The Ambitious Elementary School: Its Conception,Design,and Implications for Educational Equality

The Ambitious Elementary School: Its Conception, Design, and Implications for Educational Equality is a good book presenting the design, development, and results of a five-year, intensive study of school change in two charter elementary schools in Chicago serving mainly struggling African American students. The book is well written and well organized with a preview, details, and summary for each chapter. Authors Elizabeth McGhee, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Lisa Rosen know they are building on a long history of research on school reform, with over 20 pages of chapter notes and over 300 references. The main message is that schools can improve student achievement by increasing the quantity of education (i.e., time for teaching and learning) and the quality of education (i.e., research-based organizational structures and processes that change and improve teachers’ work and student learning).

The list of components of ambitious elementary schools is familiar. It is based on the six structures and processes identified by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research in an earlier study of Chicago public schools. This starts with high expectations for all students, regardless of background variables. It includes a rigorous curriculum; frequent and useful evaluations; an extended school day and year; collaborative work by teachers; strong and supportive administrative leadership; extra professional support staff and specialists; and the involvement of parents in their child’s education.

These elements echo the lists of essentials that were identified over 40 years in studies of schools that aimed to improve education for struggling students in economically distressed communities, including Effective Schools, Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) models, HP² (High-Poverty, High-Performing) schools, and countless other individual and name brand reform models. Despite confirmed components in good schools, actions to bring new school reforms to scale have been limited. Few leaders have found the time, talent, and political will to fully reorganize their schools. This is, in part, because all reforms stress the importance of implementing all essential elements simultaneously, not sequentially.

What’s new? The book describes some important additions and elaborations in the study schools. As charter schools, the two schools had the authority to hire and fire the director/principal and teachers. This made it possible to have a professional staff that agreed with the philosophy of an ambitious school and were willing to work on its development. With the researchers, the educators discussed and decided on the reading and math curricula and the content and schedule of frequent evaluations of student progress. They designed and determined how to extend the school day and year, including extra time for student learning, coaching classes, extra classes of reading and math, summer school, afterschool, enrichment activities, tutoring, mentoring, and other ways to use time to increase student success.

Perhaps most important, the school scheduled 90 minutes every day, from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m., for teachers to plan and work collaboratively to monitor student progress, review data, diagnose areas of weaknesses in teaching and learning, design new instructional approaches, develop individualized lessons to move each student forward on standards and skills, and continually help, support, and learn from each other. The authors contrasted the typical autonomous teachers who work mainly as individuals in their rooms behind closed doors, with the shared, systemic teachers in the study schools. This may be the most essential of all essential elements in organizing ambitious schools.

What’s missing? No study is perfect. Even this excellent five-year study could not do everything.

The study schools could not implement small class sizes, one of the desired qualities for school improvement. Classes in the study schools were about average, ranging up to 27 students.

This study focused on teaching and evaluating students’ learning in reading and mathematics, not other subjects.

Each study school hired a professional parent coordinator to help teachers communicate with each parent about how to support their own child’s learning at home before serious problems arose. This was an important advance over most schools but did not represent a comprehensive program of school, family, and community partnerships. The newest research-based approaches to family and community engagement not only guide parents in supporting their own child’s learning but also create a welcoming and spirited school community. A school-based partnership team plans activities that create connections between and among educators, parents, and community partners to help all students attain important academic and behavioral goals, enrich the school curriculum, provide family services, and extend students’ learning opportunities and experiences.

This study did not report students’ roles and reactions in the ambitious elementary schools. Students were, clearly, the main focus of the teachers’ decisions and efforts, but students’ voices were not represented. A future study or new reports may extend understanding of the power of the ambitious schools by presenting students’ views, interests, actions, and aspirations prompted by their experiences.

What were the results? Readers will be particularly interested in Chapter Eight, on results for student achievement. The report on results—the major reason for all of the hard work required in ambitious schools—is focused but limited.

The study design was inventive and took advantage of a natural experiment in the lottery system that determined student admission. The authors report that students who won the lottery and attended the study schools had significantly higher achievement test scores than did matched students who lost the lottery and attended other schools. The mainly African American students in the study schools moved closer but not equal to white students in Chicago public schools, reducing but not closing the achievement gap. The authors report test scores by grade level and with unique attention to sustained benefits on test scores into the middle grades. These are very promising results.

Readers also will be looking for details on other results of the two ambitious schools. Specifically, future studies or new reports are needed on students’ scores separately for the two schools, separately for reading and mathematics achievement, and with subgroup comparisons to learn whether some students benefited more than others (e.g., by gender, by students’ starting skills, by parental engagement responses), In the future, results for students in ambitious versus other schools will be of interest on attendance, behavior, attitudes toward school, motivation to learn, and other indicators of success in school.

What’s next? In the end, the authors ask whether the lessons learned in the ambitious elementary schools can be taken to scale. They know that the study schools were successful places—highly professional and responsive. They close (p. 181) with the comment and question: “The children are ready. Are we?” These experienced researchers cannot fully hide their skepticism. They seem to know that it will be nearly impossible to take this model to scale unless or until policy leaders allow school principals to hire and fire teachers and select those who agree with all aspects of the innovative school organization. Most important, principals and teachers must be willing to spend extra time every day on professional work with their colleagues to consistently and persistently review data on students’ progress, develop new instructional approaches and lessons, connect with every family, and attend to other important social and emotional needs of each and every student. No teacher can do less than expected and no student can be allowed to fall behind. Easy to say, but very hard to do. The most reasonable expectation may be that the design and implementation of an ambitious elementary school will interest and excite an ambitious few—and even that would be a good thing.