Running a school or school system has never been simple, but nowadays the job requires a sophisticated understanding of the larger education landscape. Are we centralizing or flattening out? Adopting a free-market approach or swinging back toward a more traditional educator-driven outlook? The answer has been different at different moments, and sometimes it’s “all of the above.”

Priscilla Wohlstetter (TC file photo)

On the one hand, “districts are run as hierarchical businesses, with the power at the top, and instructions coming from the top down,” says Teachers College’s Priscilla Wohlstetter, Distinguished Research Professor. Witness the rise of mayoral control in big urban school systems during the past 25 years, as well as stronger federal and state accountability measures, and the introduction of the Common Core State Standards.

Districts are run as hierarchical businesses, with the power at the top, and instructions coming from the top down,” but there's also growing recognition that “it’s critically important for information to come from the bottom up as well, because the people making the decisions on the ground know the most about how implementation is going.”

—Priscilla Wohlstetter

Yet there’s also been growing recognition that, as Wohlstetter puts it, “it’s critically important for information to come from the bottom up as well, because the people making the decisions on the ground know the most about how implementation is going.” Thus, responsibility for figuring out how to meet standards and ensure learning has increasingly been pushed out to communities and schools. Spurred initially by funding from the philanthropist Walter Annenberg during the early 1990s, and most recently by a new initiative by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, K-12 public education has seen the rise of “networks for school improvement” (NSI) – groups of schools that work with partner organizations to improve teaching and learning, typically for underserved minorities. 

Now, a team led by Wohlstetter has published a new guide to help education leaders maximize their success in working with these networks. Among the co-authors are two Teachers College doctoral students, Megan Duff and Clare Buckley Flack. The effort was conducted under the auspices of the Spencer Foundation.

Titled “Managing Networks for School Improvement: Seven Lessons from the Field,” the guide is the result of a three-year study of a diverse sample of organizations that comprise four different types of networks: groups of schools in a particular geographic area that are supported by local district superintendents; field support centers, which partner with district superintendents and work with schools; affinity organizations, which are independent nonprofits that work under contract from the central district office to support a group of district schools; and charter school management organizations that operate outside the district, supporting their member schools. There are profound differences among these different types of networks, but all, to borrow Wohlstetter’s image, are like wheels, with the network as the hub and participating schools as the spokes. 

Among the guide’s recommendations – aimed, collectively, at district leaders, principals, and network managers, are to:

Develop a clear and coherent instructional vision. “Although NSI varied in their visions of high-quality curriculum, pedagogy and educational outcomes, nearly all NSI articulated core beliefs to guide how network members conceptualized teaching and learning,” the authors write.”

Empower schools to make decisions. Successful networks have typically “sought to empower their members schools by deliberately granting them decision rights over matters such as goal-setting, operations, curriculum use, and professional learning,” the guide states. “NSI also jointly collaborated on data analysis to empower educators to make informed instructional decisions.” And all NSI in studied by the authors “valued adaptation and teacher-level instructional decision-making to some degree.”

Facilitate inter-school collaboration. The networks examined by the authors “developed ways to foster collaboration between member schools to promote knowledge-sharing, accelerate network-wide learning and innovation, and strengthen bonds of network trust.”

Work toward ongoing, continuous improvement. “To varying degrees, the NSI in our study viewed their support as works in progress, deploying mechanisms to gather data and other evidence to build and modify them. This was particularly important given adoption of the New York State Common Core Learning Standards, which produced seismic shifts in how NSI hubs judged the quality of their instruction guidance and supports.”

In the ever-evolving world of public education, such shifts seem likely to continue. But as in other walks of life, the ability to get out there and network will likely only increase in importance.