Schools in Transition: Reform Efforts and School Capacity in Washington State

This article features case studies of two elementary schools, identified as exemplary by Washington educators, as they worked to enact Washington’s Essential Academic Learning Requirements and help students achieve proficiency on the Washington Assessment of Student Learning. We describe school- and classroom-level practices and analyze the schools’ progress toward successful enactment of Washington’s reform vision by considering six dimensions of school capacity: principal leadership; professional community; program coherence; technical resources; knowledge, skills, and dispositions of individual teachers; and learning opportunities for teachers. Supporting the claim that large-scale reform takes time, we argue that for a young reform effort “exemplary” is best understood in terms of capacity rather than outcome.