concluded that the district was “irrelevant” when it came to promoting effective practices in schools. They pointed to the fact that, while a district typically provided similar policies, programs, materials, and resources to all of their schools, some of the schools in the district were highly effective and some were not. Their conclusion reflected popular opinion at the time: the central office has little impact on student achievement.
Over time, Lezotte and his colleagues changed their view. They recognized that without central-office support, other schools in a district were unable to learn from an effective school. Furthermore, the effective school was unlikely to sustain a commitment to continuous improvement. As Lezotte (2011) notes:
If creating and maintaining schools as effective isn’t a districtwide priority, the school will likely not be able to maintain its effectiveness status. Without broader based organizational support, school effectiveness tends to depend too heavily on the heroic commitment of the school leader or only a few staff. We have [seen] numerous cases where the principal of any effective school moved on for one reason or another and was replaced by someone who did not share the passion, vision or values. When this happened the school usually, and quickly I might add, returned to its earlier state. (p. 15)
Numerous other studies have now affirmed that an effective central office can play a major role in improving schools throughout the system. When Robert Marzano and Tim Waters (2009) conducted one of the largest-ever quantitative research studies on superintendents, they found a statistically significant relationship between district leadership and student achievement. Another study (Louis, Leithwood, Wahlstrom, & Anderson, 2010), funded by the Wallace Foundation, demonstrated the link between effective school leadership and established the vital role of the central office in creating the conditions that promote and support such leadership at the school level.
We embrace the premise that districts can support and sustain higher levels of learning throughout all of their schools, not only because of the research base, but also because we have repeatedly witnessed it in the real world of education.
• How did Adlai E. Stevenson High School District 125 in Lincolnshire, Illinois, become one of the highest-performing districts in the United States, and then continue to improve student achievement each year for over a quarter of a century under the leadership of four different superintendents?
• How did Sanger Unified School District in California, located in the congressional district with the highest level of poverty in the United States, move from one of the first districts in the state assigned into program improvement because of low student achievement to a district that now exceeds state goals and has become a national model for districtwide reform?
• How did Schaumburg District 54 in Schaumburg, Illinois, increase the percentage of its students demonstrating proficiency on the state assessment from 75 percent to over 90 percent in five years? How did this district, where no school had ever helped 90 percent or more of its students achieve proficiency in mathematics and language arts, transform itself into a system where nineteen of its twenty-seven schools achieved this benchmark goal in just a few years?
• How did Whittier Union High School District in California steadily improve student achievement in all of its schools at the same time the percentage of its students living in poverty skyrocketed from 40 percent to 80 percent?
• How did Blue Valley School District in Kansas move student achievement from good to great—and then sustain greatness year after year?
In each case, district leaders maintained a commitment to and focus on building the individual and collective capacity of educators throughout the district. In each case, the district provided educators with the ongoing clarity and support to help them succeed at what they were being asked to do. In short, they worked to ensure that every school in their districts was functioning as a PLC.
It is revealing that successful districts—those effective at districtwide reform within all of their schools—not only have used PLC principles in their reform, but have also tended to be committed to larger-scale reform efforts within their states. This is a crucial point. Successful districts think bigger—beyond their boundaries—and could become great resources for statewide reform. Indeed, our message is that the entire system—whole-system reform—must become the focus of future change efforts.
There are fewer examples of statewide or provincewide reform efforts involving all the schools and districts in the system. The Wallace Foundation study (Louis et al., 2010) concluded that few states in the United States had developed comprehensive approaches to education reform, that they tended to focus on mandates rather than capacity building, and that they offered very limited guidance for specific approaches to improving teaching and learning. On the other hand, a series of reports on the most effective school systems in the world conducted over several years by Sir Michael Barber, Mona Mourshed, and Chinezi Chijioke (Barber & Mourshed, 2007, 2009; Mourshed, Chijioke, & Barber, 2010) for the McKinsey Group identified provincial and national policies that led to higher levels of student learning.
Ontario provides one case study. From 2003 to the present, the province has engaged in deliberate strategies for system reform across its 72 districts, which include 4,000 elementary schools and 900 secondary schools. A focus on learning, capacity building, wise and thorough use of data, and identifying and spreading good practice are all integrated in the Ontario strategy. Fostering leadership at all levels has been a core part of Ontario’s success that includes a substantial increase in literacy learning across the 4,000 schools, as well as major gains in high school graduation rates—from 68 percent to 83 percent in the 900 secondary schools (Fullan, 2013a).
Delaware offers an example of a statewide attempt to implement the PLC process on a systemic basis. In 2009, then state Secretary of Education Lillian Lowery worked with the state’s forty-one Local Education Agencies (LEAs) to gain support for building educator capacity by using PLCs as a cornerstone of Delaware’s educational agenda. The commitment to PLCs was evident in Delaware’s application for a Race to the Top (RTTT) award in 2010. It stipulated that the state’s instructional improvement system would include “collaborative planning time in which teachers analyze student data, develop plans to differentiate instruction in response to data, and review the effectiveness of prior actions” (Delaware Department of Education [DDOE], 2010, p. c27, emphasis in original). The application also explained that the system was to “provide teachers, principals, and administrators with meaningful support and actionable data to systematically manage continuous instructional improvement, including such activities as instructional planning, gathering information with the support of rapid-time reporting; using this information to inform decisions on appropriate next instructional steps; and evaluating the effectiveness of the action taken. Such systems promote collaborative problem solving and action planning” (DDOE, 2010, p. c27).
The application also stipulated specific action steps that would be taken to support PLCs. Included among those steps were the following (DDOE, 2010):
• All core subject teachers of grades 3 through 12 would be organized into “small relevant groups such as six third- and fourth-grade teachers” to work collaboratively toward “instructional improvement.”
• These collaborative groups would receive at least ninety minutes of collaborative time per week, and teachers would be required to attend.
• Collaborative time would be considered sacred and not used for other purposes.
• Teachers in these groups would examine achievement data on their own students and use the data to inform, adjust, and improve their instruction and accelerate student learning.
• The state would provide data coaches for two years to support schools throughout the state in implementing the initiative and building their internal capacity to continue creating a collaborative
