A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Education Reforms and Students At Risk - October 1996

Schools as High-Reliability Organizations

A sense of community in schools, as modeled in varying degrees by the 18 sites visited in our study, provides the necessary foundation for positive change at the building level. However, we also recognized that the introduction and sustenance of positive change requires district- and state-level supports that are consistent with campus priorities and constant in their emphasis. In developing a framework for examining these supports, we looked at organizations that are expected to meet the daunting criterion of virtually 100 percent failure-free operation.

Air traffic control towers and regional electric power grids are two examples of High-Reliability Organizations (HROs) described by Todd LaPorte and Paula Consolini.¹⁰ Karlene Roberts also described characteristics of HROs in diverse settings,¹¹ and one of the authors of this article examined the probable educational implications of an "HRO response" to the increasing demands that the education system provide high-quality instructional services to all students.¹²

In our study of effective programs, we examined each successful case for evidence that curricular and instructional decisions were being made and supported in ways that were consistent with the evolved characteristics of organizations required to operate at high reliability. We found much support for the HRO construct, and, not surprisingly, for its dependence on an established network of high-quality relations (i. e., community) among all stakeholders on campus. While HRO characteristics are dynamic, and any presentation of them risks conveying an artificially static picture, we believe that the following characterizations and examples are illuminating.

1. The central goals of HROs are clear and widely shared. On board a nuclear aircraft carrier, the primary mission is to launch and land military aircraft. For a water company, it is to provide clean, drinkable water to all people being served. The principal at one of the sites we studied regularly described the school's goal as preparing young people to be highly successful in the world of commerce. The core task of another site was to ensure that all students would be reading at or above grade level by the end of third grade. At a third site, the core task was to provide a high-quality, demanding education program within an organization that gave each student the maximum opportunity to pass each grade successfully and graduate.

2. All staff in HROs share a belief that success is critical and that failure to achieve core tasks would be absolutely disastrous. We found similar drives permeating the most successful schools and programs in our study. Parents, teachers, and administrators worked on the various reforms as though academic and prosocial success were critical. At some of our less successful sites, failures were sometimes anticipated, and staff members typically associated them with failings of the students or their home situations.

3. HROs stress intensive recruitment and ongoing training. To meet the criterion of zero catastrophic errors, organizations must be able to rely on the staff's professional decision making. Like high-reliability noneducational organizations, the exemplary sites we visited had two universal features: they recruited with unusual energy and care, and they participated in unusual levels of ongoing staff development. As part of its yearly routine, the leadership team at one of the sites we studied participated in an average of two weeks per year of intensive training, one week of which is shared with the entire school staff. The staff of another site had arranged an elaborate series of staff development exercises each year, some conducted by program developers, some by local university faculty, and the remainder planned and led by "senior" faculty members at the site.

4. HROs build an interdependence among staff. Especially during times of peak workloads, staff members are able to assume a close interdependence of operations -- usually rooted in the strong sense of community that is established during nonpeak times. For example, traditional "norms of autonomy" had been broken down within the ninth-grade team at a site belonging to the Coalition of Essential Schools. We have seen this sort of interdependence at sites that included charter schools, school-within-a-school arrangements, and alternative schools.

5. HROs extend formal, logical decision analysis, evolved into standard operating procedures, as far as extant knowledge allows. This is not at all a celebration of bureaucracy for its own sake. Rather, it is an effort to standardize best proven practice in some areas so as to focus human attention on performing nonstandard tasks well. The curricular frameworks that were used to guide mathematics instruction at two California sites in our study declared that some things had to be universal. Such decisions helped shape the next level of decisions -- which were still considerable -- that had to be made by the professional staff. It is important to note that the frameworks provided a level of assurance to each teacher that each year's incoming students would share a common body of knowledge. Such assurance allows a teacher to cover additional material more rapidly or in greater depth. We have found that similar standard curricular and organizational supports can be supplied by well-known national programs, such as Core Knowledge¹³ and Success for All.¹⁴

6. HROs prize vigilance against lapses and flexibility toward rules. Since lapses cannot always be avoided, HROs must prevent them from cascading into larger problems. A child who has not learned to read by third grade, for example, creates a series of complex problems involving his ability to use text and his self-concept. He often generates severe instruction/management problems for upper-grade teachers. What might have been a small problem if treated early in school can become a series of major problems. Some of our sites had adopted instructional programs such as Reading Recovery¹⁵ and thus were especially vigilant when it came to early student failures. In other sites, interdisciplinary teams that met on a frequent basis often worked to detect students' problems early, to seek solutions, and to support each student until he or she was again able to handle current assignments.

7. HROs are invariably valued by their supervising organizations. This valuing typically results from the emphasis on long-term reliability over short-term "efficiencies." The program developers with whom we spoke quickly acknowledged that there were whole districts in which their programs could not prosper. Success does not happen in isolation. Rather, successful schools find support from a community of adults working within the school, from the surrounding community, from district administrators, from state-level decision makers, and from the program developers themselves. The most successful sites we visited had strong, ongoing connections to program developers.

Resources Required to Implement Reforms

A variety of resources are necessary to implement the sorts of reforms for students at risk that we have reviewed and studied. These resources include monetary resources, but are not restricted to dollars invested by school districts, communities, and private sources. Many other types of resources played an important role in implementing reforms, such as people/personnel resources, material resources, and political resources.

Monetary resources. Both internal (e. g., local budgets) and external (e. g., foundation grants, state funds), monetary resources were relied upon for reform implementation by the sites we studied. However, no sites relied solely upon outside monetary resources; to varying degrees, all sites made use of external funds. The categorical nature of many public and private funding streams, however, typically led to a patchwork approach to building project budgets. In some cases, external funds provided important "add-ons" to ongoing reform efforts.

People/Personnel resources. In virtually every site we studied, the building principal charged with general oversight of the schools was a "believer"; that is, he or she was willing to lend support or to take credit for the program's successes because he or she believed it had improved the teaching-learning situation in some way. In addition, each site we visited that evidenced success with students benefited directly and importantly by staff persons trained in the particular school-program approach. Other people/personnel resources that proved effective in implementing reform efforts included paid classroom aides, parent/adult volunteers, community volunteers, extra staff time, reform-tested advisors, and new teacher "pipelines" (professional networks to colleges or universities).

Material resources. Each school we studied provided the required reform- related instructional materials (books, supplementary reading materials, manipulables) in addition to the typical array of general instructional materials. Computers were not usually found in the schools we studied, although in one or two cases were becoming increasingly prominent. School facilities were usually typical for the school's region, although staff at a number of the sites had done a considerable amount of work to create attractive and comfortable surroundings for students.

Political resources. Affiliation with a college or university afforded some of our sites with additional monetary resources and considerable credibility. In addition, private-sector affiliations with local companies and firms provided schools with a degree of insulation from district-level policies, procedures, and requirements.

Implications for Policy and Practice

The actions of individual schools alone will, in our opinion, not be sufficient to ensure that students placed at risk receive a quality education. In addition to the needs for some comparability across schools in the levels of resources available to all students, many organizational factors common to all schools are in need of attention:

1. Set clear and agreed-upon goals and objectives at the national, state, and school levels. Consensual goals and objectives set for educational practice should be regarded as the basis for a contract with our students, and such a contract should ensure that no student will be allowed to fail.

2. Align federal, state, and local education programs to serve students. Research and evaluation efforts are needed that measure, on a regular basis, the cross-level coherence in terms of student learning of program and policy efforts being made at the federal, state, and local levels.

3. Maintain external sources of support for schoolwide programs (e. g., Title I). Special-purpose funding streams that allow schools maximum flexibility in directing the specific uses of educational resources that are provided are critical components of an integrated service system for students at risk.

4. Upgrade teacher training and staff development programs. Substantial funds provided at the federal, state, and district levels must be earmarked for the continuous improvement of these programs. In addition, the development of professional and collegial networks among teachers should be encouraged.

5. Foster the development of sense of community among students and staff. At-risk students' membership in healthy communities that respect diversity are the keys to survival and the means to lifelong learning. Without a sense of community in our schools, the best efforts and practices of education reformers are likely to be wasted.

Our nation faces very serious challenges in serving its at-risk students. We have made progress in isolated areas, but to sustain this isolated progress and extend it to much larger numbers of schools, we must provide a more solid research base for the many suspected connections between instructional processes and student outcomes, and for the level of effectiveness of various "promising programs" in diverse contexts. We must evolve more readily available and useful information on contextually effective program options and provide realistic sets of requirements for program implementation. Finally, we must motivate a national drive toward systemic supports for community and for high-reliability operations in schools serving at-risk students.

Implications for Needed Research

Previous research has demonstrated that it is possible for schools serving large numbers of students placed at risk to help bring those students to levels of education far above levels traditionally achieved by disadvantaged groups. Now, we need a coherent and sustained program of applied research and evaluation studies of the conditions that foster or cripple valuable school-based reforms for students placed at risk. Applied research of this sort can be meaningfully supported by systematic, third-party evaluations of diverse reform efforts. Finally, we need to have in place a mechanism for the dissemination of research findings related to at-risk students -- a dissemination system that piggybacks upon a coordinated research program and works through established networks to reach teachers, administrators, and support staff. We must begin, in short, by educating our consumers; then we must do our best to meet their expectations.

10.Todd LaPorte and Paula Consolini, "Working in Practice but Not in Theory: Theoretical Challenges of 'High-Reliability Organizations, ' "Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, vol. 1, 1991, pp. 19-48.

11.Karlene Roberts, "Some Characteristics of High Reliability Organizations," Organizational Science, vol. 1 (2), pp. 1-17 and idem, New Challenges to Understanding Organizations (New York: Macmillan, 1993).

12.Stringfield et al., op. cit.; and Stringfield, op. cit.

13.Core Knowledge Sequence (Charlottesville, Va.: Core Knowledge Foundation, 1995).

14.Nancy A. Madden et al. "Success for All: Longitudinal Effects of a Restructuring Program for Inner-City Elementary Schools," American Educational Research Journal, vol. 30, 1993, pp. 123-48.

15.Gay Su Pinnell, "Reading Recovery: Helping at-Risk Children Learn to Read," Elementary School Journal, vol. 90, 1989, pp. 161-82.

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[Executive Summary Part 1] [Summary of Literature Review Part 1]