School Reform and Improvement

Key Concepts Leadership: Effective leaders of school reform are good managers, focus others on the reform, decentralize the reform effort, and match people with tasks. Getting Started: Getting started involves preparing to plan. Essential activities include developing a school leadership team, determining how prepared the school is for change, informing and engaging stakeholders, and beginning professional development activities. Comprehensive Needs Assessment: The needs assessment often involves developing a school profile. This profile should address the following dimensions: student learning, curriculum and instruction, school organization, family and community involvement, and student factors. Inquiry Process: The purpose of inquiry is to explore and verify the primary need areas identified in the comprehensive needs assessment, consider various approaches to addressing these needs, and identify promising approaches. Planning: The school improvement plan should offer substantive changes in how the school conducts its business, changes in school organization, curriculum and instruction, and in parent involvement. Implementation: Effective implementation is dependent upon good communication with school staff and community, effective training of all participants, ability to be flexible, and the readiness to redesign organizational infrastructure. Evaluation: Evaluating the effectiveness of a school reform program involves both monitoring the implementation of program components and assessing student outcomes.

Continuous School Improvement Educators involved in continuous school reform often describe this reform as cyclical rather than linear in design. The process is never static, nor does it proceed in a linear step-by-step fashion. Rather it is dynamic and recursive, as indicated by the graphic. For example, if the components depicted in the graphic proceed in a clockwise fashion, planning for a schoolwide reform program precedes its implementation; however, in reality planning and implementation often blend together­ thus, the forward and backward arrows. These arrows symbolize the forward and backward movement of continuous school improvement. Roadblocks encountered in implementation can serve to refine and redirect the planning, which can in turn impact future inquiry and conduct of the comprehensive needs assessment. Moreover, as the graphic indicates, ongoing school reform is never finished. As school demographics, student needs, and community influences change, so will the school itself need to change, thus putting in motion again these school reform processes.