The executive strategy function

Around the country, state education officials are faced with the prospect of intervening in large numbers of chronically failing schools. Though some states are still in the process of developing these interventions, they have almost universally included state-directed data-analysis by school and district staff, and state-led school and district planning processes (Laguarda, 2003; Education Commission of the States, 2001). However, many of these interventions are predicated on research about the features of already effective schools (Brady, 2003)--a phenomenon that largely ignores the particular challenges of finding effective levers for improvement in the politically, technically, and emotionally complex terrain of under-performing schools (O'Day and Finnegan, 2003). For educators and researchers concerned with the process of improvement in low-performing schools, the exploration of the complex ways in which low-performing schools respond to external interventions is of crucial importance (Mintrop, 2001). This paper describes the experiences of three underperforming schools in the state of Massachusetts. Each of these schools is in a different stage of the state accountability system, and each one reacts to--and struggles with--the pressures and requirements of state accountability in unique ways. The schools in these studies display a uniform commitment to using data analysis and school planning to improve student achievement, but encounter a range of issues, including some very difficult dilemmas related to balancing the competing need for change and stability, that limit the effect of these efforts.

In the end, what the schools in this study lack is any form of executive strategy related to their organizational development. Though they each pursue many improvement strategies, they have only a limited awareness of the general pattern of development in schools like theirs, and a limited sense of the intermediate goals they should pursue on the path to sustained improvements in student learning. That this executive strategy function is missing in these schools suggests that the design for intervention in low-performing schools is currently incomplete, and that large numbers of low-performing schools will continue to falter without a more sustained and sensitive form of guidance about the particular developmental challenges of each low-performing school.