Looking Back over a Decade of Whole-School Reform: The Experience of New American Schools
Looking Back over a Decade of Whole-School Reform: The Experience of New American Schools
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十年整体学校改革回顾：美国新学校的经验
DOI：
10.1177/003172170208400214
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发表时间：
2002
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
S. Kirby
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
M. Berends;S. Bodilly;S. Kirby
作者警告说，联邦和州的政策制定者需要批判性地思考他们目前的立场，即同时促进高风险的考试，以创新课程和教学策略为中心的全面学校改革，以及采用多种额外的改革。当新美国学校（NAS）在1991年代表全校改革发起努力时，至少部分动机是零碎的学校改革方法对国家考试成绩几乎没有影响。NAS是一个私人的非营利组织，负责通过实施全校改革和利用设计团队提供的援助，帮助学校和地区显著提高大量学生的成绩。NAS的核心前提是，所有高质量的学校都有一个统一的设计，使所有工作人员都能发挥最大的能力，并将基于研究的实践整合到一套连贯和相互加强的有效方法中，为整个学校提供教学和学习。确保表现较差的学校采用成功的设计的最好方法是资助设计团队开发“打破常规”的学校设计，这些设计可以很容易地被全国各地的社区采用。设计完成后，团队将继续在全国各地的学校实施他们的设计。这种采用将导致NAS的主要目标，提高大量学生的表现实现。这种全校参与的教育改进方法是发起和传播大规模变革的一种截然不同的方式。这是一个独特的组合：1）私营部门的参与，使用风险资本家的方法; 2）选择全校设计作为改革的工具; 3）在全国范围内扩大规模的雄心勃勃的目标。此外，NAS采用的实验性方法要求在扩大规模之前仔细开发和演示设计。因此，它采取了分阶段的办法，包括：* 竞争和甄选阶段（1992年）; * 为期一年的发展阶段（1992-93年）; * 为期两年的示范阶段（1993-95年）;以及 * 为期三年的扩大阶段（1995-98年）。这种改进教育的方法提供了一个前所未有的机会，可以研究和理解学校改革从开始到完成的独特尝试。兰德公司的作用NAS接触兰德公司，为其学校改革工作提供分析支持。这种支持采取了多种形式，但它主要是为了记录和分析NAS在实现其广泛使用和实施设计的目标以及提高与该使用相关的学生表现方面取得进展的条件。支持包括以下分析任务：* 记录国家教育局为评估其对教育改革的贡献所做的努力; * 描述设计并分析设计随时间的变化; * 评估设计型学校在示范和推广阶段的实施水平; * 查明在示范和推广阶段阻碍或鼓励实施的因素;以及 * 衡量采用这些设计是否能达到NAS及其合作地区在扩大规模阶段所期望的结果。这些任务是在NAS倡议的头七年中进行的，从示范阶段一直到扩大阶段。研究结果已被记录在一系列兰德公司的报告中。这些年来，兰德的研究计划包括：* 对100多所在扩大规模阶段早期开始实施的NAS学校进行纵向抽样，包括校长、教师和学区的实施和绩效数据; * 对40所学校进行案例研究，分析实施情况以及学区在阻碍或促成全面学校改革方面所发挥的作用;* 描述设计如何从最初的建议阶段发展到全国学校的“大规模”实施; * 分析一个城市学区的设计如何促进课堂教学、教学和学习以及个人水平学生成绩的变化; * 分析高实施NAS地点的绩效差异;以及 * 与NAS员工和设计团队负责人的持续讨论。…
Federal and state policy makers need to think critically about their current stance of simultaneously promoting high-stakes testing, comprehensive school reforms that center on innovative curriculum and instructional strategies, and the adoption of multiple additional reforms, the authors warn. WHEN THE New American Schools (NAS) launched its efforts on behalf of whole-school reform in 1991, at least part of the motivation was that the piecemeal approach to school reform had produced little change in the nation's test scores. A private, nonprofit organization, NAS was charged with helping schools and districts raise significantly the achievement of large numbers of students by implementing whole-school reforms and by taking advantage of the assistance offered by the design teams. The core premise of NAS was that all high-quality schools possess a unifying design that allows all staff members to perform to the best of their abilities and that integrates research-based practices into a coherent and mutually reinforcing set of effective approaches to teaching and learning for the entire school. The best way to ensure that lower- performing schools adopted successful designs was to fund design teams to develop "break the mold" school designs that could be readily adopted by communities around the nation. After developing the design, teams would go on to implement their designs in schools across the country. This adoption would lead to the fulfillment of NAS's primary goal of improving the performance of large numbers of students. This whole-school approach to educational improvement was a dramatically different way of initiating and disseminating large-scale changes. It was a unique combination of 1) private-sector involvement, using a venture capitalist approach; 2) the choice of whole-school designs as a vehicle for reform; and 3) the ambitious goal of scaling up across the country. Moreover, the experimental approach adopted by NAS required careful development and demonstration of designs prior to moving to the scale-up efforts. Thus it had a phased approach including: * competition and selection phases (1992); * a development phase of one year (1992-93); * a demonstration phase of two years (1993-95); and * a scale-up phase of three years (1995-98). This approach to educational improvement offered an unprecedented opportunity to study and understand a unique attempt at school reform from its beginnings to its completion. RAND's Role NAS approached RAND to provide analytic support to its school reform efforts. This support took many forms, but it was primarily intended to document and analyze the conditions under which NAS made progress toward its goals of widespread use and implementation of the designs and improved student performance associated with that use. The support included the following analytic tasks: * to document the efforts of NAS to assess its contributions to education reform; * to describe the designs and analyze changes in them over time; * to assess the level of implementation in design-based schools during the demonstration and scale-up phases; * to identify factors that impede or encourage implementation in the demonstration and scale-up phases; and * to measure whether adopting the designs resulted in the outcomes desired by NAS and its partnering districts in the scale-up phase. These tasks were conducted over the first seven years of the NAS initiative, from the demonstration phase through the scale-up phase. The results have been documented in a series of RAND reports. Over these years, RAND's program of studies has included: * a longitudinal sample of more than 100 NAS schools that began implementation early in the scale-up phase, including data on implementation and performance from principals, teachers, and districts; * case studies in 40 schools to analyze implementation and the role that districts play in impeding or enabling comprehensive school reform; * a description of how designs have evolved from the initial proposal stage to implementation "at scale" in schools across the nation; * analyses in one urban school district of how designs promote changes in classroom instruction, in teaching and learning, and in individual-level student achievement scores; * an analysis of performance differences in high-implementing NAS sites; and * ongoing discussions with NAS staff and design team leaders. …