The High Support School Initiative: Restructuring Central Office to Improve Student Learning

Abstract

A series of reform efforts over the past two decades have found the Boston Public Schools (BPS) making progress, despite the districts’ struggles over time to improve its lowest performing schools. Due to a total restructuring of the central office and a strategy focused on increasing student outcomes in a set of highly impacted schools across the city, BPS is keenly poised to address persistent achievement gaps and provide the Boston community with high quality schools in every neighborhood. My project was to lead the planning and facilitate the initial stages of the implementation of an effort to turn around 21 schools whose performance was below the city’s average on Massachusetts state assessments for two consecutive years. The strategy called for a focus on the individual schools and a new model of collaboration between the district central office and the schools. Cross-functional teams composed of district administrators, school leaders, teachers, and support staff worked jointly to customize interventions for the schools. The project succeeded in that it provided an opportunity to test a new central office structure designed to support principals to lead quality instruction in their schools. It also succeeded because central office administrators collaborated with school communities in unprecedented ways, used data publicly to target interventions toward the students with the greatest needs, allocated coaching support toward the schools, used budget flexibility to enhance school-based strategies, and rolled out a new evaluation system and staffing supports for this set of schools--all while maintaining requisite services for all schools. In addition to these successes, we encountered several key challenges including lack of initial funding, difficulties customizing professional development to the schools, creating a learning community among the school leaders, and sustaining a focus on this initiative while other initiatives vied for the same resources. Competing initiatives unveiled larger political challenges and created shifts in organizational priorities. We achieved success by focusing all of our attention on delivering services to the schools during the planning stages. At times, we failed to communicate well with school leaders and grappled to maintain consistent focus on supporting principals to lead instruction in their schools throughout the implementation. Boston Public Schools can be successful in transforming schools to improve quality (1) by continuing to restructure the central office to create the conditions for schools to be successful, (2) by creating direct lines of accountability for each central office employee to student learning in classrooms across the district, and (3) by beginning to address some significant inequities built into the system. Regardless of what new initiative arises, central offices must construct and organize systems that focus on partnerships with school leaders to ensure quality teaching and learning in every school, resulting in exceptional learning outcomes for every student. Hopefully, the content herein can be very helpful to BPS and others seeking to engage in similar manners of reform.