Compton Report Card: Alphabet Soup
School reform is like cooking: Too many cooks spoil the broth. One administrator throws in the ingredients for split pea, another for clam chowder, another for minestrone. It’s no wonder that children turn up their noses when we serve them the confused results.
With support from the Haynes and Norton foundations, USC and the Los Angeles County Office of Education have worked with the Compton Unified School District, which was judged academically and fiscally bankrupt in 1993 and has been under the control of a state administrator since, to create a living laboratory for research in school reform.
One middle and two elementary schools volunteered almost two years ago to participate in our project. District and state policymakers and administrators all pushed for separate and sometimes conflicting initiatives. One elementary school made a compelling case for mixed-age reading groups, but was not allowed to proceed because of district rules about how students are grouped and how reading is taught.
Schools tended to treat each set of initiatives separately, without attempting to integrate the various demands for improvement into a single vision to guide reform. All too often, the result was “projectitis,†with faculty devoting lots of time to projects that were largely unconnected to one another and to the school’s vision. In addition to losing focus, officials seemed to have difficulty thinking “out of the box.†Jerome Harris, who was sent in by the state to administer the district, had his list of nonnegotiables, including bilingual education at the same time every day in every school. Harris saw this as a way to ensure that bilingual education was being taught. But general educational research has shown that the best results are tailored to the setting. District administrators need to move away from telling schools what to do and when to do it and start providing services and incentives for change.
At the school level, some teachers were reluctant to take on new leadership roles and responsibilities. Having seen reforms come and go, they were understandably hesitant. Yet reforms are most successful when designed and implemented by the people closest to the students--and that usually means teachers. Teachers who take an active role in reform frequently find enthusiasm for the process, so long as they are rewarded for their efforts, another effective strategy that Compton has yet to implement.
Regardless of how a school reform initiative is designed, the make-or-break question is whether a school accepts accountability for improving student learning. Compton has a student assessment system in place that tests students every eight weeks and disseminates the results, but there are no “stakes†or consequences associated with this system. No school is rewarded or sanctioned on the basis of the scores.
Absent a focus on student learning, decision-making tended to center on adult needs. “We just need to have more discipline in this school,†ran a common refrain, Rather than examining their own instructional strategies, other teachers searched for the “perfect†curriculum package.
Despite these problems, reform efforts did make a difference. In two of the three schools, test scores climbed. In the third school, two of nine classes lost ground in 1996 when compared with 1994. But that school also posted the project’s largest gain: Reading scores among first-graders shot up from the 10th percentile to the 70th percentile. This is a good start, but without a healthy climate for reform, the improvements are not likely to spread or be sustained over time.
Last March, Dyan Lal replaced Harris, but he left after only a few months. A decision now awaits the new state administrator, Randy Ward. Is there one best recipe for all the schools in the district? Or should schools be allowed to cook up their own soup--and be held accountable for the results?
