Identifying the Characteristics of Effective High Schools

Identifying the Characteristics of Effective High Schools

Report from Year One of the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools

Stacey Rutledge | Lora Cohen-Vogel | La'Tara Osborne-Lampkin

Research Report September 2012

The National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools (NCSU) is a national research and development center that focuses on identifying the combination of essential components and the programs, practices, processes and policies that make some high schools in large urban districts particularly effective with low income students, minority students, and English language learners. The Center's goal is to develop, implement, and test new processes that other districts will be able to use to scale up effective practices within the context of their own goals and unique circumstances. Led by Vanderbilt University's Peabody College, our partners include The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Florida State University, the University of WisconsinMadison, Georgia State University, and the Education Development Center.

We want to express our sincere gratitude to Broward County Public Schools, and the principals, teachers, and other school personnel, and students for their willingness to participate in this study.

This paper is part of our research report series and was written by:

Stacey A. Rutledge, Florida State University Lora Cohen-Vogel, University of North Carolina ? Chapel Hill La'Tara Osborne-Lampkin, Florida State University

The following individuals contributed to the research reported here:

Thomas Smith, Marisa Cannata, Ellen B. Goldring, Katherine Taylor Haynes, Joseph F. Murphy, Vanderbilt University; Jason T. Huff, New Leaders; Patrice Iatarola, Florida State University; Tim Sass, George State University

We also thank the following graduate students for contributing to this work: Kimberly Berry, Jennifer Y. Blalock, Lynn H. Comer, Saralyn Grass, J. Edward Guthrie, Christopher W. Harrison, Karin Katterfeld, Laura Neergaard, Courtney Preston, Ronnie Roberts, Bruce Vineyard

This research was conducted with funding from the Institute of Education Sciences (R305C10023). The opinions expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the sponsor.

Table of Contents Executive Summary ...................................................................................................................... 5 Section I: Introduction ................................................................................................................. 7 Section II: The Essential Components: A Guiding Framework ............................................. 8 Section III: Study Context and Research Design .................................................................... 10 Section IV: School Case Summaries ......................................................................................... 17

School B101 ..................................................................................................................... 17 School B102 ..................................................................................................................... 20 School B103 ..................................................................................................................... 23 School B104 ..................................................................................................................... 27 Section V: Comparisons between Higher and Lower Value-Added Schools by Component ....................................................................................................................................................... 32 Quality Instruction............................................................................................................ 32 CLASS-S Analysis ........................................................................................................... 32 Student Shadowing........................................................................................................... 38 Learning Centered Leadership ......................................................................................... 43 Culture of Learning and Professional Behavior ............................................................... 47 Systemic Performance Accountability ............................................................................. 48 Personalized Learning Connections ................................................................................. 49 Rigorous and Aligned Curriculum ................................................................................... 51 Systematic Use of Data .................................................................................................... 53 Variability of Schooling Experiences............................................................................... 54 Connections to External Communities ............................................................................. 55 Section VI: Personalization for Social and Academic Learning ............................................ 57 Section VII: Conclusion, Implications, and Next Steps for the Center ................................. 59 References .................................................................................................................................... 61 Appendices ................................................................................................................................... 64 Appendix A Definitions of Subcomponents and Dimensions..................................... ..65 Appendix B NVivo Code List ....................................................................................... 75

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Appendix C CLASS-S Findings.................................................................................... 80 Appendix D PASL Case Examples ............................................................................... 85

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Executive Summary

The National Center on Scaling up Effective Schools (NCSU) is a five-year project working to develop, implement, and test new processes to scale up effective practices in high schools that districts will be able apply within the context of their own unique goals and circumstances. This report describes the activities and findings of the first year, specifically, from fieldwork conducted in four case study high schools in one of our partner districts, Broward County, Florida. The findings from this fieldwork inform a joint team of researchers, designers, and district educators toward promising practices around which an innovation will be built in the same district in years three, four and five of the Center's work.

The work of NCSU is informed by thirty years of research on the characteristics of effective schools. Although a consensus has recently begun to emerge around the "essential components" of successful schooling, far less is known about the ways in which educators develop, implement, integrate, and sustain these components. The Center's first year of fieldwork was designed to identify the programs, policies, and practices that effective schools in our study used to coordinate the essential components into successful outcomes for students. Four high schools in Broward County ? two higher-performing and two lower-performing ? were selected for case study on the basis of findings from a value-added analysis. Our comprehensive case study was conducted during the 2010-11 school year during three week-long visits to each high school.

We identified one major theme that cut across all ten components: personalization for academic and social learning.2 In the area of personalization, our findings show that the higher value-added (VA) schools made deliberate efforts through systematic structures to promote strong relationships between adults and students as well as to personalize the learning experience of students. In addition, the higher VA schools maintained strong and reliable disciplinary systems that, in turn, engendered feelings of caring and, implicitly, trust among both students and teachers. Leaders at the higher VA schools talked explicitly about looking for student engagement in classroom walkthroughs as well as in their interactions with students. Teachers at the higher VA schools were more likely to discuss instructional activities that drew on students' experiences and interests. The higher VA schools also encouraged stronger linkages with parents. We will discuss this finding extensively in this report as it forms the basis for the innovation we will design and implement in partnership with Broward County in subsequent years.

The report is divided into ten sections. After an introduction, Section II presents eight essential components of effective high schools drawn from a comprehensive review of the high school reform literature (e.g., Dolejs, et al., 2006; Murphy, Elliott, Goldring, & Porter, 2006) and two others that emerged from the analysis of the fieldwork data in Year One. Section III details the research design, describing the sample selection, data, and three-stage approach used to analyze the data. In Section IV, we present case summaries of each of the four sites, referred to herein as B101, B102, B103, and B104 to protect confidentiality. In addition to summarizing the practices through which the essential components were manifest in each school, this section includes structural and demographic features that may be important for contextualizing the findings. In Section V, we compare higher and lower value-added schools in terms of the ten essential components and identify the bundles of practices that might explain observed differences.

2 As our major finding forms the basis for our innovation for scale up, we describe this finding indepth. For additional information on the two other findings, please contact the authors.

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