Project Summary

The United States Department of Education contracted with The Education Alliance to conduct an evaluation of the implementation of six widely used comprehensive school reform models and changes in teacher practice and student performance in 90 predominantly low-performing schools across the eastern United States.

The study, titled Implementing for Success, was conducted over an almost four-year period and addressed ongoing issues raised by observers and critics of school reform. Alliance staff were guided by two overriding goals: (1) to discover how school reform model characteristics, school characteristics, teacher variables, and various support variables affect the extent of implementation of school reform model components; and (2) to explain why some teachers implement reform models successfully and/or change how they teach while others continue their practice unchanged.

Alliance researchers combined qualitative and quantitative data to identify patterns of teacher change resulting from comprehensive school reform implementation. More specifically, the research team sought to discover the key factors that influence: (1) whether or not change in teacher practice takes place, and (2) the nature or quality of that change if and when change occurred.

With the goal of identifying factors that both encourage and impede successful model implementation, Alliance researchers surveyed teachers and principals, conducted extensive site visits, observed and interviewed teachers, interviewed principals, district personnel, and model providers, and returned to sixteen case study schools to reexamine the implementation cycle with teachers. By integrating these multiple data sources, researchers were able to explore the way contextual factors both internal and external to the school influenced model implementation within the classroom as well as throughout a school.