Eric.ed.gov – One Vision, Seven Strategies

The “American Dream” is under duress as the economy slows, incomes stagnate, and upward mobility is more limited than at any time in recent history. Despite a steady increase in per-pupil spending on public schooling over the last decades, not enough students graduate with proficiency in reading and math. And despite some progress over the past decade, students living in poverty and who are African American or Hispanic, still lag far behind white students with more means. Yet not all schools are failing. There are many exemplary schools including urban schools that are succeeding despite high poverty rates, and growing numbers of district leaders taking courageous steps toward real and lasting improvement. To achieve the nation’s ambitious performance goals for all students, school-level change alone is not the answer. Americans need to raise their sights and reorganize the entire educational structure in which their schools function. In the authors’ work with urban districts, they have developed a multi-dimensional vision for restructuring public education for today’s goals and realities. This vision is built around seven transformational strategies for organizing resources–people, time, and money–to support the creation of high-performing schools at scale. These strategies should not be viewed as “best practices” or “success factors” that can be implemented independent of each other. Instead, they should be seen as an integrated set of seven strategies for transforming education to meet the new goals for learning. (Contains 5 endnotes.)