Comprehensive School Reform

Like most principals facing a new school year, Carol Stack, at the Jefferson Middle School in Champaign, Illinois, had set a series of goals for herself in September of 1999. One of her top goals was to reduce the school’s suspension rate. She had a hunch that particular groups of students were being suspended in disproportionate numbers, but she didn’t have a firm handle on the scope of the problem.

In 1996, Cathy McCarthy was a brand new principal at the Armory Street School in Springfield, Massachusetts, when she received word that the elementary school’s test scores were among the lowest in the city. The staff was stunned, but McCarthy saw the bad news as an opportunity to spur widespread changes in the school. She just wasn’t sure where to begin.

What does it take to change the education system of an entire country? If you ask EDC’s Jody Spiro, she’ll tell you to start with the teachers. That’s what EDC did in April 1998, when its Global Learning Group joined with the Ministry of Education in Romania to restructure the training that educators receive in that country. Four years later, staff members of the Romania Education Reform Project have provided specialized training to an estimated 240,000 of the nation’s 300,000 teachers.

The sun bears down on the rooftop garden Lai Lai Sheung and her students have planted on the rooftop of the Quincy Elementary School in downtown Boston. The trees—an apple and two pears—are not tall enough yet to throw shade, but now, in their third year of growth, they are bearing their first fruits.

One of the ironies—and challenges—of effective education is that in order to engage individual learners you have to look at the whole environment.

EDC is searching the country for middle schools that feature “academic excellence, developmental responsiveness, and social equity.” Would some of those same schools also earn high marks for inclusive practices?

Al Cuoco, director of EDC’s Mathematics Initiative, and EDC Vice President Wayne Harvey, a mathematics education researcher, emphasize that improving mathematics education goes beyond a simple choice between traditional mathematics and mathematics based on the NCTM standards.