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Over the past two decades, big cities have been the most consistent focus of investment and controversy in American public education. The challenges for big cities are obvious. Increasing numbers of foreign-born students and students living in poverty, coupled with dramatic declines in the numbers of native-born middle-class students, mean that cities face an unprecedented array of educational needs and great uncertainty about how to meet them. Debates about how to make city public schools effective, particularly about whether to shore up existing arrangements or experiment with new ways of running and overseeing schools, have been intense. While urban schools continue to warrant attention, school districts in many suburbs just outside the central city's limits (inner-ring suburbs) have similar trends but have received less notice. These school districts--from Prince George's County, Maryland, to Reynoldsburg, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado, to Burien, Washington--have also experienced population changes as dramatic as those in big cities. Some might argue that inner-ring suburbs undergoing population changes have been lucky to avoid the battles over education policy, teacher strikes, and state interventions. But for suburbs with growing numbers of disadvantaged students, neglect has not all been benign. Many suburbs are economically distressed and not well-equipped to handle major new challenges. Even suburban school systems that were effective for the groups that moved there after World War II are likely not prepared to meet the new array of student needs or to find solutions to unprecedented problems. In this essay the authors review the evidence on these points, consider the strengths and weaknesses of inner-ring suburbs when faced with new challenges, and suggest ways leaders--local, state, and philanthropic--can help suburban schools adapt to the challenges they face.

Every sector of the U.S. economy is working on ways to deliver services in a more customized manner. If all goes well, education is headed in the same direction. Personalized learning and globally benchmarked academic standards (a.k.a. Common Core) are the focus of most major school districts and charter school networks. Educators and parents know students must be better prepared to think deeply about complex problems and to have skills that are relevant for jobs that haven't yet been created. Promising school models are showing what's possible, but innovation in the classroom only takes you so far. Twenty-first century learning practices demand twenty-first century systems. This paper goes deep into the question of which system policies are most likely to get in the way of implementing personalized learning at scale. We work outward from the school to define the new capacities and functions districts need to develop. We make the case that districts are currently unwittingly hostile to school-level innovation. For that to change, they must aggressively work to change the incentives, policies, and structures so that they encourage and free up schools to innovate. This is the first of three white papers looking at system redesign from a variety of perspectives. Our next paper, "The Case for Coherent High Schools" [see: ED556237], examines the challenges of high school redesign. Our third and final paper, "Redesigning the District Operating System [see: ED563481], explains why there must be updated central office systems to allow school-level initiative and problem solving.

High school redesign is one of the most elusive reform challenges to date. This paper explains why personalized high schools are hard to get and keep in a traditional school district, and shows how they can be made much more broadly available through changes in policy and philanthropic investments. Drawing from examples of successful and unsuccessful high school redesign efforts, this paper argues that stable leadership, school-level autonomy, and choice for both staff and families are necessary to support high school redesign at scale. One appendix is included: Impediments to Coherency. Endnotes are also included.

In summer of 2014, two groups of scholars and policy experts met separately to rethink educational accountability. These groups came from what most would consider different "camps" on school reform--one focused on transforming teaching for "deeper learning" and the other focused on choice as a means for leveraging school improvement. However, both were motivated by concern that accountability as enacted under No Child Left Behind had begun to create a strait jacket for schools that was undermining the goals of improvement and equity. At the same time, both groups felt it important to maintain the law's goals of focusing the nation on raising achievement for all children and closing the achievement gap. Both believed the federal government still must play a role in ensuring that states and localities work seriously and effectively to improve options for children at risk. The papers resulting from these separate sets of discussions agreed on many important points, including that: (1) Parents and the public need to know whether children are learning what they need to graduate high school, enter and complete four-year college, or get a rewarding, career-ladder job; (2) Student test scores can provide valuable information, but they should be used in combination with other valid evidence of school effectiveness and student progress (e.g., course completion, progress toward graduation, and more); (3) Assessment of schools should focus on meaningful learning, not just on what is easiest to test. Measures should be tightly linked to the knowledge and skills needed for college and career readiness, including students' abilities to learn and solve problems independently, and apply knowledge; (4) Because a student's level and pace of learning in any one year depend in part on what was learned previously and on the efforts of many professionals working together, the consequences of high and low performance should attach to whole schools, rather than to individual educators; (5) School leaders must have sufficient authority, flexibility, and resources to lead their schools and must take affirmative responsibility for fostering school-wide collaboration aimed at continuous improvement in teaching and learning; and (6) States and school districts must have and exercise multiple options when children learn at low rates that threaten their adult opportunities, including remedying resource shortfalls, supporting teacher and leader improvement, changing school staffing, redesigning or replacing chronically ineffective schools, assigning schools to new managers, and allowing families to choose other school options. This paper shows that these agreements have important implications for the design of accountability systems at the local, state, and federal levels, particularly: (1) The need for evidence, judgment, and action, used in combination to ensure that all children learn effectively and that schools continuously improve; (2) The importance both of testing with high-quality instruments used appropriately, and of considering multiple sources of evidence in judging student, educator, or school performance; (3) The need for sophisticated judgment systems that put data in context and weigh and balance evidence to determine constructive actions; (4) The need for a clear and sensible delineation of the roles of different levels of government; and (5) The need for continued capacity building and experimentation with approaches to accountability. This paper ends with five implications for the reauthorization of the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act" (ESEA).

The lack of productivity of school systems stems from a number of reasons, including the way in which schools are governed. The author explains in this paper that policies from on high often work against campuses being more productive. His list includes state policies that stop districts from hiring experts to teach subjects that other educators aren't prepared to teach. As with the other papers in this series, Hill explains how to change the bias against productivity. This paper ends with definite recommendations about how new governance arrangements can promote productivity.iii Many of these ideas are already present, in at least rudimentary form, in leading school districts including New York City, New Orleans, and Denver. These are pursuing a "portfolio strategy" of continuous improvement.iv However, districts following this strategy are exceptions to the norm in K-12 public education. This paper will show how, in the vast majority of localities, current governance arrangements encourage little effort on behalf of productivity. It will also lay out preconditions for productivity, which will establish premises for a proposed new governance system. [A list of resources is included.]

This brief outlines how new K-12 public education governance proposals--relinquishment, smart districts, and the urban school system of the future--are complements, not alternatives, to the portfolio strategy. The portfolio strategy defines the role of government, or how it can steer in public education; the other proposals show how, once government's role is redefined, independent organizations will develop capacity to row (provide schools, assist schools, develop teacher skills, etc.). The portfolio strategy needs mechanisms for operating and improving schools, such as those provided by the other reforms. The other reforms, reciprocally, depend on the portfolio strategy to provide preconditions that they cannot create by themselves. (Contains 2 tables and 8 footnotes.)

America's system for financing K-12 education is not neutral about innovation and the use of new technologies. Indeed, that system is stacked against them. To remedy this, our education-funding system needs to shift dramatically. Instead of today's model--which rigidly funds programs, staff positions, and administrative structures, instead of schools and students--we need an approach in which funding follows the student. At present, America's charter school finance structure provides the best prototype, but even it does not go far enough. An appropriate school-finance system must also be able to defend ineffective schools and provide space and incentives for online providers to bring their products to the marketplace. (Contains 1 table and 13 endnotes.)

This is the first report from an ongoing study of four urban school districts (New York, New Orleans, Chicago, and the District of Columbia) that are experimenting with new school designs and new ways of holding schools accountable for performance. This report introduces the idea of a "portfolio school district," and shows how some leading school districts have put the idea into practice. The report's goal is to help district and community leaders throughout the country judge whether a similar approach could improve the schools in their localities, and if they decide in the affirmative, how to approach building a portfolio strategy of their own. As this report will show, rebuilding a school district on the portfolio model involves challenges of many kinds--technical, organizational, and political. Reform leaders in the districts the authors have studied have made great progress but still have many problems to solve. (Contains 1 figure, 3 tables, and 15 footnotes.)

The search continues for effective ways to educate disadvantaged children in big cities. Different cities have tried varied approaches--intensive work on the professional skills of teachers and administrators in Boston, standardized approaches to instruction in San Diego, and extensive use of vouchers and chartering in Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee. Though some school districts have shown flexibility, government and education sector leaders in some cities have become convinced that they must look outside the traditional boundaries of the district for new ideas, talent, and learning opportunities. While also trying to strengthen existing public schools, leaders in several cities, including New York, Chicago, New Orleans, and the District of Columbia, have adopted a "portfolio strategy". The essence of a portfolio strategy is the provision of public education by multiple means. Districts pursuing a portfolio strategy (portfolio districts) sponsor some schools operated by district employees in the traditional way, and others operated by independent organizations and run under new rules. District and community leaders in cities adopting a portfolio strategy (presently including New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Denver, Philadelphia, Hartford, and the District of Columbia, among others) must search for answers to questions that have seldom been asked in American public education: (1) How do they know whether a given school or initiative is likely to succeed or fail?; (2) When do they shore up a struggling school or abandon it?; (3) How do they avoid being stuck with no option other than to continue supporting a school in which children are not learning?; and (4) How do they make sure students are not hurt by closing a school or replacing one school provider with another? This paper is the first to offer answers to these questions. The authors hoped to mine the experiences of other organizations that have developed the capacity to oversee diverse portfolios of service providers, and to apply lessons learned to the challenges districts face as they adopt portfolio-based strategies. While acknowledging that public education is unique in many ways, the project tried to use the practices evident in other organizations as sources of ideas, and it applies them to education cautiously. Subsequent papers, based on a recently funded national study of districts pursuing portfolio strategies, will provide detailed examples of data systems, analytical methods, and decisionmaking processes. These papers will be available in late 2010. "Managing School Performance" Working Paper Series are appended. (Contains 4 tables and 24 footnotes.)

This report is the final result of a six-year study of America's school finance system, including more than 30 separate studies at a cost of $6 million and involving an interdisciplinary team of more than 40 scholars including many of the country's best known economists, policy analysts, lawyers, and specialists in school finance, instruction, and educational innovation. All this work leads to one conclusion, that school finance today works against the focused and efficient use of resources to promote student learning. Recognizing the complexity and subtle nature of both the problem and the systems responsible for funding schools, the Center on Reinventing Public Education proposed a multi-year applied research and development strategy to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the summer of 2003. The School Finance Redesign Project (SFRP) would have four goals: (1) Provide an empirical basis and policy options for redesigning the nation's K-12 school finance systems to support student performance; (2) Integrate research with state policy initiatives; (3) Educate the audiences that influence school finance policy and practice; and (4) Craft implementation tools for practitioners. This final report integrates the project's findings on the first three of these objectives. The fourth (implementation tools) is partially covered in a series of working papers commissioned by the project between 2003 and 2007 and is proposed as the major focus of follow-on work in 2008-09. Appendices include: (1) The National Working Group on Funding Student Learning; (2) Background Papers; and (3) Recommendation Comparison. (Contains 3 tables, 13 figures, and 16 footnotes.)

Big-city school systems face many problems, including high dropout rates, low academic achievement, and achievement gaps between middle-class and low-income children. Many big-city systems are also losing enrollment and facing financial deficits. These problems inevitably lead to criticism of the boards that govern urban school districts, and questions about whether some other governance arrangement might get better results. Seattle faces the same problems as other big-city districts. Critics of the school board have pointed to a few cities that have put mayors in charge of public schools in hope of overcoming political paralysis, pursuing consistent reform strategies, narrowing the achievement gap, and bringing expenses in line with revenues. This paper explores the underlying logic of mayoral interventions into public education, their consequences to date, and their possible suitability for Seattle. The report highlights a range of reforms that aim to improve the governance of urban school districts. (Contains 50 footnotes and 1 table.)

In the past decade, controversies about public spending on education have grown as states adopted performance standards pledging that every child will learn enough to become an independent productive citizen and as "No Child Left Behind" ("NCLB") has put teeth into those expectations. Educators say that meeting higher standards requires more money. Some policymakers claim that past spending increases were large enough to pay for higher performance if funds were used productively. Critics of demands for more money point to cases where major spending increases were misspent, with little or no impact on student learning. In this environment, elected officials, especially governors and state legislators, have searched for answers to two questions: How much money will it take for all students to meet standards and how should the money be spent? The School Finance Redesign Project (SFRP) was created to help elected officials better understand how the finance system currently works and to identify options in allocating resources to support K-12 education. The project now includes more than 20 separate projects. This Interim Report explains the question, the research strategies, and the ways how results will be presented. Early findings indicate that educators feel pressures to close achievement gaps and raise overall levels of student learning, but they have a great deal of difficulty changing how they spend money and time and how they select and train staff. (Contains 1 footnote and 1 table.) [This report was produced by the Center on Reinventing Public Education's School Finance Redesign Project.]