Identifying and Understanding Effective High School Practices: A Comparison of Strong and Weak High Schools in the Same District Reveals That Success Comes from Creating a Culture That Personalizes Academic Achievement, Socialemotional Learning, and Student Ownership
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] What policies, programs, and practices make some high schools in the same district and with similar student populations more effective than others? Answering this question has been the focus of substantial educational research often with the goal of identifying specific practices to replicate and spread to other schools. At the National Center on Scaling Up Effective Schools, we have taken a different approach. Our goal is to enhance district capacity to identify, develop, implement, and scale effective systems of practices. We recognize that effective practices in high schools occur within a larger organizational system and are context specific because they must address local needs and align with local priorities and initiatives. Through work with two large, urban districts Broward County, Fla. and Fort Worth, Texas and through an intensive, yearlong study, we identified systems of practices that differentiated higher and lower performing high schools in the same district in order to work with district and school stakeholders to adapt, implement, and scale these effective practices in other district high schools. In addition to sharing similar demographics, the schools in our study had the same financial resources, programmatic initiatives, and bureaucratic structures. We identified four high schools in Broward County and four high schools in Fort Worth using value added methodology (Sass, 2012; Value Added Research Center, 2014) We chose schools that had either higher or lower levels of academic student growth on state assessments for three consecutive years as well as higher or lower graduation rates with low income and minority/ English language learners. We visited each school three times, conducting extensive interviews at each school, observing classes, and shadowing students for a full day (Cannata, Haynes, Smith, 2014; Rutledge et al. 2015) The story that emerged of what differentiated higher and lower performing high schools was one of multiple pathways with common landmarks. These school specific pathways coalesced into patterns within each district. In Broward County, we found that the higher performing schools engaged in an intentional set of systemic practices we call Personalization for Academic and Social Learning (PASL) In Fort Worth, we found that the higherperforming schools established integrated structures of academic press and support that scaffolded the development of Student Ownership and Responsibility (SOAR) for their learning. Despite these somewhat different findings in each district, we also identified similarities between PASL and SOAR. These fell into three main categories. First, both PASL and SOAR place their emphasis on students rather than only adults as key agents in the school. Second, both PASL and SOAR emphasize the integration of social and academic elements of schooling. Third, the higher performing schools in both districts enacted PASL and SOAR through intentional structures and school culture. Our findings and the research In Broward County, we found that the higher performing schools engaged in an intentional set of organizational practices around personalizing the learning experience for students. While each higher performing school enacted this differently, administrators, teachers, guidance counselors, and other adults in the school had standard operating procedures that fostered adult student interaction and focused on increasing students' sense of belonging in the school. Adults promoted a culture in which students described feeling safe and cared for. As one teacher at a higher performing school explained, "The whole personalization is what matters in this job, the key component to having success." Research in organizational theory and psychology support this focus on personalization. Effective schools are successful in mobilizing both the academic core of schools teaching and learning as well as practices such as guidance counseling, teacher teams, and extracurricular activities, which encourage affective relationships between adults and students (Dornbusch, Glasgow, Lin, 1996; Ingersoll, 2003; Lee, Bryk, Smith, 1993)