6: Leading School Districts for Improved Student Success

After a long period of neglect by school reformers, a small but compelling body of research now demonstrates the significant variation in student learning explained by district-level organisations (Thompson, Sykes, & Skrla, 2008). Much research of this sort, however, has limited its explanations for such variation to readily measured factors over which districts have little or no control -for example, district-wide socio-economic status (SES; Fahle & Reardon, 2018) and district size (Chingos, Whitehurst, & Gallaher, 2013).

A much larger body of research on districts has aimed to identify how districts¹ performing beyond expectations improve student learning. Often referred to as ‘district effectiveness’ studies, this research has been summarised in several recent reviews including Leithwood’s (2010), Trujillo’s (2013) and Anderson and Young’s (2018a). As these reviews indicate, the largest proportion of this evidence is exclusively qualitative and mostly case study in nature typically using ‘outlier’ research designs with small samples of districts; that is, designs that locate one or multiple districts performing beyond expectations and examine those districts to find out why, in some cases using low-performing districts for comparison. This was the case for all of the 30 studies included in Leithwood’s (2010) review and the vast majority of studies in the reviews by Trujillo (2013) and Anderson and Young (2018).