RAND Research Brief: A Decade of Whole-School Reform. The New American Schools Experience.

摘要

Spurred by the piecemeal approach to school reform that had produced little change in student performance, New American Schools (NAS), a private nonprofit organization, launched its efforts for whole-school reform in 1991. NAS's mission was to help schools and districts significantly raise the achievement of large numbers of students through the use of whole-school designs. NAS's core premise was that all high-quality schools possess, de facto, a unifying design that enables all staff members to function to the best of their abilities and that integrates research-based practices into a coherent and mutually reinforcing set of effective approaches to teaching and learning. The best way to ensure that lower-performing schools adopted successful designs was to fund teams to develop 'break the mold' school designs that could readily be adopted by communities nationwide. After developing the designs, the teams would then implement them in schools throughout the country. This adoption process would fulfill NAS's primary goal of improving the performance of large numbers of students. This whole-school design approach to better educational outcomes was a dramatically different way of initiating and disseminating large-scale educational improvements to many schools across the country. It was a unique combination of (1) private sector involvement using a venture capitalist approach; (2) the choice of whole-school design as a vehicle for reform; and (3) the ambitious goal of achieving scale-up (disseminating designs to a large number of schools in a jurisdiction that agreed to partner with NAS).