Ramping up schoolwide reform: three urban districts experience gains resulting from America's Choice design.

Some public schools do a great job educating students of color to high standards. But they populate public education much the way houses in rural regions appear at night from a jetliner passing high above--as faint beacons.

The core challenge of school reform today is to produce not merely a few glimmers of success but the dense glow of thousands of bright educational lights, to create not just a few schools that close the nation's troubling achievement gaps but entire systems of them.

Three urban districts with large populations of disadvantaged students of color--Rochester, N.Y., East Orange, N.J.; and Duval County, Fla.--have been successfully building such systems with the help of an outside catalyst, the America's Choice School Design, a comprehensive, standards-based school-improvement program (see "America's Choice School Design").

In Rochester, where 84 percent of the city's 34,000 students are African American and Hispanic and where 80 percent qualify for federally subsidized school meals, 31 of the district's 55 schools use the America's Choice design. In 12,000-student East Orange, home to the largest population of Haitian immigrants outside of Florida and where, like Rochester, 80 percent qualify for the federal meals program, 10 of the district's 15 elementary and middle schools have adopted America's Choice. And in Duval County, a sprawling, 850-square-mile district serving 126,000 urban, suburban and rural students in and around Jacksonville, officials have embarked on an ambitious plan to introduce the America's Choice model in all of the district's 131 elementary and middle schools.

Promising Start

The results have been encouraging. America's Choice has contracted with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, an independent research organization based at the University of Pennsylvania, to evaluate the performance of America's Choice schools.

In a recent evaluation of the 16 Rochester schools using the America's Choice design for several years, CPRE found students outperformed their counterparts in the city's non-America's Choice schools by an average 17 percentage points a year in 4th-and 8th-grade reading and by an average 26 percent in math, even though the America's Choice schools served greater percentages of disadvantaged students. The study found that African American students in America's Choice schools "consistently outgained white students, reducing the achievement gaps between white and minority students." The design, the study concluded, has been "particularly powerful" for Rochester's lowest-performing students.

In Duval County, where educators have stressed the writing component of the program, CPRE researchers found that America's Choice schools "regularly outgained students in other [Duval] schools in writing" after two years. And in East Orange, students in America's Choice elementary schools have made substantial gains. Between 1999 and 2004, the proportion of America's Choice 4th-graders meeting New Jersey's language-arts standard rose from 35 percent to 88 percent, and the proportion of its 4th-graders meeting the state's math standard jumped from 54 percent to 90 percent.

The relationships between East Orange, Rochester and Duval and America's Choice have different origins, but they share important features that are critical to the districts' successful work with an outside partner to improve school performance.

Leaders Lead

Top district administrators need to have a strong working knowledge of the comprehensive school designs that are being deployed in their schools, and they must make clear to teachers and principals that the designs are a district priority. Leaving relationships with comprehensive school-improvement programs to individual schools often results in too little commitment to the programs among school staffs.

John Fryer knew he wanted to use the America's Choice design when he became superintendent of the Duval Country district in 1998. He had studied school reform extensively the previous year and had been drawn to America's Choice and its standards-based school-improvement strategy.

Fryer, a retired Air Force major general who had headed the National War College and the National Defense University during his military career, mobilized quickly to sell the America's Choice program to the Duval school system and the Jacksonville community. A year before he formalized a relationship with America's Choice, he campaigned for one element of the program--a requirement that each student read 25 books a year--that he knew would be enthusiastically embraced. In a not-so-subtle message to his principals, he sent "book logs" to every student with a self-addressed envelope and students who returned the completed list to Fryer's office got a personal letter over Fryer's signature.

When a series of presentations by America's Choice staff in Jacksonville didn't initially win over the community, Fryer sent school system stakeholders into Duval schools to look at instruction through the prism of the America's Choice design in an effort to convince them that this approach would better serve students. At one point the superintendent asked every teacher in Duval to gather a writing sample that met the teachers' expectations. Standards ranged widely from class to class. "We discovered that, in effect, we had no standards," Fryer recalls. "It was a very compelling message."

Nonetheless, Fryer's leadership was tested early on when a politically powerful organization of Jacksonville churches put immense pressure on the Duval school board to abandon America's Choice in favor of a highly scripted reading program called Direct Instruction. A tense standoff was resolved when the school board voted to back America's Choice as well as a smaller Direct Instruction initiative.

East Orange's work with America's Choice began differently. In the late 1990s, the New Jersey courts required East Orange and other low-wealth districts in the state to adopt comprehensive school-improvement programs as part of a ruling in a long-running school finance case. Like his counterparts in many other so-called "Abbott districts," then-superintendent John Howard allowed his schools to select their own improvement programs. But after a year Howard realized his central office needed to play a more prominent role in the reform effort.

Howard named a top administrator as director of whole-school reform, who in turn helped educate school board members about the coming changes and appointed liaisons between East Orange schools and America's Choice and other comprehensive reform programs. The move has helped preserve the relationships despite East Orange having had four superintendents in the last five years. Laval Wilson, who assumed the top post in February 2003, signaled his support of America's Choice by attending the organization's regional training along with his principals.

In Rochester, Superintendent Manuel Rivera has delegated authority over America's Choice to his cabinet, particularly the district's three division chiefs for school development and operations: Marie Cianca, Cheryl Holloway and C. Michael Robinson. They sent curriculum specialists and other administrators to training sessions that would enable supervisors to recognize when the program is being implemented properly. The three division chiefs also attended.

The buy-in by this cadre of senior district leaders committed to comprehensive reform ensured an abiding relationship between Rochester and America's Choice, even though the 34,000-student city school district has changed superintendents since the program's arrival in 1998. Superintendent turnover can unravel relationships with comprehensive school-improvement programs. That hasn't happened in Rochester or East Orange.

Build Commitment

At the same time, all three districts have worked hard to win support for comprehensive school improvement from the ground up in schools.

"We learned early on that we wouldn't get much out of a comprehensive school design unless there's relentless implementation of the model," says Rochester's Cianca.

To encourage the level of implementation they want, Cianca and her colleagues have sought to ensure that teachers and principals back the models their schools use. A school-based planning team in Rochester makes a recommendation of a design to a school's faculty. Then 70 percent of a school's faculty must approve the selection. In Jacksonville, Fryer targeted 14 schools that reflected the demographic differences in the sprawling Duval system. But he vowed that the schools would introduce the America's Choice design only if 80 percent of the faculty approved the move. He made personal presentations at each school--and earned the votes he needed.

East Orange used model classrooms in schools adopting the America's Choice design to help overcome residual resistance from teachers who dug in their heels despite having voted to bring in change agents. The classrooms are part of the program's design, which includes classroom libraries of 500 books and other materials. East Orange principals then began demonstrating the America's Choice strategies for teaching reading, writing and math in the model rooms so teachers could see the program in action. "It sent a message that we were invested," says Gloria Calhoun-Scott, the administrator who superintendent John Howard subsequently put in charge of whole-school reform and who now heads the district's relationship with America's Choice and other comprehensive-reform providers as assistant superintendent for curriculum, instruction and operational services.

Rochester communicates the same message in another way: School administrators in the city's school system are evaluated in part on the rigor with which they implement reform models. Says Cianca: "The vast majority of assistant principals that get promoted have been effective at implementing school reform models. We've made that clear."

Many principals who have used comprehensive reform models successfully have sent the same sort of message to their teachers.

"We created a lot of peer pressure," says Sharon Vincent, principal of 400-student Fourth Avenue Elementary School in East Orange, a once-failing school that has turned itself around. "Teachers who used America's Choice strategies were rewarded and the resisters are gone."

Ramping Up

Given the size of the Duval County school system and the complexity of the political environment in such a large, diverse district, Fryer was careful to first introduce America's Choice in a small, representative sample of Duval schools. Doing so, he reasoned, would showcase the design in demographically different schools that the district's many political players could visit without overwhelming the district's training capacity.

After launching the America's Choice program in 14 schools in 1999-2000, he introduced the program in another 48 schools the following year. "You always have reform-minded early adoptors," he says, "but you need to reach a critical mass of schools using a program if you want to sustain the program over the long term. You have to get the zealots to move fast and bring the others along, while ignoring the vocal resisters."

In all three districts, administrators have been able to point to rapid improvements in student achievement under the America's Choice program. The cost of school reform and inevitable opposition from reform naysayers make such early victories important, says Fryer, who first focused on raising writing scores as a way to win support for his comprehensive, standards-based reform strategy. Why writing? "It is easier to get results quickly in writing than in reading," he says.

In Rochester, the standard daily school schedule had to be revamped in buildings using the program because an extended literacy block is a key feature of the design. Without the involvement of the three regional superintendents, the required schedule changes would have presented a major bureaucratic stumbling block. Many such seemingly minor problems can derail comprehensive reform if administrators are not in a position to solve them.

East Orange learned that lesson the hard way. The district's central office did not have staff in place to work with outside school-improvement organizations when its schools first started working with the organizations. The result was a tangle of logistical troubles and miscommunication that caused confusion and consternation throughout the district, undercutting reform efforts, says Calhoun-Scott.

One of the first things Calhoun-Scott did in her role as air traffic controller of whole-school reform in East Orange was to eliminate the overlapping and often-contradictory training that was expected of teachers by the district, textbook publishers and America's Choice. Teachers in participating schools were struggling to learn the program and being sent mixed messages about its importance until Calhoun-Scott reduced the amount of training unrelated to America's Choice expected of staff and sent a clear signal to principals that America's Choice training had the highest priority.

Calhoun-Scott also assigned a respected East Orange teacher, Lorena Simmons, to work with the school-improvement coaches that play a central role in the America's Choice program. The program requires every school it works with to appoint a math coach, a literacy coach and an overall design coach and then trains them extensively so they can counsel the rest of the teachers in their schools. With teacher turnover high in urban schools, the ongoing training maintains the momentum of comprehensive reform.

Simmons calls herself an "encourager of encouragers." She attends America's Choice regional and national training with the East Orange coaches, helps them interpret and roll out the design in their schools, ensures that training schedules work and that supplies arrive on time and makes sure principals don't use the coaches for unrelated tasks such as substitute teaching or bus duty.

Forge Relationships

Rochester, Duval and East Orange administrators suggest that strong, trusting relationships featuring open lines of communication are critical to districts working successfully with comprehensive-reform programs.

In Rochester, Cianca and her colleagues meet regularly with the senior America's Choice official in Rochester, Loretta Johnson, a respected public educator who spent most of her career in the city school system, including a year as interim superintendent. "Trust is key," says Johnson, who also meets regularly with Rochester principals using the program.

Fryer says it wasn't uncommon for him to speak weekly or even daily to America's Choice chief executive, Judy Codding, during the organization's first years of work in Duval County. East Orange's Calhoun-Scott, pointing to another reform organization's struggles in the district that stemmed from its frequent replacement of district liaisons, believes continuity in relationships is important to keeping reform efforts on track.

Unlike school management companies such as Edison Schools, America's Choice does not run schools and thus does not hire or fire principals and teachers. But important features of its design, including its extensive teacher training and common planning periods for teachers, nonetheless have come under scrutiny of teacher unions. Early on, the local bargaining unit in Duval County opposed the superintendent's plan to bring in America's Choice. The union balked at shared planning time, the use of contract-approved afterschool meeting times for training and what it characterized as more work without extra pay. It also worried that a contract with America's Choice would come at the expense of teacher pay hikes and sent union lawyers to audit teacher travel expenses to regional and national America's Choice training sessions.

But the union opposition largely evaporated because Fryer paid for the program from existing state and federal funding sources and because many Duval teachers embraced it. In the words of Sharon Van Horn, a 1st-grade teacher at Twin Lakes Academy Elementary, a suburban school with 1,240 students, "Faculty meetings used to be about minutia. Now they are about things that matter. America's Choice has changed the culture of the school." With an eye to teacher union concerns, districts that use America's Choice are careful to ensure that America's Choice coaches do not conduct employment-related evaluations of teachers.

Infrastructure Support

Many things can slow or permanently derail school-improvement efforts. A Florida legislative initiative to reduce class sizes, for example, has forced Duval County to hire 2,300 new teachers over the past two years--teachers who must be trained from scratch in America's Choice instructional strategies. Weak principals and high rates of staff and administrator turnover are common challenges.

To counter such problems and to sustain the initiative beyond the duration of his three-year contracts with America's Choice, Fryer has used an innovative strategy to build an infrastructure within his school system that permits Duval to use the program with limited support from America's Choice staff. He worked out an arrangement with America's Choice to put Duval County staff through the same rigorous, year-long certification that America's Choice requires its staff to complete before delivering the design. Then he licensed the use of America's Choice curriculum and instructional materials for every elementary and middle school in the county.

"We want to institutionalize change," says Fryer. "We want to make it stick." That is both the prospect and the challenge of comprehensive school reform.

RELATED ARTICLE: America's Choice school design.

The America's Choice School Design is one of the nation's largest comprehensive, K-12 school-improvement programs, serving some 325,000 students in 16 states and the District of Columbia.

The National Center on Education and the Economy, a nonprofit education organization founded in 1988, launched America's Choice in 1998 after conducting extensive research on the best educational practices nationwide and abroad.

In late 2004, NCEE created a for-profit subsidiary, America's Choice Inc. The new company's products include the America's Choice School Design, elements of the design that are sold individually and consulting services to states and large school systems. The America's Choice School Design features research-based teaching strategies, a 2 1/2-hour daily literacy block at the primary school level, in-school math and literacy coaches and a safety-net system for struggling students that includes double-period courses in literacy and math.

America's Choice works with local educators to establish leadership teams and model classrooms in each of the schools that adopt the design. A national network of curriculum and teaching experts helps schools implement the school-improvement program through on-campus and regional and national training efforts.

America's Choice works with school systems under five-year contracts at a base cost ranging from $70,000 a year for the America's Choice elementary school program to $75,000 a year for the high school program. Funding typically comes from Title I, the federal Comprehensive School Reform Program and other federal and state sources.

NCEE has contracted with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, headquartered at the University of Pennsylvania, to evaluate the performance of America's Choice schools. CPRE's studies can be found at www.cpre.org. More information on America's Choice can be found at www.americaschoice.org.

--Thomas Toch

Thomas Toch is writer-in-residence at the National Center on Education and the Economy, 555 13th St., N.W., Suite 500, Washington, D.C. 20004. E-mail: [e-mail]. He is the author of High Schools on a Human Scale (Beacon Press). America's Choice is a for-profit NCEE subsidiary.