Finding # 3: The Special Strategies schools obtaining the greatest academic gains for their at-risk students paid a great deal of attention to issues of initial and long-term implementation, and to institutionalizing the reforms. Several general and a great many program-specific implementation issues, if not successfully addressed, permanently crippled otherwise promising programs.
A realistic perception of local strengths and areas in need of improvement was key in the most successful schools in Special Strategies. What were the specific problems facing students at risk in the school? In the most successful schools the answer was derived in advance of program selection and was much more detailed than just "low test scores." Was the principal willing to lead the faculty through the challenges of successfully implementing a particular innovation? What percentage of the faculty was willing to consider various magnitudes of meaningful changes in their teaching and in the organization of their work? If a particular administrator or teacher was unwilling to consider any practical changes to a clearly less than optimal educational program, how willing was the district or the principal or the faculty to provide further inducements for change? What community, district, and state supports could be counted on? To greater or lesser degrees in various sites, all of the above issues mattered during program implementations. In this regard, schools self-assessment processes surrounding the development of Chapter 1 schoolwide project plans were often constructive.
Initial choices among diverse program or design improvement options are many. In Special Strategies we studied ten promising options, and perhaps a hundred others are discussed nationally. Countless other "programs" are developed annually in Americas 16,000+ school districts. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, schools had at least theoretical access to the National Diffusion Network, Regional Educational Laboratories, Chapter 1 Technical Assistance Centers, and the resources of state Chapter 1 offices and state departments of education. In addition, schools had at least theoretical access to information from diverse professional associations at the state and national levels. Given that wide band of options, several Special Strategies researchers were struck with the relatively small number of options most schools examined before choosing a specific program.
Several of the schools had no option at all: They were simply told by central administrators that their school would be receiving a particular computer-assisted-instruction program, or would be implementing a particular type of school reform.
By contrast, the principal in SFA-A had gone with a district team to examine several different school reform options before considering Success for All, and several members of her staff visited a Success-for-All site before the full faculty voted on that particular reform. In two of the schoolwide projects, the principals and the full faculties considered at least four different routes to reform before selecting their somewhat site-tailored paths.
Full and active district, school administration, and faculty commitment to the final choice of reforms was not always sought. Yet there was always a price paid when the commitment of one of the three groups was not achieved. We found an initial and often sustaining lift for the program when multi-level commitments were obtained. The fact that community demands and central administrative responses helped create the extended-year schoolwides, and that faculty and administration were asked to make five-year commitments to the process, strongly signaled a directional change in those schools. The fact that most schoolwide projects involved a unified plan shared by central office and school-level administration plus the great majority of faculty provided strength to subsequent efforts. In Special Strategies, regardless of the abstract strengths of a reform, the fact that a principal and faculty had considered diverse options and voted to follow a particular path increased the probability of successful implementation.
On the other hand, the Coalition of Essential Schools was only partially implemented in the five high school sites due in part to consistently scattered commitment. No whole faculty fully embraced reorganizing high school curricula away from their traditional scope and sequence, school support lagged for scheduling joint teacher preparation periods and multi-period classes, and only one of the five high schools studied produced a stable, multi-grade, multi-year program of assessment through performance.
Allowing "transfer with dignity" for any faculty member unwilling to undertake a reform that had been voted by the great majority of a faculty and the principal was often helpful. Program implementation at several Special Strategies schools was permanently hampered by steps taken by one or a few faculty who did not wish to participate in the effort. At successful sites, administrators occasionally spoke of district policies that allowed any faculty member in any school attempting reform to "transfer with dignity" (without negative repercussions and with all seniority) at her or his own initiative. "Transfer with dignity" was policy in the district supporting SFA-A and two of the more successful schoolwide projects. Principals at those schools spoke of quietly counseling small numbers of faculty that perhaps they would feel more professionally fulfilled at another school, and of facilitating those teachers transfers out of the Special Strategies schools.
Similarly, schools that were allowed to handpick new administrators and faculty based on the applicants awareness of and commitment to the schools particular reform were much more likely to sustain the reform. In spite of destructive riots in their city and other potentially harmful conditions, the principal and faculty of Extended Year Schoolwide-B, all of whom had volunteered for and committed to five years work at the school, were able to hold the program together. The 1990-93 principal at SFA-B (the low-implementation, minimal-gain school in Figure 8) was not aware that she had been transferred to a Success-for-All school and was not informed as to the requirements of successfully administering that program until after she had arrived. In addition, the faculty had no voice in choosing their new leader. The new principals "buy in" was understandably low, and the program never regained the momentum it was reputed to have held under the previous principal.
Acquiring and productively using long-term, targeted technical assistance was often key to program implementation. Becoming a Reading Recovery teacher requires a full year of focused training, followed by permanent cycles of focused staff development, classroom observation, and feedback. In the extended-year schoolwide projects, all staff received almost three weeks of coordinated staff development each year for five years. Schools involved in Success for All are expected to continue a relationship with a regional support team. By contrast, at several locations central administrators assumed that once a school had experienced initial training in a new program, they "had done" that program. In site after site, Special Strategies observers noted that new teachers and administrators were not taught the specifics of a particular program or design as they entered, and that these new hires often did not buy into the design.
A few characteristics were common to sites at which programs were discontinued during or shortly after the three years of Special Strategies observations. In a few cases there was a school and/or district perception that the program was not living up to its goals, and was discontinued for this reason. Others were victims of what appeared to be political decisions or shifts to "the latest thing." When a school or system discontinued one program and substituted another, claiming that the new program was "more cost effective" without providing strong evidence of cost savings and without a stable research base on the effectiveness of the new program, observers could hardly be surprised to hear teacher cynicism about "new programs."
At some schools, teachers, principals, and parents were able to band together and resist new generations of minimally-researched initiatives. They were able to continue a focus on an ongoing reform within their school. Almost invariably, these more fad-resistant schools were led by academically focused, activist principals.
Each Special Strategy had program-specific requirements for full implementation. Typically, those specifics were not fully spelled out by developers before a school began implementation. Principals and faculty members who had visited at least one other school involved in their particular reform were often less surprised by and better prepared to address program-specific implementation issues when those issues inevitably arose. Several of these program-by-program implementation requirements are spelled out in Appendix A; others are detailed in Chapter Fourteen of the Final Report.
