Organizing Schools for Improvement: Lessons from Chicago
Open accessAbstract
Alexander Elementary School and Hancock Elementary School began the 1990s as two of the worst schools in Chicago in terms of math and reading achievement.Only two miles apart, the schools are in bordering neighborhoods and appear similar in many ways.Both enrolled nearly 100% minority students from families considered low income.During the 1990s, both launched an array of initiatives aimed at boosting student achievement.Hancock moved impressively forward, while Alexander barely moved the needle on improvement.How did Hancock "beat the odds" while Alexander failed to do so?This puzzle led us to undertake a systematic longitudinal investigation of hundreds of elementary schools in Chicago, just like Alexander and Hancock.Beginning in 1990, the Consortium on Chicago School Research initiated an intensive longitudinal study of the internal workings and external community conditions that distinguished improving elementary schools from those that failed to improve.That unique 15-year Organizing Schools for ImprovementResearch on Chicago school improvement indicates that improving elementary schools requires coherent, orchestrated action across five essential supports.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In schools, aspects of leadership and climate are associated with student wellbeing and success.
“In schools, aspects of leadership and climate also are associated with student wellbeing and success [58, 89].”
From Leading the charge in the education sector: development and validation of the School Implementation Leadership Scale (SILS) (2022) · cites this paper as [89]
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Implications for educational practice of the science of learning and development
Darling-Hammond, L., Flook, L., Cook-Harvey, C., Barron, B., & Osher, D. (2020) · Applied Developmental Science · doi:10.1080/10888691.2018.1537791 · Cited by 2,733 · see citing works
Horn, I. S., & Little, J. W. (2010) · American Educational Research Journal · doi:10.3102/0002831209345158 · Cited by 762 · see citing works
Kraft, M. A., & Gilmour, A. F. (2016) · Educational Administration Quarterly · doi:10.1177/0013161x16653445 · Cited by 208 · see citing works
Pathways to New Accountability Through the Every Student Succeeds Act
Darling-Hammond, L., Bae, S., Cook-Harvey, C., Lam, L., Mercer, C., Podolsky, A., & Stosich, E. L. (2016) · Learning Policy Institute · doi:10.54300/966.414 · Cited by 127 · see citing works
What difference does school leadership make to student outcomes?
Robinson, V., & Gray, E. (2019) · Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand · doi:10.1080/03036758.2019.1582075 · Cited by 109 · see citing works
Lai, M. K., Wilson, A., McNaughton, S., & Hsiao, S. (2014) · Reading Research Quarterly · doi:10.1002/rrq.73 · Cited by 69 · see citing works
Successful leadership in a rural, high-poverty school: The case of County Line Middle School
W. Klar, H., & A. Brewer, C. (2014) · Journal of Educational Administration · doi:10.1108/jea-04-2013-0056 · Cited by 59 · see citing works
Lyon, A. R., Corbin, C. M., Brown, E. C., Ehrhart, M. G., Locke, J., Davis, C., Picozzi, E., Aarons, G. A., & Cook, C. R. (2022) · Implementation Science · doi:10.1186/s13012-022-01222-7 · Cited by 34 · see citing works
- Authors
- Bryk, A. S., Sebring, P. B., Allensworth, E., Easton, J. Q., & Luppescu, S.
- ORCID
- Allensworth, Elaine
- Venue
- University of Chicago Press eBooks
- Publisher
- University of Chicago Press
- Published
- 2009
- OpenAlex
- W4230815353
- Cited by
- 299
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 23 · 2025: 21 · 2024: 15 · 2023: 25 · 2022: 20 · 2021: 19 · 2020: 28 · 2019: 18 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 17 · 2016: 22 · 2015: 17 · 2014: 15 · 2013: 16 · 2012: 11
- FWCI
- 15.76
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- University of Chicago Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Educational Assessment and Improvement
- Social Sciences › Education › Educational Leadership and Practices
- Social Sciences › Education › School Choice and Performance
- Keywords
- school improvement, elementary school, school organization, academic performance, low-income minority students, Chicago School, school-community relations, educational leadership, educational reform
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
