I’ve been reading Richard Elmore’s School Reform from the Inside Out for several months, and wanted to post a summary of the various essays and papers that make up the book. Some of the chapters are academic articles, while others are the kind of article you might find in Phi Delta Kappan.

1. Getting to Scale with Good Educational Practice

In chapter 1, Elmore argues that plenty of “change” occurs in schools, but it is almost always distant from the instructional core, where teachers, students, and academic content interact. He asserts that good teaching should not be seen as a personal trait, but a public issue of professional practice, and suggests that specific structures are needed to take effective practices to scale.

2. Building a New Structure for School Leadership

In this chapter, Elmore argues that most school leaders are products of the systems they are trying to reform, and thus lack the ability to lead significant change. He describes the “buffering” and “loose coupling” that prevent education policy reform from having much of an impact on the instructional core, noting that instructional improvement is left largely to individuals acting alone.

Improvement, then, is change with direction, sustained over time, that moves entire systems, raising the average level of quality and performance while at the same time decreasing the variation among units, and engaging people in analysis and understanding of why some actions seem to work and others don’t.

Leadership is the guidance and direction of instructional improvement. p. 57

Elmore directly critiques the idea that teaching is a private, intuitive, idiosyncratic matter, and proposes structures for improving the capacity and performance of everyone within the system.

3. Bridging the Gap between Standards and Leadership: The Imperative for Professional Development in Education

Elmore describes a yawning gap between what we know about effective professional development and how we actually conduct PD in schools and districts. PD is, he says, an essential tool in the process of large-scale improvement, which requires

…focus, knowledge, persistence, and consistency over time.
…
Professional development is the set of knowledge- and skill-building activities that raise the capacity of teachers and administrators to respond to external demands and to engage in the improvement of practice and performance” (p. 104).

Elmore also introduces the concepts internal accountability and capacity for improvement, which are discussed at length in chapters 4 and 7, respectively.

4. When Accountability Knocks, Will Anyone Answer?

This chapter is a qualitative study of various conceptions of accountability, as found in a number of schools Elmore and his co-authors visited. Pseudonymous school portraits occupy much of this very long chapter. Three related key concepts are responsibility, expectations, and accountability, which refer to self-, peer-, and externally imposed pressure to perform at a certain level or act in a certain way. When these three pressures are aligned, schools have greater capacity for improvement.

5. Unwarranted Intrusion

This brief chapter argues that the federal government does not have the capacity to support the reforms it mandated under No Child Left Behind. Elmore suggests that NCLB over-invests in testing and under-invests in capacity-building.

6. Change and Improvement in Educational Reform

In this chapter, Elmore draws together many of his earlier assertions about how to address the challenges of accountability and improvement in public education. He suggests that, fundamentally, teachers and administrators do not know how to improve the schools they are working in:

Shifts in policy improve teaching and learning only if they are accompanied by systematic investments in the knowledge and skills of educators. p. 211

7. Doing the Right Thing, Knowing the Right Thing to Do: The Problem of Failing Schools and Performance-Based Accountability

Elmore suggests in this final chapter that improvement is not a smooth, linear process, and that the AYP targets set under NCLB have no basis in the reality of how schools that are improving actually improve. Rather than improve a consistent amount each year, schools improve, then plateau for a while as they struggle to comprehend their next-level challenges.

Schools build capacity by generating internal accountability – greater agreement and coherence on expectations for teachers and students – and then by working their way through problems of instructional practice at ever-increasing levels of complexity and demand. At each successive stage, the work at the next stage can look impossible. This process has to be managed by people with expertise, and informed by people who have worked with schools confronting similar problems in other settings. Right now no infrastructure exists outside of a few opportunistic state and local examples to provide continuous support to failing schools. p. 254.

Conclusions

School Reform from the Inside Out offers no shortage of critique to policymakers, teachers, and educational leaders, but Elmore combines his critique with clear prescriptions about how to address the challenges we face in improving the performance of our schools. As a collection of essays, this book repeats some of the same arguments and concepts, and lacks the organization and flow of a book with purposefully sequenced chapters, but the essays are organized well, and the final three chapters draw together Elmore’s various arguments into a clear set of recommendations about how to policy and practice can work together to improve student learning.