Districts That Work: What the Research Says

In September of 2003, Michael Casserly, Executive Director of the Council of Great City Schools, spoke to the Superintendents Literacy Leadership Summit sponsored by Scholastic. Below are excerpts of his remarks describing the Council's Achievement Gaps Task Force research study.

All of us are facing challenges that public education has never faced before. I can't think of another institution — public or private — that is under more pressure to improve than urban public schools. We are being told to produce results or get out of the way. We are being told to improve or see the public go somewhere else. We are being told to be accountable for what we do or let someone else do it.

When Congress passed No Child Left Behind a couple of years ago, it did so not as an act of nurturance. It did so out of frustration — frustration at not seeing the progress they expected. And much of that frustration was aimed at urban America where so much of the debate about reform converges.

One of the scary things about No Child Left Behind is that it required not only universal proficiency, but mandates that we improve our whole systems. But if you look around at the research, there is not much to serve as a roadmap for how to get gains at the scale that NCLB and the public are demanding. There is a lot of research on what it takes to turn around individual schools, or pockets of schools. And there is a lot of research on individual programs, strategies, and groups of students. But almost all of this work ultimately concludes that we don't know how to take what we know works in miniature and apply it at a larger, systems level.

So we at the Council of Great City Schools started asking ourselves whether any big city school systems were improving at the scale the public was demanding - and then asking the question, "How did they do it?"

We went looking for cities that

• Had improved in all grades in reading and math on their state assessments
• Had improved over at least three years
• Had improved faster than the state overall
• Had narrowed racially-identifiable achievement gaps.

We looked at average scores and we looked at the percentage of students scoring at the proficiency level districtwide and by group. We eventually settled on studying Houston, Charlotte, Sacramento, and some portions of the Chancellor's District in New York City.

Our research question was this: "What do these districts do that others don't do?" The answer to our research questions came in two parts. The first was political and the second was strategic.

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