Taking charge of high school reform: the Breakthrough High Schools project studied 30 high schools that are raising achievement, increasing graduation rates and preparing students for college and work.

Increased scrutiny has brought a laser-like focus to America's schools. The rewards of good performance and the sanctions of poor performance now generate strategies and actions at all levels in the education hierarchy. The successes experienced by some schools serve as an encouraging public announcement that success for every student is possible.

However, the failure of many schools and school districts should serve as a distress call that our schools need help. The recognized distress call "SOS" has come to be known in the education world as "save our schools."

A "global economy" has heightened the urgency for reforming America's educational system, whose students must compete in an international arena. A recent study that measures the U.S. educational system's performance against that of 31 other nations ranks the United States 15th in reading, 19th in math and 14th in science.

Further, according to the Center for the Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University, for the class of 2001, there were about 1,000 high schools across the United States that promoted fewer than 50 percent of their students to the 12th grade on time.

No longer can the United States afford to have an educational system that has traditionally educated one-third of the students, schooled one-third and allowed one-third to fall through the cracks.

Reform high on policymakers' agendas

The schools crisis has received attention from policymakers for several years. But while federal and state legislation have established benchmarks intended to improve achievement for all students, only recently have high schools in particular become a serious topic of discussion in policy arenas. Former U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige affirmed that high school reform is high on the Department of Education's agenda during the second term of the Bush administration. Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, current chair of the National Governors' Association, has stated that high school reform will be NGA's primary focus during his chairmanship.

For high school leaders in California and throughout the nation, this new focus on high schools presents a challenge and an opportunity: We must capitalize on the current sense of urgency surrounding the state of U.S. high schools, and make concerted effort to take a leadership role in framing the conversation and subsequent action around how to successfully re-engineer our secondary schools.

The National Association of Secondary School Principals has already undertaken a number of initiatives to take the lead in the conversation about high school reform. Through our Breakthrough High Schools project, we identify exemplary high schools that have met the challenges of high poverty/high minority student populations. These schools serve as attainable models for other schools to raise student achievement, prevent dropouts, increase graduation rates, and prepare children for postsecondary education.

The traits present in every one of these exemplary high schools include creating a safe and orderly school environment; articulating a common message on the basis of shared values and a vision focused on the high achievement of all students; holding high expectations for students and staff members; creating structures to support a personalized learning environment; collaborating for shared leadership, decision making and problem solving and using data for decision making.

Yet the most crucial and often overlooked element of successful schools --both in the Breakthrough models and elsewhere--is effective leadership. In 2003 the Mid-Continent Regional Educational Lab published its balanced leadership framework. This study was developed from a quantitative analysis of 30 years of research, an exhaustive review of theoretical research on leadership, and a research team with more than 100 years of combined professional wisdom on school leadership.

The findings from the meta-analysis found that there is a substantial relationship between leadership and student achievement. A critical finding of this study states that "just as leaders can have a positive impact on achievement, they can also have a marginal, or worse, a negative impact on achievement. When leaders concentrate on the wrong school and/or classroom practices, or miscalculate the magnitude or 'order' of the change they are attempting to implement, they can negatively impact student achievement."

Harvard scholar Richard Elmore, in a study commissioned for the National Governor's Association, reached a similar conclusion. He found that having the right focus of change is key to improving schools and increasing student achievement. In Elmore's report, "Knowing the Right Things to Do: School Improvement and Performance-Based Accountability," he states, "Knowing the right thing to do is the central problem of school improvement. Holding schools accountable for their performance depends on having people in schools with the knowledge, skills and judgment to make the improvements that will increase student achievement."

The National Association of Secondary School Principals is committed to doing the right thing in promoting excellence in school leadership. The development of "Breaking Ranks II: Strategies for Leading High School Reform" represents a major effort in providing school leaders with the strategies and tools necessary to lead reform efforts.

NASSP is currently developing "Breaking Ranks in the Middle," to be released at the 2006 NASSP convention. This template will provide tools to assist our middle-level schools with transition, collaborative leadership and personalization, as well as curriculum, instruction and assessment.

NASSP must join with federal, state and local leaders to make high school change--and particularly the Breaking Ranks II framework--the priority it should be. Breaking Ranks II has been featured at each of the U.S. Department of Education's seven regional high school improvement summits held across the nation in the spring of 2004, and at the Department's National High School Leadership Summit in Washington in December 2004.

School teams, with representation from all levels of school governance, had the opportunity to plan, with trained facilitators, their high school reform initiatives. Their planning was enhanced by the access they were provided to Breaking Ranks II experts and to other expertise on all elements of comprehensive high school improvement.

Key initiatives

With the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education, NASSP has been able to put forward key initiatives:

* Seventeen states, including California, received grants allowing them to partner with state boards of education, the state government and postsecondary entities to hold high school conferences at the state level. These conferences center on Breaking Ranks II and the need for comprehensive high school change. Participants also receive current achievement data for their own states.

* Six school leaders from each of the 17 states were trained in the Breaking Ranks II concepts. They are prepared to begin the work of school change with their faculties and school communities, and they are certified to train others in their states. (Training is also being made available to participants from states that did not receive grants. Two of these training sessions have already occurred, and another is planned.)

Another important role to be played by NASSP and its state affiliates centers on persuading policymakers to support the efforts of high school districts with appropriate resources. "Supporting Principals Who Break Ranks," a companion document to Breaking Ranks II, was written with that function in mind. Like the Breaking Ranks II field guide, it acknowledges the importance of district personnel and policymakers in the high school improvement effort, and offers very specific recommendations for them, tied directly to the three core areas of Breaking Ranks II. Principals can use this document to frame their conversations with those responsible for resource and policy decisions that impact school improvement efforts.

The high school reform "conversation" is occurring across the nation at events sponsored by the National Governors Association, the American Association of School Administrators, the Coalition for Community Schools, the Council of Great City Schools and numerous other national and local organizations. A major goal of NASSP is to serve as a voice for high school and middle school leaders.

By assuring that NASSP and its affiliates are represented every place that the conversation is being held, we work to make certain the practitioner's voice is consistently heard, and that school leaders continue to be a significant force in the struggle to take charge of school reform. Our organization and its members must raise awareness of high school reform issues nationwide by taking part in existing forums and by creating forums where voids exist.

Engaging business partners in contributing to the development of appropriate outcomes for graduates and supplementing scarce resources to implement improvements are areas where state affiliates should be particularly aggressive. Assuring that graduates leave high school with the high-level skills required by today's workplace necessitates a new look at curriculum and the "essential learnings" students must acquire for successful transition into postsecondary life.

Breaking Ranks II recommends that the content of the curriculum should, where practical, connect to real-life applications to help students link their education to the future. Business partners should be encouraged to participate in the identification of those skills and outcomes. Participation at that level can and should lead to helping local schools and districts provide resources in the form of internships, job shadowing opportunities, grants, etc. To facilitate this process, state affiliates and individual members should consider taking advantage of work being done by the NASSP Resident Practitioner for Business Partnerships.

The dialogue we engage in with elementary education and postsecondary partners will lead to the necessary seamless alignment in the education of our students. Where that alignment has been lacking, the instruction and skill gaps have resulted--one of the reasons for the often unprepared status of many graduates.

Principals and districts must collaborate with those who educate our students before and after high school to assure the elimination of those gaps and to make sure that levels of expectation are understood by all. The result will be that students arriving in 9th grade are prepared to do rigorous high school work, and are graduating prepared for the next level, whether that is in college, technical school or the workforce.

Clearly, NASSP and its affiliates are obligated to step forward and be a voice for the implementation of what we know to be best practice, research-based solutions to the problems existing in American high schools. We have, with the publication of Breaking Ranks II, provided a framework for the reform of our high schools that is not only based on known best practice, but also consistent with the recommendations of the Comprehensive School Reform model and other prominent reform blue prints.

The publication, however, is only the first step in the work to be done. It is incumbent upon us to lead in engaging local and federal policymakers, business entities and educators at the elementary and postsecondary levels in the dialogues that will ensure that every high school has the expertise and the resources to become a top-quality, student-centered high school.

Gerald N. Tirozzi is executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals.