Promoting Excellence: Good to Great, NYC's District 2, and the Case of a High-Performing School District

This paper compares two celebrated studies—New York City Community School District 2 (Elmore & Burney, 1999 Elmore, R. F. and Burney, D. 1999. “Investing in teacher learning: Staff development and instructional improvement”. In Teaching as the learning profession: Handbook of policy and practice, Edited by: Darling-Hammond, L. and Sykes, G. 263–291. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. [Google Scholar]), and Good to Great (Collins, 2001 Collins, J. 2001. Good to great, New York: HarperCollins Publishers. [Google Scholar]), which examined sustained success in American corporations—to the case of a single high-performing school district. The question of interest concerns how school districts achieve and maintain high performance. The study focuses on five central issues from a combined theory from District 2 and Good to Great: 1) An organizationwide disciplined system that provides boundaries for participants but allows for creativity and innovation within those boundaries; 2) a central defined organizational focus that drives day-to-day decisions and is separate from an organization's vision and mission; 3) getting the right people into the organization through innovative hiring and training practices; 4) funneling budgetary resources to district priorities through multipocket budgeting; and 5) a long-term commitment to success through continuous improvement while maintaining a focus on the current challenges facing the organization.