Table of Contents

Executive Summary

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Scaling Up

Critical Questions

Action Agenda

Appendix

I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

These conference proceedings summarize the presentations and discussions held at the American Psychological Association (APA) and Carnegie Corporation of New York interdisciplinary conference Bringing to Scale Educational Innovation and School Reform: Partnerships in Urban Education. A charitable grant from the Carnegie Corporation and a contribution from The College Board provided the necessary funding to bring together 21 participants for a 2-day meeting on June 27-28, 1997. Sponsored by the APA Committee on Urban Initiatives, the conference was designed to address the specific problem of identifying and making school systems aware of the programs that work and to renew psychology's commitment to educational reform through the development of partnerships with educators from various organizations and government agencies. The report chronicles the conference deliberations, represents the different viewpoints of the conference attendees, and concludes with an agenda for action.

'The stakes of educational failure are higher than ever before. There are very few good jobs for high school dropouts, unlike 30 years ago.' So stated Congressman Thomas C. Sawyer (D-OH) in the conference opening. The aging of our society and other demographic trends make education a vital issue for every citizen. The baby boom generation is 78 million strong, the generation behind them, only 44 million. To keep the economy going, younger Americans will need to outdo the productive capacity of their more numerous forebears. The fact that nearly a quarter of these young Americans live in poverty today makes it unlikely that they will, but the basic arithmetic of intergenerational dependence means that somehow they must.

Working to fortify the U.S. Department of Education's (DOE) two-fold agenda to promote the improvement of learning in urban schools and to encourage the widespread adoption of proven educational programs, the conference goals were to define what is worth scaling up and how psychology can contribute to educational reform. A major concern has been the lack of involvement of psychology in the educational arena, given psychology's vast quantity of literature available on quality innovations. The conference was a call to action for psychologists to accept the challenge of participating in the school reform movement through research evaluation and dissemination. Although the problems of urban education cannot be solved by any single discipline, psychology has unique contributions to offer the educational reform effort:

• Psychologists' training gives them an indepth understanding of the teaching/learning process, individual differences, and motivation.

• Psychologists have the methodological know-how to evaluate educational practices and replicate proven programs.

• Psychologists are intimately familiar with the process of change and the individual and interpersonal factors associated with it, making them well-suited to helping individual educators and entire educational systems deal successfully with change.

• Psychologists' assessment and research skills give them a commitment to the collection, interpretation, and use of data, which schools can use to make data-based decisions about their practices.

Scaling up the best programs will require bringing research and practice together. There is currently a disconnect or gap between psychological research and practice. There are too few who can translate research into practice or mediate between research and practice. Moreover, more research should be conducted on promising programs to enrich the empirical base and to determine under what conditions they work. Consumer guides summarizing the research literature and evaluation results on various efforts are also important tools needed for scaling up efforts. Several criteria already exist for deciding what's worth scaling up:

• The program should be effective; that is, researchers need to define a problem and then measure whether it was solved.

• The program should be viable and sustainable.

• The program should be ecologically congruent with the real-life setting; innovators should respect the resource limitations, values, and other conditions in schools.

'No child is expendable' and 'every child can learn' should be the guiding principles for school restructuring. We need a paradigm shift in American education. Our measurement assumptions currently relegate half of all schoolchildren to the status of 'below average.' This view limits children's growth and opportunities. Because society cannot afford to waste a single drop of talent, educators must replace their idea that intelligence is fixed and measurable by test scores alone and instead see intelligence as malleable and multidimensional. To enable this shift, structures in the school also need to change. Schools could be restructured to get rid of stratified classrooms that cut children out of interesting opportunities in the hope of remediating them. Schools' test scores should not be discussed without thinking about differences in resources or children's prior opportunities.

Evaluation plays a major role in the scaling up process. An evaluator can mediate among the needs of the program's funding agency, the service provider, and the children and community. Once the quality of programs and processes is known, scaling up becomes essentially a problem of implementing promising and/or exemplary programs as well as helping consumers choose programs wisely. Obstacles to change include adequate knowledge about education research and the change process at all levels of schools and government, the absence of training and technical assistance, entrenched bureaucracies that resist change, and a lack of models showing what works. Closer and more collaborative relationships between researchers and practitioners at the very beginning of the program development process make it easier to disseminate knowledge effectively. Unfortunately, few graduate students are being trained in program evaluation, and psychology needs more theory and research on evaluation as a process in itself. At the level of individual schools, reformers need to know what the problem is before they launch a program, set measurable goals and conduct periodic evaluations, and base programs on sound science and research. The reform effort requires adequate resources, additional research and evaluation, and better targeting so that dollars go where they are needed most.

Success will also require addressing the needs of teachers. Effective professional development designed to enhance competence in new skills offers an avenue for knowledge dissemination about effective programs. However, we know too little about how to organize professional development so that it reaches classroom teachers and improves student achievement.

The diversity of the student body in urban schools poses special challenges to teachers and educators. To help teachers meet these challenges in a positive way, researchers should concentrate on the positive features of children's experiences and, at the same time, delve more deeply into why they don't know or can't do certain things. A context basis for program evaluation is needed and must become part of the change process. More research needs to be done to understand how to improve teachers' performance. Before reformers can scale programs up, they need to look at the interaction between teachers and children in classrooms. Changing structures, such as school management, does not necessarily change classroom practices. Adult learning and interpersonal skills lie at the heart of many school reform efforts, which often flounder because of human factors.

No school can be allowed to fail - too many children are at risk. And to save every school, public perceptions must change: The focus must shift from repair to prevention, from the individual to the context, from deficits to possibility and a determination to help all children learn. While the individual school has to be the unit of change, reformers also need to know more about district-level change.

Research will need to answer several critical questions related to educational innovation and school reform:

• What factors do effective programs share?

• Is it better to 'home-brew' programs or adopt already existing programs?

• How can reformers institutionalize school change?

• How can reformers enhance collaboration between researchers and program developers and practitioners?

• What is the best way to enhance evaluation efforts?

• How can reformers help consumers - including educators, administrators, families, and communities - embrace more effective practices?

• How can psychology serve as a catalyst for bringing together various partners in reform efforts?

Psychology must resume its rightful place at the education table and use research, practice, and policy to improve the nation's schools.

The following action agenda was developed to prompt the psychological community to step forward, assume responsibility, and carry out the recommendations from the conference:

• Seek funding for a major followup conference to address the critical questions raised in the preliminary conference and to develop policy recommendations on educational reform.

• Recommend that APA develop a proposal for funding a review and analysis of the massive amount of literature currently available on effective programs and contexts for change.

• Recommend that APA focus on expanding the training psychologists receive in program evaluation and knowledge dissemination.

• Embrace education as a priority by recommending that APA's Education Directorate support this effort with activities and funding.

• Take its place at the education table by forming partnerships with education groups, parent groups, foundations that fund educational projects, and government agencies and then work with them on advocacy and policy development.

• Submit research papers on educational upscaling to be published in the American Psychologist Psychology in the Public Forum section.

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