Building District Capacity for Scaling up Instructional Improvement in High Poverty Schools

Improving instruction and achievement in many high poverty schools has long been an intractable social problem in America (Elmore & McLaughlin, 1988) with strong implications for equitable opportunities among our nation’s youth. State standards-based reforms (SBR) and accountability systems are one significant recent effort to address this challenge (Smith & O’Day, 1991; Furhman, 1999). Since state content standards are often intentionally ‘largegrained’ to allow for local control, district managers have had to fill-in or otherwise operationalize the guidance presented by the state (Author, 1997; Spillane, 2004).

But while these professionals have been pressed to coordinate and more or less elaborate instructional guidance from a central position, researchers and policymakers have also encouraged a more decentralized location for instructional improvement. From this view, schools should be the principal authority over instructional practice, bypassing district bureaucracies that have often been seen as obstacles to creative reforms rather than guides for positive change (Chubb & Moe, 1990; Finn, 1997). Comprehensive school reform (CSR) designs developed by independent, non-governmental organizations for schools complement this perspective (Berends, 2004). Recent studies show that some research-based CSR designs can improve instruction and achievement, even in schools where students are challenged by economic or other disadvantages (Borman, Hewes, Overman & Brown, 2003; May, Supovich, & Perda, 2004; Rowan, Camburn, Correnti, & Miller, 2007). At the same time, emerging literature also suggests that districts can be effective in improving student achievement if they centralize instructional management by developing coherent guidance policies, providing resources for teachers’ learning aligned to those policies, and holding schools accountable for outcomes (Author, 2000; Elmore & Burney, 2000; Fink & Resnick, 2001).

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