Emerging Practices in Rapid Achievement Gain Schools

The ESE recently published a study entitled, "Emerging Practices in Rapid Achievement Gain Schools: An Analysis of 2010-2011 Level 4 Schools to Identify Organizational and Instructional Practices that Accelerate Students’ Academic Achievement."

The goal of this study, undertaken by the The Institute for Strategic Leadership and Learning (INSTLL, LLC) was to identify significant common characteristics in school turnaround practices and/or structures between the Level 4 schools making rapid achievement gains in 2010-2011 versus those schools that made little if any gains. The analysis identified three such areas of significance:

• The school has an instruction- and results-oriented principal who has galvanized both individual and collective responsibility for the improved achievement of all students through a variety of deliberate improvement structures, expectations, practices, and continuous feedback.
• The school has created instruction-specific teaming and teacher-specific coaching for pursuing ongoing instructional improvement.
• The school has developed a well-orchestrated system of ongoing data collection and analysis that informs a continuously responsive and adaptive system of tiered instruction directly attentive to students’ specific academic needs.

The report is 22 pages but definitely worth the read (or at least a quick skim!) The presence of effective use of data is embedded in all three of these common characteristics. The recent NCLB waiver presentations discussed options for the use of reserved funds to help districts' lowest performing schools make their targets, and pointed to the Level 4 study as a place to identify high-leverage strategies for use in these efforts.