Karin Chenoweth on the Secret Sauce of Gap-Closing Districts

            In the concluding chapter in her book on six beat-the-odds school districts, Karin Chenoweth (The Education Trust) ponders how to summarize the key ingredients. She noticed a number of seemingly important elements: passionate, hard-working teachers; a coherent reading program; an effective assessment system; a good student management program; well-targeted grants. “As nice as it would be to boil the success of these districts down to a couple of those things,” says Chenoweth, “I don’t think the answer lies in that direction. After all, there are plenty of passionate, hard-working teachers in ineffective districts, and the same can be said about good reading programs, assessments, data systems, and grant programs.” 

            She believes that what explains these districts’ remarkable achievements is their “ethos,” which was powerfully summed up by Ronald Edmonds in a 1979 article: a culture in which “it is incumbent on all personnel to be instructionally effective for all pupils.” Chenoweth unpacks Edmonds’s statement: 

• Incumbent – Educators have internalized the responsibility to ensure that kids get smarter, and they (the educators) are willing to be accountable for that. 
• All personnel – Getting results is not the sole responsibility of individual teachers but of every adult in the building, including cafeteria workers, bus drivers, and custodians. 
• Instructionally effective – This is broadly defined, encompassing curriculum, schedules, materials, pedagogy, interventions, engagement, and encouragement. 
• All pupils – This includes children living in poverty, African-American children, and others who are left out of school success in far too many U.S. schools. 

The districts Chenoweth describes – and the schools she’s written about in her other books – “are filled with adults who feel it incumbent on themselves to be instructionally effective for all kids.” Here’s what that looks like in concrete terms: 

• Leadership – “None of the leaders in this book is a fluffy, utopian idealist,” says Chenoweth. “All are hard-headed career educators who have seen the power schools have to change lives… They aren’t waiting for the cavalry to teach the kids; they are the cavalry.” As one of the superintendents put it, educators “can change the path of poverty.” Leaders communicated a clear, ambitious vision and set measurable goals (in one case, that no fourth grader would fail the state reading test and have to repeat the grade). Notably, none of the district leaders blamed educators for student failure; rather, says Chenoweth, they expected principals, teachers, and other staff members “to be curious and willing to learn, improve, and lead efforts to find solutions to problems.” 
• Scientific method – A common theme in the districts was the systematic application of these steps:
• Identify an important problem. 
• Propose a solution based on local data and existing research. 
• Implement it. 
• Gather and analyze data to see if the problem was solved. 
• If it was, identify the reasons and extend and expand the solution. 
• If it wasn’t solved, identify the reasons and either adjust or start over. 

“When you do that week after week, month after month, year after year, you start seeing results,”   said an Oklahoma superintendent. This is not easy work, says Chenoweth, and many educators aren’t good at the last three steps. But when the scientific method is applied, “This way of working by its very nature builds leadership capacity throughout schools and districts, because ideas and solutions come from everywhere. A paraeducator’s insight into why a student may be having trouble with a particular concept or skill is just as valuable as those of a teacher, principal, or superintendent. A bus driver or school secretary may have information about a student that no other professional in the building knows. A brand-new teacher might have better training in reading or math instruction than a veteran one.” With common metrics of success and continual examination of data, schools can be creative, try new things, and find the best solutions for kids. 

• Systems of support – Chenoweth quotes Paul Zavitkovsky of the University of Illinois/Chicago: “The key to a high-performing school is that it becomes a community where adult learning is as important as kid learning is. And because of the infrastructure of American schools… you’re fighting an uphill battle to create the time and the space to do systematic adult learning where adults can really learn their way through chronic problems together.” The districts Chenoweth profiled won this battle by: 
• Effective teamwork – Teacher teams pored over assessment data, behavioral data, attendance data, and student work and thought deeply about the effects of their work, what they should do more of, and what they should do less of; 
• Common assessments – “Teachers need to be looking at how students did on the same assessment given at roughly the same time,” says Chenoweth… “Without common data there is no real way to expose and learn from expertise.” This means that teacher teams agree on what their students should be learning, and then experiment with how to teach it.
• A culture of trust – The question often heard in highly productive meetings: Your kids are doing better than mine; what are you doing? “It is long past time to acknowledge that it is impossible for individual educators to know all there is to know about making kids smarter,” says Chenoweth. “There is simply too much to know. It is only by pooling their knowledge and learning from expertise that educators can possibly expect to help all kids.”
• Using the research on how people learn – The districts Chenoweth chose mostly figured this out for themselves. It would be more efficient, she says, for districts to draw on the rich insights on human learning from neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology. -
• Understanding that the work is never done – “There is always another problem to solve,” she says, “more opportunities to provide for children, better ways of doing things, higher standards to reach.” 

 “So, to sum up,” says Chenoweth, “the common elements of these districts are leadership that defines a vision of high expectations for all students and builds a culture where all adults in the system feel it incumbent to make kids smarter; a process to guide the adults in the district to making better decisions while growing their ability to do so using the scientific method; and systems to undergird that improvement process.” 

            Why aren’t more districts implementing these ideas? Why do economic and racial achievement gaps continue to be so wide across the nation? Chenoweth points to these factors: 

• It’s hard to translate research into practice. 
• Many educators resist the idea that others have something to teach them. 
• Most school and district leaders don’t understand how to lead improvement. 
• We as a nation have not fully committed to making all kids smarter. 
• Not everyone agrees that all kids can get smarter. 
• Local newspaper reporters aren’t effectively describing what’s happening in schools. 
• Some Americans “have become discouraged about whether public schools can do much to help kids become smart,” says Chenoweth. “Others have become convinced that schools can but won’t.” 

“I wrote this book hoping to counter such pessimism,” she concludes. “The districts I have profiled… provide clear arguments against the idea that public schools are incapable of improvement and excellence. They demonstrate that our future fellow citizens – children from all backgrounds – are capable of getting smarter and that the efforts of ordinary educators, when marshaled together, can help them do so. Kids can get smarter. We can all get smarter. We just have to muster the will to do so.” 

“We Can All Get Smarter” by Karin Chenoweth in her book, Districts That Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty, and Achievement (Harvard Education Press, 2021, pp. 129-152); Chenoweth can be reached at kchenoweth@edtrust.org.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #929 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.