Chapter 8: Systemic Reform Up Close (and in the Trenches): A Multiyear Case Study of an Outlier School

For more than a decade, federal and state policymakers have promoted the idea of standards-based education and the use of high-stakes tests. Certain members of the academic community have helped rationalize and legitimate both the standards and the high-stakes testing movements by developing the theory of systemic reform. This theory endorses both top-down control of curriculum and discretion at the local site level. Given this endorsement of seemingly antithetical concepts, it should come as no surprise that systemic reform often looks quite different in practice than it does in theory, especially when the practices focused on are at the school-site level. This paper, however, examines an outlier school in which the process of systemic reform has played out in a manner that is largely consistent with the theory. The purpose is to use the case to begin to understand what school and district-level leaders might do to function successfully in the current policy environment and to provide those leaders with “working hypotheses” that may be helpful in negotiating an environment increasingly dominated by standardized tests and the high-stakes consequences that policymakers have linked to test performance.