Building Knowledge and Fashioning Success One School at a Time

For the past four years, we have been study ing schools that are unusually successful in the area of literacy. At the same time, we have also been studying less successful schools to help us understand what, exactly, accounts for the varying degrees of success among schools with similar student populations and community expec tations. This experience has allowed us to draw some conclusions about the nature of success?and about the things that teachers can do to promote high levels of student achievement and coll?gial professional communities. One thing has become abundantly clear: Successful schools do not happen by accident, and they are not guaranteed by the presence of nice families and orderly classrooms. Rather, success is fashioned by the educators, students, and commu nity members in a way that is context-specific. In this article, we provide a brief description of our research and highlight the large themes that emerge from our longitudinal study. Throughout, we also connect these to conclusions drawn by other researchers, because there has been a stun ning convergence of findings around a similar set of major outcomes. Studying successful schools We have studied successful schools, rather than effective teachers, because it is becoming increas ingly clear that children, especially children of poverty who are at risk for school failure, need mul tiple years of effective instruction if they are to be come highly skilled readers and writers (Allington, 2001; Snow, Barnes, Chandler, Goodman, & Hemphill, 1991). We wanted to know what makes some schools successful and others not.