School Restructuring Under No Child Left Behind: What Works When? A Guide for Education Leaders

This guide provides users with a step by step approach to restructuring, from organizing a district team and assessing the district's capacity to govern restructuring decisions to conducting a school-by-school analysis and implementing a restructuring plan. The text of the guide is supplemented with templates, checklists, and other practical tools. This guide: (1) reflects the best education and cross-industry research on restructuring; (2) translates that research into practical decision-making tools; (3) includes process steps; and (4) includes realistic consideration of strengths and constraints in a wide variety of school districts. The major actions included in this guide are divided into four steps. These steps are presented in Tool 1 Restructuring Roadmap on page 13. Tool 2 Overall Organizer's Checklist on pages 14-16 provides detailed substeps. In summary, the four steps are as follows: (1) Take Charge of Change--Big Change; (2) Choose the Right Changes; (3) Implement the Plan; and (4) Evaluate, Improve, and Act on Failures. This guide primarily focuses on choosing among the first four options under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which are relatively drastic and unfamiliar to district leaders. It grows out of four papers in the "What Works When" series that explore what is known about when and under what circumstances these four options improve student learning. Education Leaders' Summaries of these four papers appear at the end of this guide. State takeovers are addressed early, in Step 1, to help districts determine whether they have capacity to manage the restructuring decision process and again at the end of Step 2, when districts may consider state takeovers of some individual schools. (Contains 7 footnotes.) [This guide was produced by Learning Points Associates, Washington, DC and The Center for Comprehensive School Reform and Improvement, Washington, DC. Research was administered by Learning Point Associates in partnership with the Southwest Educational Development Laboratory (SEDL) and WestEd, under contract with the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education of the U.S. Department of Education.]