Christopher T. Cross, editor, The National Clearinghouse for Comprehensive School Reform
2004
The density of this 170-page book hints that there is much to learn from the past fourteen years of Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) efforts, beginning with the founding of the New American Schools Development Corporation in 1991 and encouraged by the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration program in 1997. The very nature of these interventions, which came in so very many forms (from Success for All to Core Knowledge to High Schools That Work), targeted innumerable aspects of schooling, and occurred amid a hundred other ever-changing factors, makes for complex analysis. One yearns for crisp conclusions and definitive lessons, but you won't find many here. You will instead find complicated inferences about the impact on CSR of factors such as staff development, differences among school districts, and the policy environment, as well as case studies of a handful of CSR efforts. These are mostly predictable, recounting, for example, the importance of principals' leadership and staff professional development in ensuring a reform succeeds. Much of the analysis focuses on organizational changes, and less on student outcomes, though the book does include a meta-analysis of 232 studies examining 29 CSR models. It concludes that "overall, students from CSR schools can be expected to score one eighth of a standard deviation, or 2.5 NCEs higher, on achievement tests than control students in non-CSR schools." However, few CSR interventions were covered by more than a handful of studies, and only seven studies based their observations on randomized experiments. And (as the book acknowledges) a selection bias is ever-present: schools in which CSR failed were places that tended to abandon the reform strategy, while those studied may be biased toward success. Furthermore (the book does not acknowledge), one might look askance at a meta-analysis whose top category is "strongest evidence of effectiveness" and whose lowest is not "strongest evidence of ineffectiveness," but rather "greatest need for additional research." (Does anyone wonder why education research itself enjoys such low repute?) For those looking to dig deeply into the research on CSR, this book may prove useful, but the reader-unfriendliness of its prose makes it unlikely to boost even those programs getting high marks, such as Direct Instruction and Success for All. To obtain a copy of the book, not now available online, call 202.955.9450.
