Over the past 15-20 years, a growing number of school system leaders, mostly in urban areas, have implemented a new kind of district improvement strategy to raise outcomes for their students, especially historically underserved student groups such as black, Hispanic, and low-income students. This overarching approach is generally characterized by a focus on measurable student outcomes, increased autonomy for principals, increased choices for families, and mechanisms for replacing or reforming chronically low-performing schools with high-performing and high-potential schools.

This project focuses on the unique stories of leaders, activists, families, and educators in eight cities with evidence of improved student outcomes using some variation of this strategy, which the Center on Reinventing Public Education calls the “portfolio strategy,” the Texas Education Agency refers to as “systems of great schools,” and David Osborne of the Progressive Policy Institute calls “a 21st-century education system.” However, not every leader or community profiled here would identify with these specific terms, so we won’t attempt to label the strategy that unites the stories on this site.

Instead, we focus on the shared goal of these eight cities: a continuously improving system of schools that meaningfully accelerates student outcomes.

What elements and beliefs did these eight cities have in common? We identify unifying “core beliefs” and “strategic pillars” below:

This strategy is bigger than the sum of its parts: Each of the seven pillars and core beliefs that inform this approach interacts with the others in ways that can accelerate effects on students, families, and schools. Implementing a single pillar on its own will not necessarily bring about improvements for students, and in some cases, one pillar on its own may be counterproductive. For example, giving schools full autonomy without oversight, clear goals, talent, and accountability mechanisms could have little or no positive impact on student learning or, in a worst-case scenario, could result in decisions detrimental to learning.

The Approach

Origins and Evolution

The origins of this strategy date back to the 1990s, notably in the work of Paul Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). Hill and CRPE encouraged school system leaders to reorient the relationship between districts and schools. School districts traditionally operate from a stance of centralized control, where the district is responsible for many budgetary, operational, staffing, and curricular decisions. In contrast, Hill and CRPE proposed that in order to accelerate student achievement, districts should cultivate a variety of school models, step back from day-to-day school decisions, and grant school leaders increased autonomy in exchange for results-driven accountability.

Since then, education leaders have learned much more through on-the-ground experience and research about the elements and variables required to implement and sustain this strategy. The number of cities and districts pursuing it has grown, along with the universe of leaders and organizations experienced in implementing various pillars of the work. In states like Texas and Georgia, multiple school districts are incubating versions of it with state support and resources, enabled and encouraged in state law. Other cities across the country have pursued versions of this strategy as well, and evidence of their results is developing.

But implementation has not always been smooth and changes have not always lasted. Some cities, including several of the eight featured here, have rolled back or reversed core elements of their strategies, even in places where outcomes appeared strong by many measures.

This is due to complex combinations of leadership change, missteps in implementation, state and federal policy change, and political backlash. In several cases, inadequate communication and community engagement efforts from local leaders around strategy changes contributed to a sense among local families that reforms were done to them, not with them. City strategies also faced opposition from teachers unions, especially when school autonomy and turnaround strategies involved charter schools. Examples include New York City, Oakland, and Newark.

One additional factor contributing to the pushback against this strategy in some places is the complicated state of the research base behind it, which is strong in some respects, but difficult to pin down in others.

Evidence of Impact

Although available evidence on this strategy in general is not comprehensive, what we do have is compelling. All eight cities on this site were selected based on evidence of improved student outcomes. For each of the cities profiled on this site, we examined a wide variety of indicators over multiple years to assess whether the city achieved measurable improvements for students.

These included trends in enrollment, student achievement compared to the state, achievement among student subgroups, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results, and results on the education equality index, which focuses on low-income students. Highlights of all these findings are woven into each city’s story. For cities with substantial charter school sectors, we looked to research from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University (CREDO), which provides some of the best available comparisons of charter sector and traditional sector student performance. We also consulted impact evaluations of specific elements of reform strategies in some cities, such as studies focused on closures in New Orleans, small high schools in New York City, and philanthropic funds in Newark.

There is still a lot to be learned about the strategy and individual pillars. Precisely measuring the impact of this strategy at a district-wide level is challenging, and rarely comprehensive. When many changes in district strategy happen simultaneously, measuring the impact of any one change on schools and students is difficult. Additionally, several pillars of this strategy are intended to have an indirect impact on students, enabling change by improving the systems surrounding schools. Sometimes it can take years for a policy or process change to measurably impact student outcomes. All this creates a challenging environment for evaluative research. Looking forward, actionable research on this strategy would strengthen our understanding of what pillars matter most, what changes are likely to have the best long-term impacts on students, and how to successfully scale promising approaches or transfer them to new contexts. 

At the heart of this project is the belief that the stories of community members, families, students, leaders, and advocates are themselves a valid and meaningful source of evidence. Those interested in this strategy can learn from the lived experiences of those who were there, including the ups and downs of attempting to bring about lasting, significant change in large, complex educational systems.