Within ten years, a successful school or district will almost certainly experience at least one superintendent change, multiple principal transitions, substantial staff turnover, curriculum reviews and technology initiatives, school board elections, and shifts in funding or political priorities. In my last post, I argued that none of these should be described as “disruptions.” They are the standard operating conditions of American public education. The real question, then, is not whether a successful school can keep producing strong results under ideal circumstances. It’s whether it is strong enough to survive the entirely predictable turbulence that lies ahead.
All of this makes studying top-performing schools and districts more challenging than it seems at first blush. High test scores or a bracing turnaround tale tell us what a school is accomplishing now. They tell us almost nothing about whether current results are due to years of institutional capacity-building, or the stars aligning temporarily. For the third and final entry in this series, I offer some thoughts about what we might look for right now if we wanted to predict whether a currently successful school or district is likely to continue succeeding a decade from now—and by extension, which schools and districts likely merit close study and emulation. What are the features that make success likely to endure?
Think of this not as a scoring rubric but as a thought exercise. These are the kinds of questions I would ask and the kinds of answers that would make me more confident that a school’s success is built to last.
Spoiler alert: The word “innovation” will appear nowhere in what follows.
The first and most revealing question is deceptively simple: Could a diligent new teacher walk into this school next year and be successful? Durable schools do not depend primarily on recruiting and hiring gifted, motivated educators and hoping they figure things out. They can point to a structured curriculum, shared materials, and explicit instructional routines that allow new hires to be acculturated into a functioning system. Just as important, they have a strong and well-defined school culture—not slogans or mission statements but a clear sense of “this is how we do things around here.” Expectations about classroom management, instructional pacing, student behavior, collaboration, and professional norms are visible, reinforced, and socially transmitted. A new teacher isn’t handed materials, told to “make it your own,” and wished good luck. He or she enters an environment that actively shows new faculty how to function successfully.
This was one of the most striking lessons from my reporting on Success Academy. Whatever else explains that network’s astonishing results, they cannot plausibly be attributed to staffing classrooms with pedigreed recruits from elite universities, as was often the case in the early days of “no excuses” charter schools. As I noted in How the Other Half Learns, classrooms were named after teachers’ alma maters, as in many schools that preach college-going to low-income kids. But they were workaday places like SUNY Oneonta, Hunter College, even BMCC, or Borough of Manhattan Community College—the kind of state and local institutions whose graduates make up the backbone of the profession. The instructional model and adult culture, consistent across dozens of schools, were designed on the assumption that ordinary teachers, properly trained and supported, could produce extraordinary outcomes. As noted previously, Success Academy stays aloft despite extremely high teacher turnover. So far, its schools prove that durability can coexist with high teacher turnover so long as institutional structures and culture are strong.
Houston’s ongoing turnaround efforts reflect a similar logic. As I noted in Education Next (“The Last Hurrah”), the district’s “NES schools” have implemented a routinized structure in which lesson sequences and instructional techniques are often explicitly prescribed. The effect is to guarantee a baseline of competent teaching and a consistent student experience across classrooms. What Houston appears to be doing is not assuming that great teaching will happen; they’re engineering conditions that make competent teaching unavoidable.
Closely related is whether the system demands extraordinary effort simply to maintain normal performance. Some schools produce impressive gains because teachers work unsustainable hours, constantly design their own materials, and carry enormous instructional loads. For a time, this can look like institutional excellence, but often it masks institutional strain: Schools that depend on brilliance or burnout eventually run out of both. What would reassure me instead is hearing leaders talk about reducing teachers’ burdens, about shared resources, about routines that make good teaching easier rather than harder. The relevant question is not whether today’s staff is extraordinary, but whether an ordinary future staff could succeed under ordinary working conditions. Many of the celebrated schools of the early reform era—the kinds profiled in the Casey and Chenoweth books discussed earlier in this series—appear, in retrospect, to have depended heavily on superhuman adult effort that proved difficult to institutionalize once leadership changed or burnout took its toll.
Another revealing signal is how the school handles new initiatives and reform proposals. Education is notoriously fad-happy: wave after wave of new programs, each accompanied by persuasive research, compelling advocates (or vendors), and even genuine moral urgency. Individually, these might be defensible. Collectively, they can overwhelm a system’s capacity to execute. Durable schools develop what might be called an institutional immune system. Bluntly, it’s the ability to say, “No, we’re not doing that.”
I’d feel particularly confident I was in a school whose success was likely to endure if its team could name initiatives they declined. Stability in education rarely comes from discovering the perfect program; it comes from protecting the ones that already work. From the outside, this may look and sound unimaginative, but schools rarely fail because they lack ideas. They fail because they adopt too many.
Bench strength is another crucial signal. Founder-driven systems can produce rapid gains, but unless knowledge diffuses beyond a charismatic leader, those gains often prove difficult to maintain once leadership changes, as inevitably it will. I would want to see that assistant principals, instructional coaches, and teacher leaders can articulate the instructional model in similar terms and sustain it operationally. If success stories focus mainly on a single exceptional leader, sustainability likely depends on his or her continued presence.
Governance, however, may be the most underestimated durability factor of all—and, frankly, the one least within educators’ control. In public education, leadership flows through school boards and the political imperatives and enthusiasms surrounding them. Boards hire superintendents, set priorities, and respond to incentives that reward visible reform more than quiet continuity. Almost no school board candidate runs on a platform of pure stewardship; we seek and reward visible change over quiet success. It is probably even rarer to find a superintendent hired specifically to keep doing what is already working—or someone who actually seeks such a job. Given these realities, even successful systems face constant pressure to signal change. I would find it reassuring if a school’s leadership transitions had historically preserved instructional continuity rather than resetting it—proving that the district leaders are capable of resisting novelty and tolerating stability.
If all of this sounds demanding, bordering on implausible, that’s because it is. Sustained excellence in schooling is genuinely difficult to achieve, and it is no accident that long-term successes are rare in our field. Almost every impulse and structural feature of American public education pushes in the opposite direction. The system is fragmented across thousands of districts. Governance is electoral and therefore inherently prone to leadership turnover and shifting priorities. Staff churn is constant. And the professional culture of education often encourages teachers and leaders to see themselves as individual change agents and advocates for children—roles that might be morally admirable but not always aligned with the quieter institutional discipline required to seek out and preserve what works.
None of this means sustained success is impossible. But it does mean it is unlikely to emerge by accident, and even less likely to persist without deliberate institutional design and discipline. The conditions that undermine durability—leadership churn, reform cycles, political pressure, initiative overload—are not temporary aberrations. They are inherent features of the system. Any school or district that manages to sustain excellence over decades is therefore doing something unusually difficult: not merely achieving strong results but building structures and cultures capable of surviving the very forces that typically erode them.
All of this brings us back to the original premise of this series, and to Holly Korbey’s wise call to study successful schools more carefully. She is surely right that education has much to learn from its highest performers. But if we are serious about learning from greatness, we need to study not only what successful schools do, but also what they are built to withstand. The miracle is not that some schools succeed. It’s that any manage to keep succeeding.
