Lessons from New American Schools' Scale-up Phase

New American Schools was established in 1991 to help schools transform themselves into high-performing organizations. This report is a formative assessment of the first two years (1995-1997) of the scale-up phase, during which NAS partnered with 10 jurisdictions to implement design-based programs for improving student performance. A series of lessons emerged from this analysis: (1) The effort at school reform is complex because of the multiple actors involved. (2) Design teams do not accomplish implementation by themselves but only with the cooperation of schools and districts. (3) Teachers found stable school and district leadership and clear signals about the effort's priority to be important. Perhaps the most important lesson is that there still are no silver bullets for ensuring the implementation of reforms, but several districts have made significant progress in the two-year period.