newly appointed junior principals.
In other cases, students have not experienced all the potential benefits of small high schools because leaders assumed the creation of small high schools was an end in itself, rather than a change in structure that would make other needed reforms easier to achieve. One benefit leaders hoped for was that smaller high schools would improve staff-student relationships, and with improved relationships, students would become more engaged in their learning. Students would interact with a smaller number of teachers, thus fostering the development of better staff-student relationships. This may well be effective, although it should be said that getting students engaged so that they can be taught something seems much less efficient than getting them engaged by teaching them something that engages them. But every student would still have a language arts teacher, a mathematics teacher, a science teacher, a social studies teacher, and so on. The size of a high school does not affect the number of teachers a student meets in a day. Staff-student relationships can grow stronger if teachers loop through with their students so that the same teacher teaches a class for more than a single semester or year; however, this requires amendments to schedules and depends on having teachers who can teach multiple grades. Large high schools could easily incorporate this system, if they considered it a priority.
Other countries are going in the opposite direction. In England, for example, high-performing schools are asking their principals to assume responsibility for less successful schools by forming federations of schools—groups of schools with a single principal—but as yet, there is no evidence that this has led to improvement.
Other reforms have involved changes to the governance of schools. The most widespread such reform in the United States has been the introduction of charter schools. According to the Education Commission of the States (2017), forty-three states and the District of Columbia now have charter laws, but the evaluations of their impact on student achievement do not allow for any easy conclusions.
There is no doubt that some charter schools are achieving notable success, but others are not, and it appears that, at least to begin with, there were more of the latter than the former. In 2009, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University reported that across fifteen states and the District of Columbia, approximately one-half of charter schools obtain similar results to traditional public schools, one-third get worse results, and one-sixth get better results (CREDO, 2009). For the first twenty years of their operation, the net effect of charter schools was to lower student achievement rather than increase it, although this may well have been partly because most charters get less money per student (Miron & Urschel, 2010). Some charter schools, such as those that the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) operate, are undoubtedly much more effective than comparable traditional public schools. Students at KIPP schools typically make an extra three to four months more progress each year, but they achieve this by having longer school days, some Saturday classes, and a longer school year (Tuttle et al., 2013). Each year KIPP school students spend 45 percent more time in school and make about 30 percent more progress—a clear example of diminishing returns. Moreover, while some charter schools are highly effective, most are not. An evaluation of the charter school system in Chicago (Hoxby & Rockoff, 2004) finds that students attending charter schools score higher on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, but the effects are small: an increase of 4 percentile points for reading and just 2 percentile points for mathematics. As states have become better at closing less effective charter schools, the performance of charter schools has improved relative to traditional public schools, but a report from the CREDO team at Stanford—now covering twenty-two states and Washington, DC—finds that the differences are small (CREDO, 2013). In mathematics, performance was higher in 29 percent of charter schools, about the same in 40 percent, and lower in 31 percent of schools. For reading, the figures were 56 percent, 25 percent, and 19 percent (CREDO, 2013). To put this in perspective, on average, a student attending a charter school in the United States would make 4 percent more progress (equivalent to eight days) than if he or she attended a traditional public school—an improvement worth having, but much less improvement than we need.
As the characteristics of successful charter schools become better understood, it will, no doubt, be possible to ensure that charter schools are more successful, but it is worth noting that the organizations that run the best charter schools are not keen to expand quickly, so any impact on the whole education system will be slow. For example, if we assume that the North American school population increases, as it has in the past, at a rate of around 0.7 percent per year, and the number of charter school places increases by 250,000 each year (the average rate over the last few years), then even if these new charter schools are as good as KIPP schools, it will be 2058 before students achieve an extra three weeks’ learning per year (Wiliam, in press a). Of course, we could expand charter schools more aggressively, but this would be likely to result in lower quality, thus weakening the impact. Whatever their benefits, the creation of charter schools is not likely to have a substantial and immediate impact on student achievement (Carnoy, Jacobsen, Mishel, & Rothstein, 2005).
In England, the government has reconstituted many low-performing schools as “academies” that are run by philanthropic bodies but receive public funds equivalent to public schools, in addition to a large capital grant for school rebuilding. The principals of these academies have far greater freedom to hire and fire staff and are not required to follow national agreements on teacher compensation and benefits, nor to follow the national curriculum. Student test scores in these academies have risen faster than those in regular public schools, but this is to be expected, since such schools start from a lower baseline, and therefore have more room for improvement. A comparison with similarly low-performing schools not reconstituted as academies shows that they improve at the same rate (Machin & Wilson, 2009).
One of the most radical experiments in the organization of schooling has been taking place in Sweden. In 1992, the Swedish government invited for-profit providers to run public schools. Although many evaluations of this initiative found some successes, each of these studies contained significant methodological weaknesses. An evaluation from the Institute for the Study of Labour (Böhlmark & Lindahl, 2008), which corrected the flaws of earlier studies, found that the introduction of for-profit education providers did produce moderate improvements in short-term outcomes such as ninth-grade GPA and in the proportion of students who chose an academic high school track. However, these improvements appeared to be concentrated in more affluent students and were transient. There was no impact on longer-term outcomes such as high school GPA, university attainment, or years of schooling (Böhlmark & Lindahl, 2008), nor on employment, earnings, or engagement with the criminal justice system (Wondratschek, Edmark, & Frölich, 2014).
In England, since 1986, secondary schools have applied for specialist school status, along the lines of magnet schools in the United States. Specialist schools do get higher test scores than traditional secondary schools in England, but they also get more money—around $200 more per student per year. The improvement in results achieved by specialist schools turns out to be just what you would expect if you gave traditional public schools an extra $200 per student per year (Mangan, Pugh, & Gray, 2007). Moreover, specialist schools do not get better results in the subjects in which they specialize than they do in other subjects (Smithers & Robinson, 2009).
Other reform efforts have focused on curriculum. Almost every country aspires to have a 21st century curriculum. For instance, the Scottish government has adopted a Curriculum for Excellence, but whether anything changes in Scottish classrooms remains to be seen, and the short-term results are not encouraging (OECD, 2016). Trying to change students’ classroom experiences through changes in curriculum is very difficult. A bad curriculum well taught is usually a better experience for students than a good curriculum badly taught; pedagogy trumps curriculum. Or more precisely, pedagogy is curriculum, because what matters is how things are taught, rather than what is taught.
There is no standard definition of the term curriculum. The word originally (in English at least) described the selection of courses in Scottish universities in the 17th century, but over the years, it has come to mean activities
