Mark Berends, Joan Chun, Gina Schuyler, Sue Stockly and R. J. Briggs, RAND Corporation
2002
The RAND Corporation recently published this report by Mark Berends and four colleagues, examining in depth (160 pages) the experience of San Antonio, Texas with New American Schools (NAS). This is part of RAND's ongoing NAS research and evaluation project. The data are from 1997-9, during which time San Antonio schools implemented four of the NAS school designs. The RAND analysts sought to determine whether those designs actually altered what happened in classrooms (as opposed to affecting "school organization and governance"), whether they boosted student achievement, and what factors at the district, schools and classroom level bear on the effectiveness of the implementation and the changes that result. The bottom line: the NAS schools and classrooms weren't very different from others in San Antonio, nor were their students' scores very different. The main explanation, according to the authors, is not anything inherently flawed in the NAS designs but, rather, the fact that San Antonio (and Texas) was then in the throes of numerous concurrent (and conflicting) reforms within a high-stakes atmosphere. In other words, so much else was going on that it's impossible to isolate NAS effects. ("However, we did find significant effects of principal leadership on the TAAS reading and mathematics scores...in both NAS and non-NAS schools.") The authors go on to caution policymakers against trying too many different things at once. They note, in particular, that "high-stakes tests may be a two-edged sword," motivating schools to boost performance and seek out more powerful instructional strategies while, at the same time, discouraging them from adopting "richer, more in-depth curricula." If you'd like to download a PDF version or order a hard copy for $20, surf to http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1483/. For another take on New American Schools-which concludes that NAS has failed to make good on its promise to transform K-12 education-see our recent report by Jeffrey Mirel, "Evolution of the New American Schools: From Revolution to Mainstream" at http://www.edexcellence.net/detail/news.cfm?news_id=44.
