The political — what we came to call the "preconditions" — involved the ability of the school system to form a single agenda around student achievement and then to sustain it over time. It involved the ability of the school board to create a shared vision for what it wanted academically and then to find a superintendent who shared that vision. Boards in these faster improving districts changed from focusing on decisions involving budget modifications and personnel hiring to broader policy questions about student achievement and overall district direction. They worked hard at selling their policies to the public.

This was possible because the board and the superintendent owned the same vision and had worked out together how they were going to achieve it. In sum, the level of joint ownership for reform at the superintendent and school board level was different in the faster-improving districts than it was in the cities that were not making gains.

The second thing that really distinguished the faster improving districts involved the internal strategies they were pursuing. These districts had nine "best practices" in common:

1. They set districtwide and school-by-school goals for improving student achievement that were measurable and had specific timelines for attainment.
2. They created a convincing accountability system that started at the top of the district and went down at least to the principal level. In most cases, the district placed senior management on performance contracts tied to the districtwide and school-by-school goals. In Sacramento, the school board itself signed a pledge that it would step down if they could not raise student performance.
3. They adopted a single, districtwide curriculum, especially in reading, that was aligned to state standards, supplemented where necessary, and accompanied by detailed pacing guides. These districts were also extremely skilled at unpacking the store-bought programs they had acquired and analyzing where the gaps were between those curricula and the state performance standards — and then supplementing the curriculum with very targeted materials.
4. They developed and implemented a districtwide professional development plan on the curriculum's implementation rather than having each school determine its own training.
5. They established some kind of mechanism for driving reforms into the classroom and then monitoring them. Sometimes this meant reading or math coaches. Sometimes it meant a revision in what principals were charged with doing. All of the districts, however, used a fairly sophisticated "walk-through" process for monitoring classroom practice.
6. They conducted regular assessments of student achievement over the course of the school year — so they weren't waiting until it was too late to do anything about a failing kid. And they used the data in very sophisticated ways to intervene in schools that were having trouble or with teachers who needed more professional development or support.
7. They started their reforms at the elementary level and worked up rather than trying to tackle all grades at once.
8. They back-filled with intensive strategies at the middle and high school levels with kids who had not attained the basic skills earlier. This usually meant double-blocking kids in reading and math classes, or using specialized interventions like Scholastic's Read 180. None of the districts, however, made significant gains at the high school level — and I am convinced that it remains the last frontier of the school reform movement.
9. They had specific strategies for focusing on their lowest performing schools. Sometimes this meant even more frequent testing, or extra resources, or incentives for the best teachers to work in these settings, or IEPs for each student.

Now, none of these things are particularly mysterious. Many school districts do some of these things. What was different in these cities was how seamlessly they integrated them. The slower moving districts — by contrast — tended to be less coherent, more program-driven, less data-oriented, and less focused.

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