How Can Comprehensive School Reform Models Be Successfully Implemented?

Comprehensive school reform, or CSR, a currently a popular approach to school improvement, is intended to foster schoolwide change that affects all aspects of schooling (e.g., curriculum, instruction, organization, professional development, and parent involvement). Federal, state, and local legislation and funding have supported CSR implementation, and in 1997 Congress enacted the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration program, which gives financial support to schools adopting such reforms. This article reviews and synthesizes the literature that documents CSR implementation, positing that the more specific, consistent, authoritative, powerful, and stable a policy is, the stronger its implementation will be. It finds that all five policy attributes contribute to implementation; in particular, specificity is related to implementation fidelity, power to immediate implementation effects, and consistency, authority, and stability to long-lasting change.

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Boosting Student Achievement: The Effect of Comprehensive School Reform on Student Achievement

Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis ◽

10.3102/0162373709333886 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 31 (2) ◽

pp. 111-126 ◽

Cited By ~ 26

Author(s):

Betheny Gross ◽

T. Kevin Booker ◽

Dan Goldhaber

Keyword(s):

Student Achievement ◽

School Reform ◽

Federal Funding ◽

Reading Performance ◽

Comprehensive School ◽

Comprehensive School Reform ◽

Math Performance ◽

Left Behind ◽

Reform Strategy ◽

Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration

Between the late 1980s and early 2000s, schools, districts, states, and the federal government devoted enormous resources to the implementation of Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) models. With more than 1.6 billion federal dollars distributed through the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration (CSRD) project and its successor, the CSR project, states and districts made CSR adoption a central reform strategy for their lowest performing schools. Today, however, federal funding for CSR has dried up, and this policy has been left behind with few explicit efforts to assess the effect of these CSR funds on schools. In this article, the authors look back on this federal reform initiative and the effect it had on Texas students. Using promising analytic techniques for nonexperimental studies to investigate the effects of federal CSR awards on student achievement, the authors find that CSRD funding did not significantly effect students’ reading performance and that its effect on math performance varied across different student types.

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School Improvement by Design: Lessons from a Study of Comprehensive School Reform Programs

Handbook of Education Policy Research ◽

10.4324/9780203880968-60 ◽

2012 ◽

pp. 653-667

Keyword(s):

School Improvement ◽

School Reform ◽

Comprehensive School ◽

Comprehensive School Reform

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Organizational Strategies for Promoting Instructional Change: Implementation Dynamics in Schools Working With Comprehensive School Reform Providers

American Educational Research Journal ◽

10.3102/0002831207302498 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 44 (2) ◽

pp. 252-297 ◽

Cited By ~ 70

Author(s):

Brian Rowan ◽

Robert J. Miller

Keyword(s):

School Reform ◽

Program Implementation ◽

Implementation Fidelity ◽

Comprehensive School ◽

Comprehensive School Reform ◽

Cultural Control ◽

Instructional Change ◽

Organizational Strategies ◽

Change Initiatives ◽

America's Choice

This article develops a conceptual framework for studying how three comprehensive school reform (CSR) programs organized schools for instructional change and how the distinctive strategies they pursued affected implementation outcomes. The conceptual model views the Accelerated Schools Project as using a system of cultural control to produce instructional change, the America's Choice program as using a model of professional control, and the Success for All program as using a model of procedural control. Predictable differences in patterns of organizing for instructional improvement emerged across schools working with these three programs, and these patterns were found to be systematically related to patterns of program implementation. In particular, the two CSR programs that were organized to produce instructional standardization produced higher levels of instructional change in the schools where they worked. The results of the study suggest organizational strategies program developers can use to obtain implementation fidelity in instructional change initiatives.

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