Changing the school system improvement narrative

Following the pandemic, many school districts are struggling to figure out how best to accelerate students’ academic growth, support their health and wellness, and close the achievement gap. Programs to address these issues are being implemented rapidly. Unfortunately, we can predict how many of these efforts will end. The history of American education is replete with good ideas and a cascade of reforms that may work for some students in some places but generally fail to deliver on initial claims. Each cycle takes time, will, and resources. On repeat, they also breed cynicism and doubt among educators and the public that dramatic improvement is even possible. This time around, can we avoid that postmortem?

A “premortem” analysis, developed by Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao (2014), can get things off to a better start and lead to better outcomes. It asks people to imagine what success or failure would look like before they implement a change. While supporting groups of school faculty, central office staff, decision makers, and parents through this activity, we have found that when they pool their experiences and knowledge, they quickly identify the major factors that must come together across their district and community for the reform to succeed. They also realize that they did not consider many of these factors in their initial roll-out plan. Similarly, when asked to imagine failure, they can identify likely roadblocks. Districts and schools sorely need the systems perspective developed through this exercise.

We recently published with our colleagues a history of Chicago school reform, How a City Learned to Improve its Schools, which offers some lessons in this regard (Bryk et al., 2023). In 1987, then U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett labeled the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) “worst in the nation.” Decades of systemic racism and segregation, inadequate funding, fiscal malfeasance and corruption, and community disinvestment had taken its toll. Thirty years later, in 2017, research documented that the district was among the nation’s most improved. Elementary students were gaining 1.2 years of learning for each year of instruction. English learners were making rapid progress. Graduation rates had climbed from 50% to 80%, even as academic requirements became more rigorous. Students of color and those from low-income families made the biggest gains.