Designing and managing comprehensive school reform: The case of Success for All.

Abstract

This study explores the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform: devising integrated, school-wide programs of improvement for chronically-weak schools. Comprehensive school reform has been one of the dominant reform movements of the past 20 years. While originally performed by a small number of design teams, the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform has begun to spread among state education agencies, districts, commercial publishers, and others as they collaborate to integrate curriculum, assessment, and professional development into coherent programs of improvement for schools. The study has two goals. The first is to develop a conceptual framework characterizing the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform. The second is to use that framework to explore the work of the Success for All Foundation (SFAF). Between 1988-2000, SFAF rose to unusual prominence for its success designing and managing comprehensive school reform. Between 2001-2005, concurrent with the passage and implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, SFAF fell into decline, its continued viability in question. This study uses a conceptual framework developed around the ideas of managing interdependence and full world design to explore the work of SFAF between 1998-2005 in order to understand its rise to prominence and its subsequent decline. Drawing from the case of SFAF, I argue that we are just now beginning to understand the work of designing and managing comprehensive school reform as a critical component of broader, systemic reform. I argue that our nascent understanding bears on evaluation of the progress of comprehensive school reform, the prospects of popularizing the work among institutionalized organizations, and the implications for networked charter schools as an alternative to comprehensive school reform.Ph.D.Curriculum developmentEducationEducation historyEducational administrationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125474/2/3192752.pd