Achieving Equity and Excellence. Douglas Reeves
environment of high expectations for every student, providing to the poorest students in urban and rural areas the same climate and culture to which their suburban counterparts are routinely exposed.
Although there are certainly unique elements to every school and every child, that does not justify the inconsistent chaos in leadership, pedagogy, and curriculum that pervades many schools and, in particular, schools serving students from low-income families. The synthesis of the research in these pages is that we can and must simultaneously honor and value the individual chrematistics of each child, while also providing the results that effective culture, expectations, feedback, teaching, and leadership provide. Such dual pursuit of equity and excellence is rarely a required change for wealthy schools. However, it is a clarion call to action in the schools serving the poor, brown, and black children who are the focus of this book.
Introduction to Equity and Excellence Schools
To improve excellence for all while maintaining equity for all, the principles and strategies in this book reflect those practices that high-poverty, high-achieving schools adopt. I refer to these schools as equity and excellence schools. The term equity and excellence schools is based on systematic observations of schools with the characteristics in the following list. In my original research (Reeves, 2004) that began in the 1990s, I identified a set of 90/90/90 schools, or schools in which:
• 90 percent or more of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch
• 90 percent or more of students are members of ethnic or linguistic minority groups
• 90 percent or more of students pass state assessments (as defined by the various jurisdictions of the schools)
Since that original research, I have expanded my inquiry and, as the following pages make clear, benefitted from the research of many other people whose fields of inquiry included successful high-poverty schools. Therefore, for the purposes of this book, I have replaced the term 90/90/90 schools with equity and excellence schools in order to convey more accurately the broad scope of schools that are described in these chapters.
The original equity and excellence studies (Reeves, 2004) focused on 135 schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This research was undertaken by my colleagues and me at the Center for Performance Assessment in the course of our support for a comprehensive accountability system in what was then one of the nation’s largest school districts with more than 104,000 students. For most of those 135 schools, there was a clear relationship between higher poverty rates and lower levels of achievement. But there were a few outliers—schools with both high poverty and high achievement. This allowed me to make a careful comparison between the practices of the high-achieving schools and those that were lower achieving. Because all schools in this initial study were in the same district, the variables often associated with student performance—per-pupil funding, teacher assignment policies, and union bargaining agreements—were all the same for both high- and low-performing schools. Therefore, the differences in student performance were not related to these external factors but rather to differences in professional practices by teachers and administrators.
We conducted field interviews and observations with principals and teachers throughout the district in order to better understand the leadership and teaching practices that distinguished the high-performing, high-poverty schools from their lower-performing counterparts. In addition, we collected data from each school not only on state test scores but also on school-based professional practices, such as nonfiction writing, collaborative scoring, and so on. The result is the professional practices I recommend in part II (page 29) of this book. My colleagues and I are confident that these professional practices had made the difference because all the schools compared, whether high- or low-achieving, had the same per-pupil funding, union agreement, teacher assignment policy, and board policies.
In subsequent years, this small group of outlier schools tripled in size from the original seven schools to more than twenty schools—again without changes in budget, bargaining agreement, teacher assignment policy, or board policies. Then other researchers (Chenoweth, 2009, 2017, 2019; Education Trust, n.d.; Womack, Moore, & Hill-Cunningham, 2018; Zavadsky, 2009) found similar results, identifying similar practices that made critical improvements in student achievement. Other recent research supporting high performance in high-poverty schools includes work by Karin Chenoweth and Christina Theokas (2011); Susan Moore Johnson, Stefanie K. Reinhorn, and Nicole S. Simon (2018); Sarah McKibben (2018); Jim Paterson (2018); Michael J. Petrilli (2019); and Robert Slavin (2019a, 2019b). Although each of these researchers operated independently, all came to the strikingly similar conclusion—success is possible in high-poverty schools, and these successes can be replicated on a large scale. It is important to note none of these studies find a commercial program led to the increase in student achievement; rather, the difference was dependent on the daily decisions of teachers and leaders.
In This Book
This book is divided into four parts. Part I delves into the questions that you, as educators and school leaders, must ask when presented with potential change initiatives for your schools (namely, “Do I trust this research?”). Chapter 1 explains how not all research is equal and describes five different levels of educational research that form the basis of change proposals. Savvy readers must be able to sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to educational research and select those changes the evidence most supports for implementation in their schools. Once you select a change initiative, chapter 2 deals with the inevitable objections that will arise. This chapter uses the example of equity and excellence schools to demonstrate how leaders may respond to such resistance to change, and explains why you, as readers, can trust the equity and excellence research.
Part II presents the results of the equity and excellence research by devoting one chapter to each of the seven teaching and leadership practices that distinguish equity and excellence schools from similar schools with lower performance. According to the research, equity and excellence schools do the following (Reeves, 2004).
1. Organize their school or district as a professional learning community (PLC)
2. Display a laser-like focus on student achievement
3. Conduct collaborative scoring
4. Emphasize nonfiction writing
5. Utilize frequent formative assessment with multiple opportunities for success
6. Perform constructive data analysis
7. Engage in cross-disciplinary units of instruction
When you establish these practices in your own schools and districts, you are likely to see improved achievement for all students within a single school year.
The challenge of part III is to move from research to practice. In this section, you will consider how to apply the equity and excellence research in any school. This section will discuss the equity and excellence mindset and its differences from prevailing mindset theories, and introduce the key implementation model of behavior precedes belief to help teachers and leaders break free of the bonds of traditional change models. Part III also discusses the importance of transforming vision into action through promoting teacher leadership, and how to improve coaching, feedback, and evaluation methods throughout schools and districts.
Part IV returns to the roots of the equity and excellence research by advocating for the development of an accountability system that will help any school system (large or small) identify, document, assess, and replicate successful strategies. It discusses the importance of accountability indicators, from the system level to the school and department