Education writer Holly Korbey recently posed a thoughtful and important question: Why doesn’t education study its successes the way other fields study their masters? Why don’t we linger over high-performing schools, dissect what they do, and deliberately build on their example the way “Kobe did with Jordan, or Dylan did with Woodie Guthrie”? she asked. “Would a culture of studying the greats lead to improvement?”
Holly is a friend and one of our very best education writers and observers. Reading her piece, I found myself wanting not to disagree with her argument but to extend it. The problem, it seems to me, is not that we’re incurious about successful schools—I don’t think that’s quite right—but that we’re insufficiently selective about which models we seek to learn from and the lessons we take from them.
I’ve personally noticed no shortage of interest. No shortage of study tours, fellowships, attention, or inquiries into “what works.” Quite the opposite. When I was researching and reporting my book How the Other Half Learns about New York City’s Success Academy charter school network, I witnessed a steady stream of visitors: district leaders, teachers, policymakers—even international delegations. Professional development sessions routinely included observers from across the country. The network eventually opened its Robertson Center and a K–8 lab school specifically to host trainings and workshops.
And yet, for all that attention, the lessons to be learned from schools like Success Academy either don’t stick or travel very far. This suggests that the challenge is not incuriosity but something else.
The three ways we fail to learn from successful schools
First, we often try to explain away good outcomes, particularly among schools serving low-income families. When schools like Success Academy that serve disadvantaged students produce extraordinary outcomes, even across dozens of campuses, the initial reaction is frequently not “what can we learn?” but “what explains it away?” Surely it must be student selection or deep-pocketed funders—something unique and perhaps even unsavory that either cannot be replicated or that I wouldn’t want to do in my school. We treat good student outcomes as an anomaly to be challenged or rationalized rather than a system to be understood.
Second, even when we accept that success is real, often we adopt only the parts that affirm our existing beliefs. If a high-performing school is succeeding with a strong curriculum but not one we like, we see strong teaching and engaging lessons. If it enforces strict routines and discipline, we talk about “school culture.” If it invests heavily in teacher coaching, we emphasize “professional collaboration.” It’s confirmation bias; we learn the lessons we were predisposed to take away to validate our beliefs and strengthen the case for them. What we tend not to do is interrogate the full system—including the parts that may feel uncomfortable, unfashionable, or difficult to reproduce locally. We harvest the agreeable pieces and quietly ignore or discard the rest.
Worse, even when schools demonstrate sustained success, the field persuades itself that those successes are suspect—or even harmful. Steven Wilson’s devastating recent book The Lost Decade chronicles how a number of high-performing urban charter schools that had delivered measurable gains came under intense criticism and self-scrutiny from within for ideological reasons, shifting the discussion from “How did this work?” to “Should this be allowed at all?”
Third—and perhaps most important—we often study schools at a breakthrough moment of success rather than asking whether their success is likely to endure.
The schools we celebrated—and what became of them
In the early years of education reform, the question “Can this scale?” dominated the conversation. Charter networks were explicitly founded to replicate high-performing schools. Philanthropic funding was often tied to expansion plans. “Proof of concept” quickly became “proof of scalability.” Entire organizations were built around the premise that once we identified a school that worked, the obvious next step was to grow it. In that sense, it isn’t quite right to say educators failed to study successful schools, at least in the charter movement. If anything, we were obsessed with them. Critically, the focus was outward—replication, expansion, growth—rather than inward. We asked how to spread success, not how to sustain it.
Thus, if I may offer a friendly amendment to Holly’s work, it’s not enough merely to study successful schools, districts, and charter management organizations. The ones that deserve our attention are those that have sustained their successes over decades.
In her recent series of blog posts and podcasts, Holly focuses on Karin Chenoweth’s Schools That Succeed (2017). For anyone working in education reform in the early 2000s, her earlier book, “It’s Being Done” (2007), was essential reading. It profiled 15 schools beating the odds through leadership, coherence, and adult responsibility.
I was curious to see what became of those schools roughly two decades later. Sifting through state report card data, the findings are sobering: Only a small number of the schools Chenoweth profiled appear to have remained roughly stable in quality. Many have declined significantly. Several have closed entirely. (Here is a table of those school-by-school results.)
The same pattern holds for the schools profiled in Samuel Casey Carter’s No Excuses (2000), another touchstone of ed reform’s heyday. Many of these were precisely the kinds of schools reformers believed could be replicated at scale—disciplined, high‑expectation models meant to prove that poverty need not determine academic outcomes. Yet decades later, only a minority have clearly sustained their performance. The rest declined or disappeared. One of them, Houston’s Wesley Elementary School, was later swept up in the district’s testing scandals—an important, if uncomfortable, reminder that the urgency to demonstrate that success is possible can make us more eager for proof than careful in verifying it. (Here is a table of those school-by-school results.)
This exercise suggests that while we should study success, we should also be careful in defining it. Let’s be brutally honest: Education is a fad-driven field. We worship at the altar of “innovation.” We celebrate visionary principals, breakthrough models, and dramatic turnarounds. I’ve said for years, “show me a miracle and I’ll show you a scandal.” What we pay far less attention to is sustained excellence.
To my mind, Emily Hanford’s reporting on Steubenville, Ohio, in Sold a Story offers perhaps the most instructive example of educational success in recent years—not because the district discovered something new, but because it didn’t. Hanford went to Steubenville precisely because it is no elite enclave or selective charter network, but a small, economically modest Ohio district serving mostly working-class and low-income students. Its demographics look unremarkable. Its resources are typical. Yet for years, its early reading outcomes stood out against comparable districts, making it an ideal test case for what was actually happening inside classrooms. (Chenoweth profiled Wells Elementary in Steubenville, Ohio in a follow-up 2009 book, How It’s Being Done.)
What Hanford found should give us pause. Steubenville adopted Success for All, a structured, explicit approach to reading instruction, decades ago; it trained teachers carefully in that model; and most strikingly, it has stuck with it for roughly 25 years. While literacy fashions came and went elsewhere—balanced literacy, workshop models, cueing systems, new vendor packages—Steubenville did not cycle through competing philosophies. There is no dramatic breakthrough moment in the story, no charismatic savior, no sweeping reinvention. “Steubenville had no need to pursue the latest trend, to even know what the latest trend was,” Hanford reported, “because what they were doing was working. It’s been working. For 25 years.”
If we are serious about studying successful schools, Steubenville’s example matters enormously. Studying peak performance can teach us what is possible. Studying long-term consistency can teach us what is reliable. And in education, reliable achievement is far more important and far more rare.
The quiet work of maintenance
It’s also pretty boring. Sustained achievement means protecting instructional time, preserving curriculum coherence, and acculturating and training new staff into established routines. It’s resisting the steady pressure of new initiatives, new mandates, and new enthusiasms. All of it is essential and none of it is glamorous.
This invites an interesting thought exercise: If we wanted to predict whether a school’s success will last, what would we actually look for? What conditions would need to be in place—and remain in place—for progress to endure through inevitable leadership turnover, staff churn, political pressures, and the siren song of educational fads?
In my next post, I want to sketch out a speculative answer: what a “built to last” framework for schools might look like and what it might tell us about why some successes persist while others quietly fade.
With reporting and analysis by Annika Hernandez.
