California Best Practices Study

What It Is And Why It Is Important

Recent research increasingly points to the importance of the role of teacher quality in influencing educational outcomes, especially for language minority children, children growing up in poverty, and students of color. One result of this research is a new and promising policy focus on improving teacher quality by creating opportunities for teacher learning and supporting implementation of “research-based” practices in schools. This new focus is laudable, and it has created an appetite among policymakers, educators, and teacher educators for more information about research-based practices, especially practices to accelerate the learning of under-performing groups of students. But the demand for research-based practices exceeds the supply: if we look beyond reading, there is little research about effective programs and practices that meet the new federal standards for quality and rigor.

What is needed – and what we offer in our multi-year California Best Practices Study – is a comprehensive study that identifies high-performing districts and school sites, including high poverty sites that are succeeding in narrowing the achievement gap, matches them with a control group of demographically similar but less successful schools, and systematically explores differences to determine what practices (i.e., with regards to instructional program; professional development; school and district leadership, instructional coherence) contribute to school and district success. The California Best Practices Study also responds to the need for teacher learning by documenting its research findings in an accessible format intended to provide a rich and detailed description of field-tested best practices from which teachers and administrators can learn.

The study is being conducted by Springboard Schools in collaboration with Just for the Kids–CA (JFTK-CA) and the National Center for Educational Accountability (NCEA). The study spans 3 years. Each year focuses on a different level of K-12 education. The first year highlighted elementary schools and was completed in 2004. The second year (2005) put the focus is on high schools. In the third year (2006) the California Best Practice Study of Middle Schools will bring this study to a close. For each year, the high performing site's case studies, key artifacts and Best Practices Framework are posted on the Just for the Kids website.

Year-Two Research Methodology

How we chose which high schools to study

Working with parameters established by the National Center for Educational Accountability and data analysis from Just For The Kids – California, Springboard Schools used a three step process to choose fifteen high schools for study:

We began with all high schools in California. We selected one group of “high performing” and one group of “average” performing schools. We categorized schools as high performing or average by looking at student performance for the past three years on the California Standards Test (CST), at enrollment in courses identified by the California Department of Education as challenging courses, and at the percentage of students meeting A-G requirements for admission to the University of California. The process worked like this:

Step One: We selected an initial group of schools that were in the top third of the state in performance on the California Standards Test and had met all of their AYP targets for growth, both overall, and in the various subgroups of students. In contrast, average-performing schools were just that, average. Not all of the average schools met all of their AYP targets, and they had test scores falling between the 40th and the 55th percentile.

High-performing candidates for the final study also had to have at least one of the following:

Above average enrollments in “good courses” (as identified by the California Department of Education) for 2 out of the last 3 years
Better than expected percentage of students meeting A-G requirements for university admission; and
Better than expected percentage of students reaching proficient on the CST in Math

Step Two: We then analyzed student demographics to identify those schools that were “beating the odds” by out-performing schools serving similar student bodies. The demographic factors we considered included: degree of poverty as measured by enrollment in the free- and reduced-price lunch program (FRLP), percentages of English Language Learners, and ethnic group enrollments.

Step Three: For the final study, we picked high schools from the northern, central, and southern parts of the state, and tried to ensure that we had a group of schools that reflected the full range of the challenges facing California schools today.

How we collected the data

After sites were selected, research teams visited each site. Using a carefully-structured set of questions, researchers interviewed school district central office administrators, school leaders, and teachers. Research teams also reviewed a comprehensive set of documents reflecting work at district, school, department, and classroom levels. Finally, we collected the actual tools and materials used in the schools.

How we analyzed the data

The study employed the framework of the National Center for Educational Accountability to examine best practices in the following key areas:

Curriculum and Academic Goals

Staff Selection, Leadership, and Capacity Building

Instructional Programs, Practices, and Arrangements

Monitoring: Compilation, Analysis, and Use of Data

Recognition, Intervention, and Adjustment

How we packaged the findings

A chief objective of this study was to be useful to practitioners. With that end in mind, we built the California Best Practice Framework for High Schools, wrote a case study for each of the sites, and gathered and indexed specific tools and practices those high-performing sites used.

Final note on study design

Finally, we also want to acknowledge the limits of this study. First, this study describes practices that appear to be associated with high performance; it does not offer conclusive causal analysis of how these disproportionately high performing sites reached these levels of achievement. Second, the study provides a snapshot of the work underway in ten high performers at a particular moment in time. It does not offer a description of how they got there. Finally, each strategy should be seen as part of a larger whole. Schools are complex systems, and particular practices and strategies often depend on others. Readers are encouraged to think of these case studies as portraits of high-performing systems rather than as a list of disconnected “best practices.”

What We've Found

Our report on the lessons learned in the second year of the Best practices Study, which address high schools in California, are found in the report, Challenged Schools, Remarkable Results, which can be found on this website.

The first year's results can be found in the Professional Development section. The case studies, findings and artifacts collected from the schools and districts will then be used as learning tools in our Best Practices Institutes.

Teachers who use inquiry are much more likely to be reflective and to know what's going on in research, have research proven strategies in place.


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