both non-profit and for-profit) that originally created the proven programs, provided the professional development that caused them to meet the “proven” standard, and likely built infrastructure to ensure quality, sustainability, and growth potential.
The organizations that created proven programs have obvious advantages (their programs are known to work), but they also have several less obvious advantages. One is that organizations built to support a specific program have a dedicated focus on that program. They build expertise on every aspect of the program. As they grow, they hire capable coaches, usually ones who have already shown their skills in implementing or leading the program at the building level. Unlike states and districts that often live in constant turmoil, reform organizations or for-profit professional development organizations are likely to have stable leadership over time. In fact, for a high-poverty school engaged with a program provider, that provider and its leadership may be the only partner stable enough to be likely to be able to help them with their core teaching for many years.
State and district leaders play major roles in accountability, management, quality assurance, and personnel, among many other issues. With respect to implementation of proven programs, they have to set up conditions in which schools can make informed choices, monitor the performance of provider organizations, evaluate outcomes, and ensure that schools have the resources and supports they need. But truly reforming hundreds of schools in need of proven programs one at a time is not realistic for most states and districts, at least not without help. It makes a lot more sense to seek capacity in organizations designed to provide targeted professional development services on proven programs, and then coordinate with these providers to ensure benefits for students.
This blog is sponsored by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation