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1. 36 American School Board Journal I www.asbj.com I May 2010
hy do some school reform efforts work when
others don’t?
As researchers from the University of
Southern California’s Center on Educational
Governance, we want to find the answer to
that question. So when we had the chance to
watch four urban districts work through the early stages of
reform, we jumped at it.
In 2006, we helped the Weingart Foundation develop the
Urban School Districts Reform Initiative (USDRI) and
select four districts for grants ranging from $750,000 to
more than $1 million. The three-year grants targeted specif-
ic projects at small-to-medium urban districts in Southern
California: Desert Sands Unified, Inglewood Unified,
Lennox Elementary, and Pomona Unified, each of which
had a school reform plan under way.
Once grants were awarded, we formed a collaborative
learning community with the foundation and the four dis-
tricts, and observed each district work through early obsta-
cles. Each reform varied in content and approach, yet each
project followed a broadly similar strategy.
We identified six features of early success, key ingredi-
ents for any district’s reform recipe. They are: suitability,
superintendent leadership, reform champions, retaining
focus, advancing through stages, and communication.
Positioning for success
As each district’s leaders defined their project’s size and
scope, we noticed that their strategic positioning always
included three key ingredients: suitability, superintendent
leadership, and reform champions.
Suitability addresses the reform’s potential success and
how various constituents greet the reform. Your projects
must suit your district. Ask yourself: Does the project’s con-
tent align and integrate with your mission, your strategic
plan, your context? At the same time, is the reform ambi-
tious enough to improve district operations and, ultimately,
student performance?
Our four districts chose projects that addressed funda-
mental and high-priority issues, using different ways to fit
Colin Anderson
Andrew Thomas and Priscilla Wohlstetter
W
Copyright 2010 National School Boards Association. All rights reserved. This article may
be printed out and photocopied for individual or noncommercial educational use (50
copy limit), but may not be electronically re-created, stored, or distributed; or otherwise
modified, reproduced, transmitted, republished, displayed or distributed. By granting this
limited license, NSBA does not waive any of the rights or remedies otherwise available
at law or in equity. By granting permission to use of our materials, NSBA does not intend
to endorse any company or its products and services.

2. American School Board Journal I www.asbj.com I May 2010 37
the project to the district’s mission and local context.
Desert Sands’ USDRI funds helped to accelerate a technol-
ogy initiative—increased computer usage in classrooms—
that had been in the district’s strategic plan since 1993.
Lennox Elementary built an after-school program in which
English language learners created school newspapers and
learned to strengthen writing, interviewing, listening, and
researching skills.
The other two districts started projects from scratch,
aligning them with existing district programs and priorities.
Inglewood’s then-superintendent, who has a math back-
ground, knew that building instructional leadership capacity
at the principal level would improve secondary math instruc-
tion. The project was new, but its methods conformed to an
ongoing districtwide push to reorganize schools around pro-
fessional learning communities and expand the use of data-
driven instructional decision- making.
Pomona’s superintendent, who previously had served as
the district’s chief academic officer for five years, had
watched principal evaluation and accountability languish
for years. She used the funds to create a new evaluation sys-
tem that dovetailed with the district’s mission and vision,
and addressed a “weak link” in overall district governance.
For added effectiveness and coherence, an outside contrac-
tor’s coaching program for principals needed to mesh with
any principal evaluation tool.
Leadership from the top
The second key ingredient in strategic positioning is super-
intendent leadership.
In all four projects, superintendents played relatively
hands-on roles without micromanaging, which produced
results. They struck this “high accountability, high support”
balance by personally overseeing the overall development
of related curricular and instructional strategies. And, just
as importantly, they secured, controlled, and used student
achievement and related data.
Inglewood’s superintendent hired two consultants to
lead professional development and recruited a high school
principal with a mathematics background to work at the
district headquarters. The superintendent remained
involved through daily updates and campus visits, but oth-
ers carried out the bulk of the work.
Meticulous about data and benchmarking, Pomona’s
superintendent kept a notebook of test scores, evaluations,
and memos from each school and brought it on site visits.
Access to detailed student data helped her scrutinize the
principals’ instructional decisions. With teacher and admin-
istrator evaluations in hand, she could hold staff account-
able for their schoolwide goals.
This level of personal involvement and attention to
results shows how much the superintendent values the
reform, which helps the work of others with more direct
responsibility for implementation.
Finding reform champions
In observing the four districts, we noticed a third key ingre-
dient for early reform success: reform champions whose
colleagues told us they were “the glue that keeps the whole
program together.”
Each districtwide reform had staff members who func-
tioned as the project’s day-to-day leaders. Effective reform
champions must have sufficient decision-making authority
and access to adequate resources. As Pomona’s reform
expanded to more schools, its champions appealed to the
superintendent for additional staff to go on site visits. At
Lennox, the reform champion had access to the district’s sec-
ond-in-command, who helped “remove the roadblocks” that
otherwise would have prevented the program from being
implemented.
Champions also must have skills, competence, and expe-
rience in the reform’s content area. The champion for the
Lennox after-school program was a bilingual English-lan-
guage development intervention specialist for the district
and a National Board-certified former teacher who had
taught several elementary grades at different schools, had
served on one school’s leadership team, and had been a lead
teacher. Pomona chose two district administrators who
were former principals with complementary experience.
Desert Sands’ champion had been the IT director for 14
years and was seen as “very passionate and very visionary
... and he gets the nuts-and-bolts people behind him.”
At Inglewood, unique among the four districts, the super-
intendent served as the reform champion. During the pro-
ject’s second year, when the school board did not renew the
superintendent’s contract, the director of secondary
instruction (a former math teacher) subsequently stepped
in to play the role of reform champion.
Strategic implementation
Preplanning helps you launch your reform, but it’s just the
first step. Early success depends also on strategic imple-
mentation and three more ingredients: retaining focus,
advancing in stages, and maintaining communication.
Successful reforms tend to have clear, concrete objec-
tives; as the reform progresses, its participants retain a tan-
gible sense of what they are trying to achieve. Successful
reforms also stay focused.
The four districts did so in two ways. They aligned the
reform projects with the district’s mission, the local con-
text, and related district programs. They also broadcast
their successes.
Principals wanted to know the standards on which their
performance would be evaluated, the superintendent want-
ed unambiguous understanding and acceptance of those
same standards, and others wanted to understand how the
Copyright 2010 National School Boards Association. All rights reserved. This article may
be printed out and photocopied for individual or noncommercial educational use (50
copy limit), but may not be electronically re-created, stored, or distributed; or otherwise
modified, reproduced, transmitted, republished, displayed or distributed. By granting this
limited license, NSBA does not waive any of the rights or remedies otherwise available
at law or in equity. By granting permission to use of our materials, NSBA does not intend
to endorse any company or its products and services.

3. 38 American School Board Journal I www.asbj.com I May 2010
standards affected their work. Only clearly articulated and
unambiguously interpreted objectives would result in the
ultimate goal: higher-performing principals running schools
with greater student achievement.
Desert Sands’ superintendent retired shortly after the ini-
tiative’s launch, but the reform was so entwined with the dis-
trict’s strategic plan that the project didn’t falter. The new
superintendent attributed the smooth transition to the fact that
her team was “pre-organized [with] time frames, next steps.”
Likewise, when Inglewood started its second year without a
superintendent, it benefited from a “solid plan” that enabled
teachers and administrators to “hit the ground running.”
Positive public feedback helped promote the reforms’
visibility, while negative feedback was addressed privately.
The Desert Sands superintendent appreciated the impor-
tance of good news: She said the project leader “does a
good job of keeping the goals in front of his staff and then
helping teachers and principals at the school sites celebrate
the small victories as implementation goes along.”
For Lennox’s pilot after-school program, the project
head personally recruited teachers; moving forward, she
leveraged positive publicity to increase teacher participa-
tion. District administrators widely distributed the after-
school program’s student newspaper and published positive
student outcomes in district and community newsletters. In
the second year, recruiting teachers and students became
much less difficult.
Advancing in stages
Equally important is advancing the reform in stages. All four
districts began their projects on a manageable scale and
then ramped them up to include more participants. This
allowed them to respond to feedback and adapt to changing
conditions while remaining true to the goals of the reform.
Some feedback came from formal evaluations keyed to
established benchmarks. Other feedback was less formal,
resulting from classroom observations or conversations
with participants at the school sites. But in all cases, imple-
mentation was “context-sensitive” and rolled out in stages.
Desert Sands’ technology integration project began with
about “600-plus teachers in elementary schools from grades
K-5.” The second year, the emphasis was on middle schools.
The plan also began with the most motivated and interested
teachers, expanding as interest grew among the faculty. In
this way, officials could develop training materials and
processes as they went along and tailor training to the spe-
cific needs of their teachers.
Lennox began its after-school project with a yearlong
pilot at one elementary school before expanding to others.
According to the project lead, this step-by-step rollout
schedule allowed the others “to not just automatically do
what the pilot does, but modify it in ways that are going to
be important to allow it to be as successful as possible as we
go to the other sites.”
Inglewood wanted its secondary math instruction
reform to grow in a “viral” fashion. Rather than seeking to
change the behavior of all teachers at all schools, project
leaders focused on training “cadres” who would become
change agents at their respective schools. Teachers and
assistant principals attended monthly Saturday meetings on
using data to improve mathematics achievement. The idea
was that teachers would return to their schools and share
their new knowledge.
Communication is critical
The last key ingredient is maintaining communication
among all levels of the school system. Information should
flow from the school board, district offices, and reform
leaders down to every participant and school site, and back
up again to the board level.
Multiple communication channels increase information
flow, and all four districts relied on multiple forms. One
superintendent maintained an open-door policy; another
required that associate superintendents write a “Friday let-
ter” to update her on each week’s progress.
Smaller school districts have relatively flat organization-
al structures, which facilitate communication. The superin-
tendents in the four districts often interacted directly with
principals and teachers. Central office administrators also
were part of the communication process, building trusting
relationships along the way.
Lateral, or teacher-to-teacher, communication also is
important. When an Inglewood eighth-grade teacher, who
was the only algebra teacher at her K-8 school, took the ini-
tiative to call a meeting of all the district’s eighth-grade alge-
bra teachers, the reform champion called it “a great strategy.”
“That’s what we’re trying to develop,” the champion said.
“This process changes the culture of your school and that’s
what we’re getting all of the teachers to understand.”
With the perspective gained from years in this project, we
advise districts pursuing major reform projects to plan bold-
ly, but lead sensitively. Choose a reform that fits your dis-
trict’s capacities and context, designate a reform champion,
and ensure that the superintendent is ready to lead with a bal-
ance of hands-on involvement and background support.
Once positioned for success, execute the project with
the right level of focus, involvement, speed, and flow of
information and communication across all groups.
Including the six key ingredients will help ensure your
reform’s success. I
Andrew Thomas is an adjunct professor and a postdoctoral
research associate at the Center on Educational Governance at
the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of
Education. Priscilla Wohlstetter, the Diane and MacDonald
Becket Professor of Educational Policy at the school, is director
of the Center on Educational Governance and the principal inves-
tigator of the Urban School Districts Reform Initiative.
Copyright 2010 National School Boards Association. All rights reserved. This article may
be printed out and photocopied for individual or noncommercial educational use (50
copy limit), but may not be electronically re-created, stored, or distributed; or otherwise
modified, reproduced, transmitted, republished, displayed or distributed. By granting this
limited license, NSBA does not waive any of the rights or remedies otherwise available
at law or in equity. By granting permission to use of our materials, NSBA does not intend
to endorse any company or its products and services.