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

Executive Summary

Schoolwide projects can create a real sense of excitement in high-poverty schools by enriching the academic program for the child and for the whole school while removing the stigma of the label "disadvantaged." Traditionally, Title I and Chapter 1 projects attempted to help students by giving them limited amounts of special instruction--typically, outside the regular classroom. While such an approach may improve achievement in lower-level, discrete skills, it is not enough to improve academic performance on a broad scale. For that reason, practitioners and state and national policy makers have joined local leaders in support of the schoolwide concept.

Proposals for reauthorizing the Chapter 1 program as a transformed Title I program would extend the availability of the schoolwide option to more high-poverty schools. New provisions in Title I would also enhance the effectiveness of schoolwide programs through high standards, support for comprehensive planning and continuous development, flexibility to draw on all resources, and clear accountability for results. Title I schoolwide programs would require comprehensive instructional reform, enabling all children to meet the same challenging state standards. To encourage improvement throughout a school, all schoolwide programs would be required to begin with a one-year planning period. Schoolwide programs would be permitted to combine their Title I funds with other federal, state, and local funds to enhance services for all students. Finally, states would establish school support teams that offer ongoing technical assistance to schools during the planning, implementation, and evaluation of schoolwide programs.

Successful Schoolwide Projects Set High Standards

Schoolwide projects allow teachers to offer all students in high-poverty schools a challenging academic curriculum. The flexibility of the schoolwide approach gives teachers control over the curricula, enabling them to integrate discipline-based performance standards with lessons that draw on students' life experiences: Navigating a city subway system becomes the basis of a pre-algebra course; by estimating the cost of re-surfacing the school playground, students learn about surface area, estimating, and practical problem solving; and in social studies, tracing family histories takes students from their present community back to their country of origin, through historical records and geography. Through interviews with community members, students develop writing and editing skills and learn how historians document oral history. In some schools with large multilingual populations, students study Anglo traditions as well as their native culture, in two languages, using story telling, plays, essays, and arts activities.

Teachers in schoolwide projects personalize learning through interactive teaching methods: problem solving, multicultural themes, team activities, cooperative learning, individual tutoring, and portfolio assessment. They remove the traditional emphasis on sequential learning and teach higher-order concepts simultaneously with basic skills. Interdisciplinary curricula projects replace basal readers and traditional textbooks; students with different levels of preparation work together on the same problem or curriculum, each contributing to the group's product. Teachers focus on how students think, tracking closely how their knowledge develops and bridging gaps they observe. Typical of the best schoolwide projects, these approaches stimulate children's thinking while helping them make meaning of the curriculum in all core subjects, as at the Accelerated Learning Laboratory (ALL) School in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Leaders of schoolwide projects have used the schoolwide option to redesign education in a way that anticipates the learning needs of the 21st century. These systemic changes are consistent with the recommendations of education researchers (Cohen, McLaughlin, & Talbert, 1993; Levin, 1991; O'Day & Smith, 1993): an explicit framework for curriculum and instructional reforms for all schools and students; a better means of exposing and addressing educational inequality, in both instruction and administration; and opportunities for encouraging the local responsibility, flexibility, and discretion that lead to community and school-based reform. Many schoolwide projects also foster collegiality and high morale among teachers, and a high level of contact between teachers and students, which researchers have found to have a significant effect on instruction (Cohen & Grant, 1993).

The Accelerated Learning Laboratory (ALL) School in Worcester, Massachusetts began its second schoolwide project cycle in 1991 by connecting its theme-based curriculum to high academic standards for all students. Using projects more than textbooks, students in K-8 integrate their knowledge in the core disciplines, learn to solve problems, and apply educational skills to the real world. Planning together, teachers and administrators promote accelerated, multicultural learning. The project's agenda for reform calls for a technology magnet school, a global studies curriculum, multi-grade "clusters," and an alternative grading system. All mathematics activities now incorporate standards developed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). The standards also were used to set up scope-and-sequence seminars in mathematics and to set high expectations for achievement in accelerated math classes--known as "math challenges"--for all students. Students in grades 6-8 are grouped together to attend seminars led by project specialists, which cover subjects from pre-algebra through algebra. Each five-week seminar focuses on a different academic standard, such as proficiency in probability and statistics or "real-life math" (e.g., keeping a checkbook or filing taxes). Students who lack basic math skills attend mini-workshops where they receive a heavy dose of specialized instruction while working to the same high standards as other students. The ALL School curriculum uses special projects to find creative ways of teaching complex skills. For example, students in grades 3-5 simulated a 10,000-mile bicycle trek through Africa as part of an interdisciplinary project. After holding telephone conversations with adventurers who had actually made the trip to learn about the geography, the students created a scale map of Africa. While learning to calculate time, rate, and distance, to read odometers, and to plot changes on a map, the students took turns covering the relative distance in five-minute intervals on stationary bicycles. "All day long, there are children on those bikes, pedaling through Africa," the principal said.

A Good Schoolwide Project is a Good School

A number of organizational features make schoolwides especially versatile. The emphasis on advance planning makes collaboration easier, so there is greater coordination among the regular classroom teachers, parents, administrators, specialists, and support staff. Supplementary instructional options can be created for children, including extending learning time by lengthening the school day or year, having specialists or tutors team teach with regular classroom teachers, or adding supplementary content to the basic program. Parents and the community become educational partners, providing schoolwides with much-needed extra services and resources.

Many educators greet the schoolwide approach enthusiastically, but they recognize that it is not a magic bullet. Of the approximately 9,000 schools with student poverty levels of at least 75 percent, about 22 percent were using a schoolwide model by 1992 (U.S. Department of Education, 1993). Despite the increased interest in schoolwide Chapter 1 projects, studies indicate that strong leadership qualities and management strategies are required for schoolwide project success. In the view of one candid district-level coordinator, schoolwide projects require no less than this powerful combination of human resources:

Astounding principals who are able to motivate staff, organize the school, and provide mechanisms for appropriate staff development.... Shared decision-making, involvement of staff and community, strong parent involvement.... Strong student recognition programs...[and] effective use of school staff.

Project coordinators observe further that even with good leadership and careful planning it takes a few years for schools to adapt to changes: "It's not something that can occur in one year. Schoolwide projects are works in progress. They're not going to be finished."

Promising Practices

Schoolwide projects start down many different pathways to success, and they follow distinctive routes. Although programs vary in structure and content, this study identified the following eight features that are common to all the projects investigated:

• An agreed-upon vision for all students, based on higher academic standards and adequate designs and plans to implement the vision;

• A clear focus on academic achievement;

• Extended planning and a collaborative design;

• A well-defined organization and management structure;

• A strong professional community;

• Cultural inclusiveness;

• Parent and community involvement; and

• Evidence of student and school success.

Practitioners emphasize that Chapter 1 "schoolwide projects are never fully implemented, but are constantly evolving" (Schenck & Beckstrom, 1993, III-3). Thus, although this guide describes distinctive components of successful schoolwide projects, experience teaches that these features will evolve and change over time.

Challenges of Change

When asked to describe the keys to their successes, experienced project planners emphasized two factors: their staff's willingness to grapple continually with new problems and confidence among school leaders, faculty, and parents in the opportunities that schoolwide Chapter 1 projects provide. Even with these assets, a number of challenges persistently confront project implementers:

Adequate Time to Learn New Roles. The transition to a schoolwide project means introducing new and expanded roles, higher academic expectations, and different kinds of management structures. Reaching consensus often is slow, and planners of successful schoolwide projects acknowledge that developing "ownership" of new approaches among teachers and staff takes time and preparation--both of which are in short supply in high-poverty schools. Some districts encourage principals, teachers, and parents to participate in training and to seek technical support; others, however, expect the planning process to unfold quickly and smoothly without adequate guidance and assistance.

Communication and Involvement. Without exception, schoolwide project planners said that project success is directly related to the quality of communication among key people in the school community and the extent to which teachers are partners in planning and implementation. "The biggest pitfall is lack of communication," said a principal whose school is in its second project cycle. "It was hard for some people to see why things should be done differently."

Moving Beyond Reduced Class Size. Many educators consider reduced class size crucial to schoolwide project success because of the relationships between class size, classroom discipline, individualized instruction, student achievement, and self-esteem. In smaller classes, students receive more individualized instruction from the regular classroom teacher and assistants and are likely to be more productively engaged. But reducing class size cannot ensure a successful schoolwide project unless it is paired with a well-structured, consistent, standards-based, developmentally appropriate academic program.

Adequate Preparation for New Resources. Successful schoolwide projects require extensive training of all teachers in uses of technology, new content and methods, and more effective teaching styles. Practitioners emphasize that everyone needs to receive professional development--administrators, teachers, classroom assistants, and parents--not just the program coordinators.

Including parents and the Community. Organizers of schoolwide projects find that it is not enough to improve instruction, curricula, or materials. Success for the project depends on backing from parents, businesses, special interest groups, and community organizations. "You must network with the community you serve," explains one principal. "We turn to our community council of 32 contributing businesses and service agencies to help us support our students. We just cannot do it ourselves."

Achievement Variability. Students' performance on standardized tests can waver from year to year, even where standards are high, the academic emphasis is consistent, and schoolwide projects offer children comprehensive assistance. Students often are highly mobile, and the neediest students in a school may not have been exposed to the program long enough for it to take effect. "I think real change takes five to ten years.... Three years is just not enough," commented one district Chapter 1 coordinator. Successful schoolwide project managers closely monitor program fluctuations and adjust their programs as necessary, but it is difficult to stave off criticism of inevitable short-term achievement dips and fluctuating scores.

Stabilizing Change. A consistent threat to schoolwide project success is the change in leadership that occurs too often and too quickly in the life of many projects. Some schools with schoolwide projects in effect for less than two years have lost their principals to new district-based initiatives or other opportunities. It takes time for schools to establish relationships and develop shared visions. Regular administrative changes undermine the stability and continuity that high-poverty schools so greatly need.

More Progress in Elementary Schools. Experience has shown that schoolwide projects evolve most smoothly and quickly in elementary schools, especially in schools serving children in prekindergarten through the second or third grades. The process appears to be more difficult in middle schools. Although relatively little information is available about schoolwide projects in middle schools because fewer of these schools report 75 percent poverty levels, it appears that those choosing a schoolwide design have a difficult time sustaining their programs. Although some have made long strides, most middle-grade schoolwide projects are only in their earliest developmental stages.

Conclusion

There are no packaged solutions, and no schoolwide projects remain the same for more than a short time. Even in the best projects, solid designs falter. When they do, educators redirect their energies and discover new and more appropriate approaches for focusing on high standards for all children. The most promising practices in Chapter 1 schoolwide projects establish strong ties to parents, assume children are active learners, and are supported by state and local institutions. Every child becomes every educator's responsibility. In time, through hard work, collaboration, and mutual respect, schoolwide projects accomplish long-held goals of academic excellence for every child and demonstrate the potential to "reinvent" Chapter 1 as Title I.
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[Acknowledgments]

[Introduction]