Now, let's be clear that reforms like these not only solved problems. They also created them.

• Teachers rebelled at the loss of freedom in their classrooms.
• People worried about the narrowing of the curriculum.
• Parents choked on the amount of testing.
• Some worried that gifted kids would be shortchanged.
• Others fretted over the top-down nature of the reforms.

There were also things that we couldn't answer from the research. We couldn't tell, for instance, anything about the relative importance of each reform component. We weren't clear about the exact nature of the professional development or the data systems that helped drive the reforms in these districts. We weren't sure about the precise roles of such smaller-bore reforms as technology. It is possible that they are not as important as we thought or that they play only supporting roles in reform. We also weren't clear about the exact role of preschool education, extra money, and smaller class sizes. The research on the effectiveness of each of these strategies is pretty good — but none of them drove the gains we witnessed.

We also don't know whether there are other ways to get gains at scale other than those used in our study districts. We don't know if we could replicate gains at scale if we introduced the reforms in some systematic way. And we are not sure how to get gains at scale beyond basic levels of performance.

In the course of our research, I came to agree with many of the critics that "the system" — at least its embodiment in the central office — was a problem. Not because central offices are an antiquated idea as many critics content, but because so many central offices have abrogated their responsibilities for improving student achievement to the individual schools and said, "You figure it out."

The districts that were getting broad scale gains did just the opposite. They acted at scale to get gains at scale. The faster-improving cities built their reform agenda explicitly around student achievement; sustained that agenda over time; were systemic in the implementation, consistent in their application, and relentless in their focus.

What we learned was that you couldn't pick and choose among the reforms I talked about earlier. You couldn't decentralize your most important instructional and curriculum decisions to the schools and expect to get improvements at scale. You couldn't hit your districtwide targets by having everybody aiming in different directions. And you couldn't buy reform off the shelf. There was no program or package you could buy that would improve instruction all by itself.

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