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Policy Framework
An approach to educational reform that is gaining increasing currency is the one taken by the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC), a not-for-profit grantmaking and support organization that aims to increase educational equity among students in six San Francisco Bay Area counties. The central idea informing BASRC’s work is that school improvement is a continuous process, guided by the use of data on student performance. Thus, BASRC does not prescribe a particular curriculum or school structure; instead, it promotes collective data-driven inquiry into student achievement gaps and the development of systemic instructional responses to those gaps.
BASRC works with Bay Area educators at the district, school, and classroom levels to build capacity for a systematic and continuous education improvement process. The goals of this process-oriented reform strategy are to build professional knowledge of effective practice, foster mutual accountability and collaboration, and bring about ongoing improvement in the quality and equity of student outcomes.
Agenda, Scope, and Goals
BASRC has been working in Bay Area districts and schools since 1995. A new “focal strategy” developed by BASRC was introduced in the 2002-2003 school year in 19 schools in five districts, with a sixth district added in 2003-2004. The strategy has three main design features: coaching of supervisors, principals, and teachers; evidence-based decision-making; and networking among schools to share experiences and lessons.
Joined by staff from the Center for Research on the Context of Teaching at Stanford University, MDRC is leading a study of the BASRC focal strategy. The MDRC study addresses two interrelated sets of questions:
- How does student performance in the target schools and districts change with participation in the BASRC focal strategy? How do changes in performance in the BASRC schools and districts compare with changes in similar schools in similar districts?
- What is the relationship between changes in academic performance and changes over time in school organization and instructional practices that are consistent with the BASRC theory of action?
Design, Sites, and Data Sources
To address the first question — the relationship between participation in the BASRC focal strategy and changes in student outcomes over time — MDRC is using a variant of the comparative interrupted time series design used in its other whole-school and systemic reform evaluations. In this design, we examine student achievement outcomes before and after the introduction of the focal strategy in the 12 elementary schools in the five districts initially implementing the strategy:
- Newark Unified School District
- Alameda Unified School District
- Laguna Salada Union School District
- San Rafael City Elementary and High School Districts
- San Bruno Park Elementary School District
We compare the changes in the focal strategy schools with changes over the same time period in other schools in the same districts, as well as in schools in other California districts. School district records and state databases provide measures of student achievement.
To determine how widely reform practices prescribed by the BASRC theory of change have been implemented, MDRC conducted surveys of teachers and principals in 49 elementary schools. These include all the elementary schools in the five focal strategy districts, plus all elementary schools in another district that is a BASRC member district but is not participating in the focal strategy. Field research conducted in two to three schools in each of the five focal districts (some of which are focal schools and others not) further informs our understanding of how the schools are changing over time.
Findings
The project published a final report in December 2006.
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