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

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.

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.