San Francisco Blog

• It sets clear and measurable goals: They want the “achievement gap” between ethnic groups, as measured principally by test scores, to close in every school. You can’t get much simpler than that, and nobody can reasonably mix it up with some other goal. And yes, this is similar to No Child Left Behind. In fact, they’ll likely be the exact same scores that NCLB measures. But just because NCLB is an atrocity doesn’t mean this is a bad idea. On the contrary: it’s helpful to have an unambiguous measurement that everybody can see.

• It makes sensible comparisons: this is what NCLB doesn’t do. The district’s new “score card” will not just enable it to see which students in which schools are improving their test scores … it will allow them to compare similar schools in terms of both their demographics and their achievement gaps.

• It uses the information wisely: the district doesn’t want to know which schools are “high scoring” and which aren’t – it already knows that. Instead it’s trying to find demographically similar schools that have widely differing achievement gaps so that it can find out “what does school A (with a low achievement gap) do that school B (with a high achievement gap) doesn’t?” Once it finds that out it can see if the same methods work in other schools. This, again, is something that No Child Left Behind doesn’t do: NCLB doesn’t care why scores go up, it just wants them up. The San Francisco School District wants to know. Not incidentally, this also removes the incentive for teachers or principals to fudge the data, which we’ve seen in so many stressed school districts across the country. Sudden changes in results will get you more scrutiny, not less, and make it more likely that fraudulent results will be discovered.

• It lets schools set much of their own policy: tracking the data about the achievement gap in a central district location is one thing, but when it comes to actually doing something about the achievement gap the district is hoping to get out of the way. Instead of coming up with a set of standardized policies, the district plans to set district-wide goals and general approaches, and let the individual schools make their own plans for how meet them. This avoids a top heavy management style and lets schools address their own unique populations in a manner most likely to have an impact. Each school will, however, need to have fully transparent goals and results – so that anybody can see, at a glance, whether they’re making progress. And, of course, as the district finds approaches that work (if it finds approaches that work) it will share them with its schools.

None of which is to say the final plan will be any good: we won’t even have a sense of that ‘till this time next year. Further, there’s cause for skepticism. It’s hard for any large organization to implement large policy changes effectively; and it’s extra hard for large organizations in California to do it; and it’s extra extra hard for large organizations in San Francisco to make big changes. We may be progressives, but we don’t have a good track record for this kind of progress.

Still, a record is made to be broken – and so far the school district is of to a strong start, even if they’re not … quite … as far ahead as the Chronicle implies.