The Council of Chief State Schools Officers
March 2003
This 40-pager from the Council of Chief State School Officers profiles the efforts of five states (IL, LA, MD, NY, TX) to "support" low-performing schools and districts. But it's really a look at state-initiated efforts to intervene in such situations and turn them around. Since the ability of a state to repair low-performing districts - and the capacity of districts to turn around low-performing schools - is key to NCLB's prospects, this is a timely and important topic. The report, however, is descriptive, not analytic or judgmental. Perhaps because it was prepared by an organization that these states belong and pay dues to, it doesn't try to evaluate the comparative effectiveness of the (very different) approaches being taken by the five case-study states. You end it with the sense that "This is all very interesting but how well does any of it actually work in practice?" You may, however, want to see for yourself. You can find it at http://www.ccsso.org/pdfs/statesupport.pdf.
