A Look at NAS in Public School Reform
The rationale for the NAS initiative stemmed from the theory that reforming one school at a time did not meet the needs and goals associated with educational reform. NAS proponents found that the single school approach placed too many demands, in too many disparate areas like curriculum, organization, and classroom management, and were requiring schools to attempt improvement efforts all at one time. Teachers would be exhausted, and the goals seem be too many to soon. NAS seeks to alleviate this trend by bringing together advocates promoting charter school growth with advocates wanting further development of public schools. The NAS initiative is unquestionably a more ambitious approach than the “one school at a time” method of school reform because it builds upon previous reform movements and ideas, but desires to coordinate its efforts with other, larger organizational elements as well.
The design teams are funded on an independent basis and are required to deliver all manner of services to ensure implementation is achieved. Materials are provided by the teams when hands-on assistance is needed. Design teams also adhere to community support as a specific principle and encourage and embrace outside support at every opportunity. The idea is to create a very strong network that comes full circle in the area of support for the proposed reforms. Once implementation has taken root at a designated test site, as NAS’ theory goes, the model is to be replicated at other schools with similar geo/demographic configurations across the nation, propelling reform on a vastly larger scale than has previously been attempted.
NAS’s “scalable” approach to reform is argued to be more effective than post-Nation At Risk-style intensification reforms because the approach does not advocate a piecemeal approach. Rather, NAS attempts to implement entirely new structures for schools and personalize their curriculum and agendas to suit the schools and districts in question. Comprehensive reform is also posited to be a better approach than previous types of reform because it involves the community, parents, etc., far more readily into the education plan than had previously been conceptualized on any other level. Because the concept of change is so broad in scope, NAS theorized that the professionals involved would become more apt to contribute ideas and thoughts than they might on the “street-level” (McLaughlin, 1991). The strong, research-based reforms being discussed had been noted to improve the value of education on a deeper level than prior reformations. These types of reforms are also recognized as superior to other formats in that the communication and support level it offers is generally much greater.
The changes that occur with the school restructuring provided by NAS are intended to give ample opportunity for improved, quality education for students. Their aim is to provide a very strong leadership coalition, far more resources than a traditional venue, and an enlightened environment conducive to learning. Teachers are encouraged to change their leadership style via informed research and professional development that shows ways for students to achieve higher academic success. The reforms not only encourage teachers to change their instruction style, but also offer the necessary research and suggestions on how to effectively do so.
The concept of “external change agents” in the NAS approach differs from Newmann’s in that the agents provide a comprehensive voice vs. multiple ones in the overall scheme of things. They also attempt to provide an approach that works through the community as a whole, not just from a singular school perspective. The external agents in Newmann’s study were no where near as powerful, informative, or skillful as those introduced by the NAS approach.
However, NAS experienced challenges in implementing the expected designs that were unanticipated. Small sample sizes made it very hard to statistically measure the initiative’s overall success. In addition, the innovative approaches and sheer size of the endeavor proved limiting to accurate data coverage and dissemination. The design teams, and theRAND researchers, also came across the challenge that differences in schools, such as economics, social adaptation, and resources, often made implementation difficult.
Another challenging factor was communication and teacher participation. If the teachers were not willing to undertake the changes and implement them as required, there were problems with the outcome of success. Poor training in the implementation of the new processes also added an undesired challenge, because in correlation with the teacher attitudes was their school’s capacity to teach the new reform strategies and how much time was taken to do so. Teachers who did not receive ample training did not generally emerge with improved attitudes towards the new concepts and did not embrace them wholly enough to foster their success. Failure to pay for professional development and design created the singly most cited reason for the shortcomings of the NAS concept.
Another challenge presented was district support. If support was not given freely, and resources made abundant, implementation generally experienced a new level of difficulty. Lack of district support also tied in with low teacher morale and a general lack of will to implement the changes on the parts of the teachers and staff.RAND researchers at these schools discovered a prevailing attitude within these districts that expressed the sentiment, ‘if you don’t have the proper resources/support/information to do something, then why do it?’
What we, as educators and education reformers, learn from these studies is that a comprehensive research plan needs to be undertaken prior to implementation to ensure that all education environments involved (whether on a singular, district, state or national scope) have the proper resources and capacity to provide adequate instruction, knowledge, and various other tools needed to be able to effectively implement them. We also learn that you have to have a collaborative, cooperative group effort in place to have a successful program take place. Everyone has to be on board and willing to strive for the success of the changes. A few rotten apples, so to speak, can and will spoil the whole bunch. Innovation requires a united front when changes so large are taking place, and not just on a local level (within the schools) but on a district and community level as well. We also learned that trust to allow change within schools that are adaptive to their needs are crucial for implementation and that proper leadership has to be put into place to carry these out.
The outcomes of the NAS studies seem to corroborate with the earlier RAND studies in agreeing that comprehensive reform is superior to the post-Nation At Risk-style piecemeal approach. It also affirms McLaughlin’s assertion that the teams involved must be working together as a whole and not working against one other for the implementation to be effective.
McLaughlin and the NAS studies focus very much on the attitudes of teachers, those “street-level bureaucrats” most closely involved with the actual implementation of comprehensive school reforms in the classrooms whose motivations are a prime reason for reform success or failure. All agreed that time was needed for teacher training, and RAND and NAS deemed the role of monetary support crucial. McLaughlin was more prone to thinking there are other viable solutions to creating a positive outcome without ample financial support than the other two.
All in all, NAS was not the complete success it was hoped to be, but it provided a great stomping ground for research and a wealth of statistics and examples to choose from in perfecting the way comprehensive reform is brought about. It is common knowledge that anything worth doing is worth doing right, and that doing so takes time, effort, and cooperation. Comprehensive school reform is drastically needed in many places and NAS sets the framework for how to properly go about achieving this and helping to improve the overall goal of raising student achievement.
