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Purpose: This study examines the relational dynamics between teachers and formal teacher leaders (TLs). We examine the association between relationship structure and leader-member exchange (LMX) quality and the extent to which LMX mediates the relationship between social network (SN) measures of dyadic relationships and TL influence. Design/methodology/approach: Using survey data from 1,895 teacher-TL relationships, we employ path mediation analysis using hierarchical linear modeling. Findings: Our results indicate that voluntary advice-seeking and multiplex ties are associated with stronger exchange quality between teachers and TLs. In addition, LMX partially mediates the relationship between voluntary ties and TL influence. Originality/value: SN and LMX theories offer two complementary lenses for studying relational dynamics in organizations, though they seldom are used together, especially in education. This study bridges SN and LMX theories and measures to bolster studies of relational dynamics in organizations and highlights that in the case of formal teacher leadership, there is a need for school structures that enable teachers and TLs to seek out one another informally and develop strong social exchanges [This is the online version of an article published in "Journal of Professional Capital and Community" (ISSN 2056-9548 ).]

Teacher leadership is increasingly recognized as a promising strategy to improve the quality of instruction in U.S. schools. Despite the rising number of teacher leadership programs in the country, there is a paucity of knowledge about the work that teacher leaders (TLs) engage in, how educators experience teacher leadership and the impacts of these efforts on teacher leaders themselves and on districts, schools, teachers, and students. In response, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation (NMEF) supported the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) to investigate educators' experiences with teacher leadership and describe the impacts of this improvement strategy.

Districts providing strong centralized COVID-19 responses approached the crisis from a top-down leadership and guidance model which constrained school flexibility to act outside of the district's direction. This is one of a series of briefs that focused on a 'critical incident' surrounding school closure and offers pragmatic suggestions to educational leaders as they continue to grapple with the disruptions of the pandemic.

In partnership with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education, RFA has been studying Philadelphia schools' take-up of an instructional reform that has demonstrated positive impacts on teacher knowledge and student learning in math. The Ongoing Assessment Project (OGAP) is designed to deepen teachers' understanding of foundational concepts in math and engage them in regular formative assessment of their students' problem-solving strategies. Implementing an ambitious educational reform such as this one is notoriously challenging, as project staff, district personnel, and school leaders struggle to move from initial professional development--where so much money is invested--to deep, routine engagement in schools and classrooms. Teachers' instructional practices are difficult to change, and it is particularly hard to engender reform ownership in contexts full of competing demands. In our 2019 study of OGAP in Philadelphia, one school's engagement with the project offered key lessons in how to successfully approach such a reform. School faculty and project staff layered supports and distributed leadership in unique ways, and they carved out space for teachers to learn, practice, and take ownership of OGAP. This brief shares six lessons from this school for those who wish to facilitate deep ownership of an ambitious instructional reform, including reform developers/staff, district leaders, and school leaders. The brief concludes with tables of questions that readers in each of these roles can ask themselves when designing and/or implementing similar reforms.

School leadership is broadly acknowledged to be the lynchpin for school success. Yet, amongst the countless demands that school leaders face, making wise leadership choices is increasingly challenging. On what should leaders focus their attention and how should they prioritize their improvement efforts? How can they identify, understand, and make headway on the difficult challenges that will substantially enhance the educational experiences of their students, and how can they bring their faculty together with commitment around these improvement efforts? In this essay we lay out a research-informed framework for advancing meaningful school improvement using a distributed leadership approach. This report was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Opinions in this paper reflect those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, that of the funder.

Education leaders are perennially seeking new ways to build the capacity of teachers to enhance learning experiences for all students. Teacher leadership, which we define as teachers' support of the improvement of teaching and learning beyond their own classroom, has long been a source of interest and experimentation (Wenner & Campbell, 2017; York-Barr & Duke, 2004). Teacher leadership recognizes teachers' instructional expertise as an asset for educational improvement, capitalizes upon teachers' relationships with their colleagues to support change, and may provide career advancement opportunities to improve job satisfaction and the professionalization of teaching. For these and other reasons, states, districts, funders and teachers themselves have become increasingly interested in the promise of teacher leadership. In this study, we map the landscape of teacher leadership programs across the U.S. and identify commonalities and distinctions amongst the range of programs. Using a variety of search approaches to capture publiclyavailable information, we document 285 state, local, university, and foundation-sponsored programs that use a variety of techniques to support teachers as leaders. We then categorize the forms of support, attending to program models, objectives, sponsorship, and audience. We identify three major forms of support provided by teacher leadership programs: (1) preparation of teachers with knowledge and skills that can help them to lead; (2) positioning of teachers in leadership roles to capitalize upon their expertise; and (3) recognition of teachers as leaders through awards and other forms of appreciation or acknowledgement. While some programs focus only on one of these approaches, most employed a combination of these forms of support. Based on this, we define seven types of teacher leadership programs and provide an interactive depiction of this typology, with examples, to illustrate the variation within each of the seven types. While there are undoubtedly programs that escaped our view, as well as homegrown and informal initiatives that we could not document, this systematic search is the broadest scan of the teacher leadership program landscape conducted in the Unites States to date.

In this report, we describe the results of a rigorous two-year study of the impacts of a mathematics initiative called Ongoing Assessment Project (OGAP) on teacher and student learning in grades 3-5 in two Philadelphia area school districts. OGAP is a mathematics program which combines teacher formative assessment practices with knowledge of student developmental progressions to build deeper student understanding of mathematics content. OGAP includes teacher professional development, classroom resources, school-based routines for regular practice, and ongoing school-based supports. The study was conducted in 61 schools during the 2014-15 and 2015-16 school years, with OGAP randomly assigned to 31 schools and the remaining 30 serving as comparison sites. The results of this study showed that OGAP produced meaningful impacts on both teacher knowledge and student learning.

This report presents school leadership development policies and practices across all 50 states and select U.S. territories. Researchers Bobbi Newman, Jonathan Supovitz, and Greg Collins from the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), in collaboration with National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE) staff, interviewed state board members and staff members from state education agencies to learn about their states' school leadership development policies and practices and identify the organizational and individual supports that states have established. This new analysis provides a wealth of information for state leaders interested in learning about promising policies and programs across the country that support the school leadership pipeline. [The following is a companion piece to this report, "Successful Leaders for Successful Schools: Building and Maintaining a Quality Workforce. Report of the NASBE Leadership Development Study Group," see ED582121.]

The Teacher Data Use Survey can be used to query teachers, administrators, and instructional support staff about how teachers use data to support instruction, their attitudes toward data, and the supports that help teachers use data. This guide provides step-by-step instructions to help district and school planners implement the survey. The Teacher Data Use Survey offers schools and districts a way to rigorously gauge what data teachers use, how they use these data, and how they feel about their data use. It also enables assessment of the network of supports that surround teacher data use. The questions on the Teacher Data Use Survey are derived from a conceptual framework that views teacher data use as part of a larger system. This framework views the actions teachers take with data as influenced by their competence in using data, their attitudes toward data, their collaboration with other teachers, and the organizational supports available to them. By administering the Teacher Data Use Survey, school or district leaders will have evidence on which to base a number of decisions, such as appropriation of resources to support teacher data use, supports school leaders might provide, and district policy around data use. The following are appended: (1) Survey-Teacher version; (2) Survey-Administrator version; (3) Survey-Instructional support staff version; (4) Survey scales, questions, and items; and (5) Survey emails.

In this presentation discussed in this brief abstracted report, the author presents about an ongoing partnership with the Philadelphia School District (PSD) to implement and research the Ongoing Assessment Project (OGAP). OGAP is a systematic, intentional and iterative formative assessment system grounded in the research on how students learn mathematics. The program is being implemented and studied as a mixed method randomized control trial of OGAP impacts in grades 3-5 in Philadelphia area schools. In the spring of 2014, CPRE recruited 60 schools (including charters) in the Philadelphia area to participate in the research study of OGAP. These schools were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups, stratified by charter school and district. The formal research study of OGAP is designed to address the following five central research questions, which are broken down into three implementation questions and two impact questions: Implementation questions include: (1) How do teachers understand the OGAP formative assessment process and use it in their daily practice?; (2) Is the frequency and sophistication of teachers' use of OGAP associated with greater increases in mathematical knowledge for teaching or ability to interpret evidence in student work?; and (3) Is the frequency and sophistication of teachers' use of OGAP associated with greater student learning? Impact questions are as follows: (4) Does teachers' use of OGAP increase mathematical knowledge for teaching and ability to interpret evidence in student work? What moderating factors affect this relationship?; and (5) Does teachers' use of OGAP significantly improve student performance on both proximal and distal student outcome measures? What mediating and moderating factors affect this relationship? The presentation includes a brief description of the study and year one experimental impacts on teachers and students.

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) was originally promoted in 2010 by a centrist bi-partisan coalition that included Democrats interested in leveraging more rigorous academic standards to improve educational opportunity and moderate probusiness Republicans concerned about workforce development. As states moved to implement the new Standards (and aligned assessments), an anti-Common Core coalition arose first on the far right among Tea Party activists and then from the left, particularly among teacher advocacy groups. While temporarily united by their opposition to the CCSS, opponents across the political spectrum did not agree on the sources of their concern or on policy solutions. Understanding where the disparate sides of this coalition agreed and disagreed on the specific issue of the Common Core, and education policy more generally, can shed light on the conditions under which transpartisanship might flourish and the extent to which these types of coalitions can impact policy and remain aligned over time. This report examines the controversy surrounding implementation of the CCSS, which offers a case study of a better understanding of the political dynamics and potential limitations of transpartisan coalitions.

The flat structure of American schools is ill-suited to meet today's increasing demands for educational improvement. Even with unprecedented pressure to raise performance, America's schools are still largely organized the way they were a century ago--with a single principal presiding over a largely egg-crated faculty. Is such a thin veneer of instructional leadership sufficient to build the capacity of teachers at each grade level and content area to develop students to reach high expectations? Historically, American schools have addressed this deficit in instructional support with a patchwork of poorly defined roles and responsibilities--under-utilized department chairs, fitful coaching models, and informal teacher leaders who generally lacked the training and authority to influence the practice of their peers. How exactly do these roles fit into contemporary schools' strategies for improving teaching and learning? How can we more systematically build the capacity of school leaders to engage with and overcome the challenges of continuous school improvement? One place to look for fresh ideas about leadership development is England. Over the past 15 years, educational leaders in England have made several important revisions in the ways leadership is organized in schools, how leaders are developed, and how leadership is integrated into the larger educational infrastructure. There is much that American policymakers might learn from these experiences. This policy brief examines the evolution of the educational leadership development system in England to see what ideas American leaders and policymakers might take from looking transnationally. The brief is based on a more in-depth examination of that leadership development system described in a Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) research report entitled "Building a Lattice for School Leadership: The Top-to-Bottom Rethinking of Leadership Development in England and What It Might Mean for American Education.Research Report #RR-83" (see ED558763). The research report was based upon a year of research on school leadership in England that included extensive background research, site visits to schools and leadership programs, and over 20 interviews with government officials, teachers and school leaders, university researchers, union officials, and both for profit and non-profit school leadership providers. Implications for policy makers are presented.

A large and growing body of evidence over the past several decades has shown that school leadership is a key factor in improving school performance and student outcomes. Increasingly, funders and developers of school leadership programs are articulating talent development frameworks, or leadership development pipelines, that conceive of school leadership development as identifying, recruiting, developing, monitoring, compensating, and retaining talented school leaders. However, states' systems to support leadership development have received relatively scant attention and resources. This gap spurred NASBE in partnership with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) to: (1) examine the problem from a state policy perspective; (2) to offer a framework, guidance, and resources to help states develop and keep effective leaders; (3) provide examples of promising practices for rural schools; and (4) share insights from partner organizations. This report details the Leadership Study Group's recommendations. [The following is a companion piece to this report, "State Leadership Development Policies: An Analysis of 50 States and Territories," see ED582122.]

After the Spring 2014 primaries, the Common Core State Standards were viewed as a political hot potato. As former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said, "the Common Core has become toxic, I think it's radioactive…It has become an incredibly controversial topic on both the left and the right." Even so, the Common Core turned out to play a role in some of the governor's races in November, 2014. In this analysis of candidate positions and the role of the Common Core across the 36 gubernatorial races of 2014, CPRE researchers Bobbi Newman, Jonathan Supovitz and Arial Smith used campaign websites, debate transcripts, State of the State addresses, Twitter accounts, and candidate interviews, to identify the positions of 62 of the 81 candidates (including 3rd party representatives). Our findings show that support for, and opposition to, the Common Core was pretty evenly split, mostly across party lines. Arguments in support of the Common Core tended to emphasize economic benefits, while opposition emphasized Federal intrusion and the importance of local control. In a few races, the Common Core became a substantial issue. Contains the following table: Summary of 2014 Candidates and Their Positions on the Common Core.

This report examines the educational leadership development system in England over the last 15 years to identify ideas American leaders and policymakers might learn from looking cross-nationally. The report describes the rise of the National College for School Leadership in England, which spearheaded much of the early policy development and enactment and the subsequent governmental shift towards a more decentralized policy of fostering school networks. Supovitz envisions the potential assimilation of these two movements into an integrated lattice for school leadership. The lattice for school leadership in England is the careful integration of formal and social learning opportunities for leaders. It features a centrally developed, high-quality leadership development program combined with lateral social networks. These complementary elements of leadership development are carefully enmeshed in a system that provides clear responsibilities for multiple levels of leadership within schools, incentives for identifying and grooming leadership within schools, pathways for leadership progression, and certification for leader attainments. All of these elements are supported by an accountability structure that emphasizes the contribution of school leadership and teaching in school improvement. [Includes a foreword by Andy Hargreaves. For the companion Policy Brief, "Building a Lattice for School Leadership: Lessons from England. Policy Brief #15-1," see ED558746.]

District policy makers never have more potential influence than when they are crafting a Policy. In this paper Jonathan Supovitz argues, that the success of an instructional policy depends to some extent on the choices made in its crafting before it is let loose upon the world. The way a policy is framed and designed has important implications for the way people receive and understand it, and the extent to which they respond to it. The choices embedded within its design are essentially a set of signals that interact with a variety of influences, both real and perceptual, as it is received, interpreted, and enacted upon by its intended audience. To illustrate this idea, the focus of this paper is on the design of a 2011 New York City Department of Education policy intended to engage teachers across the City during the 2011-12 school year with the Common Core State Standards, called the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS) in New York City. A close analysis of the language of the CIEs, with companion explanations from interviews with the architects of the policy about their thoughts and decisions during its construction, show a set of careful choices and knowledge-informed decisions about what they thought were the best ways to encourage teachers, school leaders, and school support providers to learn about the expectations of the CCLS and their implications in order to bring about real changes in school and teacher practices.

The College and Career Readiness Standards, referred to as the Common Core Learning Standards (CCLS) in New York City, are increasingly the focus of educational reform efforts across the United States. Each year for the past several years, the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) has created a set of focusing expectations for schools in order to guide their engagement with the CCLS. Evaluation of CCLS implementation in New York City in 2011-12 allowed the authors to examine how a diverse sample of 16 elementary and middle schools engaged with the Citywide Instructional Expectations (CIEs). The sample of schools came from all five boroughs across New York City and represented a range of student demographics and performance. Through these analyses, patterns emerged that seemed to explain how different schools interpreted and implemented the CIEs. In this report the authors trace the ways that conservation-oriented and transformation-oriented schools engaged with different components of the CIEs. The authors found that the different orientations led schools to engage in looking at student work differently, to have different experiences with task selection and implementation, and to take different learning away from their experiences. Overall, the authors determined that schools with a transformation-oriented perspective made more progress towards the kinds of practices that will be required in the coming decade. These findings have important implications for schools and districts across the nation as they seek to grapple with Standards implementation.

This interactive electronic report provides an overview of an innovative new instrument developed by CPRE researchers to authentically measure teachers' formative assessment practices in mathematics. The Teacher Analysis of Student Knowledge, or TASK, instrument assesses mathematics teachers' knowledge of formative assessment and learning trajectories, important components of the instructional knowledge necessary to teach to the high expectations of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Researchers found that the majority of teachers of mathematics in grades K-10 in urban and urban fringe districts focused on their students' "procedural skills" rather than their "conceptual understandings," indicating that there is significant room for growth in teacher capacity to identify, interpret, and respond to students' conceptual understanding.

The allure of using data to improve performance is a source of tremendous activity in the education field today. "Data use" has spurred a wide variety of reforms at all different levels of the education system, ranging from infrastructure augmentation to state databases, to district dashboard systems that collect and display an array of indicators, to the formation of school data teams that conduct data-informed inquiries into subgroups of students, to specific formative assessment classroom techniques. From this cornucopia it is increasingly apparent that data use means different things to decision-makers at different levels of the education system, and that the type of data, frequency of the data, mode of inquiry, and decision-making processes look quite different from one another according to role, situation, and purpose (Supovitz & Klein, 2003; others). Thus, when we talk about the term "data use," we must hone in on "for whom?" and "for what purpose?" In this paper, the author is interested in what it means for teachers to fruitfully use data to enhance the teaching and learning process. Informed by research on the challenges teachers face to use data meaningfully, and clues from the rich literature on formative assessment, this paper reports on the design and effects of an intervention designed to help teachers connect data on their teaching with data on the learning of their students for the purpose of informing subsequent instruction which leads to better student outcomes. The hypothesis of this study, therefore, is that while examining data may be useful, the real value of data use is to examine the connection between data points--in this case the instructional choices that teachers make and the learning outcomes of students. Thus, "data use" in this study means encouraging and facilitating teachers' analytical experiences of linking data on teaching to data on the learning of their students. Using a randomized control trial, the Linking Study tests the impacts of the intervention on teachers' perceptions of their fluency with data and their self-reported learning about their instructional practices and their students' thinking. Moreover, the study estimates effects on instruction caused by the intervention, based upon external trained raters' judgments of the quality of instructional practice. Finally, this research examines impacts of the intervention on student outcomes. Appended is: Survey Items and Scale Reliabilities.

Leading school change is a challenging endeavor. Successful leadership requires strategic and sustained effort, particularly in the shifting and uncertain environment of urban public schools. The concept of distributed leadership--in which multiple actors tackle the challenges of school leadership in concert--is a promising way to strengthen professional practice and thereby improve the educational experiences of all students. The Annenberg Distributed Leadership (DL) project was one of the first efforts in the nation to deliberately take on the challenge of designing and implementing a concerted effort to build distributed leadership capacity in a diverse set of urban schools to improve the quality of teaching and learning. The DL project featured the careful selection of leadership team members to identify and lead instructional improvement efforts; ample professional development to build cohesive teams and help members understand the motivational, psychological, and pedagogical aspects of advocating instructional change; resources to apply to the task; and ongoing school-based coaching to guide leadership team efforts. This report describes the Consortium for Policy Research in Education's mixed-method evaluation of the DL project. The evaluation featured a cluster randomized control trial, where schools first agreed to participate in the study, and then were chosen by lottery to participate in the DL project or serve in the comparison group. Overall there were 16 DL schools and 21 comparison sites in the evaluation. Central evaluation findings included: (1) The DL project successfully identified and developed leadership teams that were significantly higher functioning than were leadership teams in the comparison schools; (2) Principals and team members forged new working relationships that productively expanded the leadership capacity in the participating schools; (3) Teachers developed leadership capacity and took on leadership roles on their teams and with their colleagues; and (4) Team members worked strategically to change instruction through a variety of approaches and targeted a variety of areas that they determined to be their school's greatest needs. The report concludes the DL project demonstrates that an intensive effort to influence and expand the leadership capacity of schools can have a positive impact on leadership practice, leadership team functioning, and support for instructional improvement. It further suggests that distributed leadership might be best thought of not as a reform in itself, but rather as a means of implementing reform. "Demographics of Distributed Leadership Schools" are appended.

Districts expend a considerable amount of time, effort, and resources providing student performance data to teachers to inform instruction, and examining those data for organizational decision-making. Yet rarely, if ever, are these outcome data connected to what goes on in classrooms. In this experimental study, the author reports on the first-year effects of an intervention designed to provide teachers with feedback on their teaching in conjunction with data on the learning of their students. The effects on subsequent teaching and student learning are examined in comparison to teachers who received feedback only on the learning of their students. This study examined the impacts of different data conditions on teachers' perspectives of value, their instructional practice, and the learning of their students. The promising results reported in this paper present the first analysis of the impacts of the intervention that links data on teaching and learning for teachers. The results indicated that providing feedback to teachers on their teaching, in conjunction with data on the learning of their students, has more impact on subsequent teaching and student performance than providing data to teachers on student learning alone. Appended to the study are: (1) Exit Slip Scales and Contributing Items; and (2) IQA Rubric for Mathematics. [This paper was presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Conference, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, April 2012.]

"Leading indicators"--indicators that provide early signals of progress toward academic achievement--enable education leaders, especially at the central office level in a school district, to make more strategic and less reactive decisions about services and supports to improve student learning. These indicators are a way of viewing and using data to inform systemwide decisions about education. This study builds on existing efforts by school districts to use "data-informed decision making" by developing further the concept of "leading indicators." The study described in this report focused on four districts that are at the forefront of the field in using data to inform decisions and examined how these districts are developing and using leading indicators for education. The study aimed to: (1) identify and describe the leading indicators used in four districts considered advanced in their use of data; (2) more broadly examine the infrastructure, resources, and supports each district has developed to support its use of data for decision making; (3) look beyond student measures (though these are critically important) to other measurable areas, especially the effectiveness of central office practice; and (4) bring representatives from these four districts together to review initial findings and help develop the work of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University in the area of leading indicators and data-informed decision making. By describing how these four districts--Hamilton County (Chattanooga, Tennessee), Montgomery County (Maryland), Naperville (Illinois), and Philadelphia (Pennsylvania)--have developed and used leading indicators within the context of a strong district "data culture," the Annenberg Institute hopes both to catalogue specific indicators that have been useful to these districts in increasing student achievement and to expand the notion of a leading indicator beyond easily identified testing data to more difficult-to-measure but important measures such as student engagement and central office practice. Research Protocols are appended. (Contains 1 figure and 2 footnotes.) [For companion reports, see "Using College Admission Test Scores to Clarify High School Placement. Leading Indicator Spotlight" (ED533116), "Early Reading Proficiency. Leading Indicator Spotlight" (ED533115), and "Pre-Algebra and Algebra Enrollment and Achievement. Leading Indicator Spotlight" (ED533119).]

Duval County Florida superintendent John Fryer was not used to flying blind. A retired Air Force major general and former tactical fighter wing commander new to school district leadership, Fryer was used to having a control panel packed with information. In front of him in the cockpit, Fryer had a wide range of continually updated data from which he could adjust his flight path and inform his actions. "When you are a fighter pilot, you rely on that information to guide your decision making," he said. Not having any equivalent instruments in his position as superintendent, Fryer wondered, "How do I know what is happening in our school district?" (personal interview, January 11, 2000). Throughout their journey, Fryer and his leadership team have persistently searched for ways to build a dashboard of indicators that provide data on the influence of the district's strategic changes on the practices of the district's 7,300 teachers, the test performance of the district's 127,000 students, and the leadership of the district's 149 schools. The system is called the Standards Implementation Snapshot System. The system was conceived in the summer of 2002, and at the time of this report is completing its second year of use across the district. This is the story of the development and influence of the snapshot system. Appended are: (1) Sample Rubric and Evidence Form; (2) Visit Guidelines and Teacher Sampling Frame; and (3) Sample Snapshot Results. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

This study investigates the impact of America's Choice on student writing performance in Georgia. The analyses in this study focus on the change that occurred during the first year of implementation, the 2001-2002 school year. Two research questions guided these analyses: (1) What effect did Georgia's Choice have on the writing scores from the state assessment? and (2) To what extent is the effect of Georgia's Choice related to implementation of specific components of the design? The data sources for this study were individual-level student test scores on the Georgia writing assessments, school context measures (e.g., poverty rate, ethnic composition, etc.), and implementation data collected via a survey of cluster leaders, school principals, and the school leadership teams. This report is organized into six sections. In the next section, some background on Georgia's Choice and the rollout of the design during the first year is presented. Then it describes the data sources and sample. Next, it describes the methods, and then it presents the results of the analyses. Finally, it offers some interpretations of the results and explores the implications of these results for Georgia schools, America's Choice, and for comprehensive school reform in general. Appended are: (1) Scales of Implementation; (2) Results from Statistical Models of Impact; and (3) Results from Statistical Models Linking Implementation Measures and Impact. (Contains 6 tables and 3 footnotes.)

Over the past several years, education reformers have increasingly invested in the development of communities within schools as a central strategy to improve teaching and student learning. These communities come in various guises, including small schools, small learning communities, and teacher teams. Two assumptions about how these communities will enhance the quality of instruction underlie the push for these more intimate learning environments. First, supporters believe that teachers will get to know their students better and therefore be more able to respond to students' learning needs. Second, advocates contend that small communities will encourage teachers to collaborate more in order to improve their instructional practices. Thus, the theory of action underlying the development of teacher communities is that the fostering of these kinds of teacher communities will instigate improvements in the quality of instruction, which will lead to enhanced student learning. This issue of "CPRE Policy Briefs" examines the merit of these assumptions and the conditions under which communities of teachers can improve their instructional practices and bring about enhanced student learning. The lessons for policymakers contained in this Brief come from large-scale evaluations of two major district reform initiatives--one in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the other in Cincinnati, Ohio--that were designed to foster the development of instructionally focused communities. The research from these two very different settings indicates that only under certain conditions will teacher communities flourish into communities engaged in instructional improvement. The findings suggest that in order for an investment in communities to pay off in widespread improvement in student learning, particular kinds of teacher communities are needed: those that are focused on improving the instructional core of schooling and provided with the necessary strategies, structures, and supports. With more specific guidance that helps teachers to hone their instructional craft knowledge, policymakers can foster communities of instructional practice. (Contains 1 footnote.)

This document represents the first of two volumes presented in "Study of the Impact of the Statewide Systemic Initiatives Program" (Norman L. Webb and Iris R. Weiss). In an effort to evaluate the impact of the Statewide Systemic Initiatives (SSIs) on student achievement and the lessons that could be learned from the National Science Foundation's effort to reform mathematics and science education on a statewide basis, research studies identified the technical strategies, the political strategies, and the interactions with funders that were critical factors in the attempt to effect significant change in student learning over large populations. Documents were received on 21 of the 26 SSIs. More intensive data were collected via telephone interviews of key personnel in seven of these states and during site visits in six other states. Among a number of lessons learned were the following: It was vital to incorporate enough flexibility within the design so that information produced by research, evaluation, and monitoring could be effectively used (technical lesson); the creation of partnerships with policy organizations significantly advanced policy work (political lesson); and, SSI leaders and funders needed to develop a shared, in-depth understanding of the reform strategies as these fit the local context (interaction with funders). The following are appended: (1) SRI International Evaluation Reports; (2) Abt Associates Inc. Monitoring Reports; (3) Coding Scheme: Chronology and Components; (4) Coding Scheme: Strategic Planning, Decision-Making, and Thinking; (5) Coding Scheme: Key Challenges; (6) Interview Protocol for Telephone Interviews and Site Visits; (7) Case Report: Arkansas Statewide Systemic Initiative; (8) Case Report: Maine Statewide Systemic Initiative; (9) Case Report: Michigan Statewide Systemic Initiative; (10) Case Report: Nebraska Statewide Systemic Initiative; (11) Case Report: Puerto Rico Statewide Systemic Initiative; and (12) Case Report: Vermont Statewide Systemic Initiative. [For Volume II of this report, see ED497577.]

The major challenge that school districts face is to improve the learning of all students, not just in individual schools, but across the entire system of schools. Duval County, Florida has embarked on a remarkable journey to implement standards-based reform in schools throughout the district with the intent to systematically improve teaching and learning across its 150 schools. In this study, the authors examine the impact of Duval's efforts by documenting the county's changes in state test performance in comparison to other, similar Florida counties. Through these analyses, they explore the hypothesis that Duval's strategies for increasing the quality of teaching and learning across its system of schools is paying off in terms of faster gains in student learning relative to other counties within the state. They examine elementary and middle school reading, writing, and mathematics results from the spring of 1999 to the spring of 2002 on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) in Duval relative to seven other counties in Florida. The comparison counties include Broward, Hillsborough, Lee, Orange, Palm Beach, Pinellas, and Polk, which were the most reasonably comparable counties in Florida. Overall, results provide evidence that Duval's efforts to systematically change the practices of teachers and school leaders across its system are improving the achievement of its elementary schools at a faster rate than in other comparable districts. In middle schools, to date, growth in performance has been comparable to that of other counties. Includes two appendices. (Contains 13 tables, 6 figures, and 1 footnote.)