Improving School Improvement Plans

Based partly on experience in large urban districts, the authors conclude that effective elementary schools with achievement higher than schools with comparable student enrollment are unusually successful in identifying and responding to strategic instructional issues. Interrelated issues that schools must deal with successfully include delivery of compensatory education, pacing of instruction, emphasis on higher-order learning, and grouping. Schools must reduce or eliminate the lack of coordination frequently found between compensatory education pullout and regular instruction. They must avoid tendencies and temptations to deliver instruction at too slow or too rapid a pace with emphasis on low-order learning, and they must take explicit steps to overcome problems in either homogeneous or heterogeneous grouping. Examples are provided illustrating how effective schools have handled these issues and how central policies and directives can help them plan to do so. Discussion of implications focuses on wording of effective schools' characteristics and on recent organizational analysis bearing on creation of instructionally effective schools by design.