The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Mathew Rodrieguez reports how Superintendent Joyce Bales was hired away from Pueblo City, Colorado to turn around Californa's Vista Unified School District - a system with half of its students testing below grade level, half of its high schoolers failing to graduate, and two thirds of its schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress. The district enrolls 23,000 students, one third of whom are English language learners, in 31 schools.....  Since she arrived, five principals and three administrators have left...

Bales spent twelve years in Pueblo City schools - a district of similar size, demographics and academic performance, including six in the top job. As Deputy Superintendent, she helped to chose the Lindamood-Bell reading program, implement it in one school, and later the whole district. Keith Owen, chief academic officer of Pueblo, attributes her success to three factors: implementing Lindamood-Bell, increasing teacher training, and raising expectations in schools with low-income students…. In 1998, 50.7 percent of fourth graders in Pueblo scored “proficient” or “advanced” in reading on the state assessment. By 2003, that number jumped to 66 percent.

Bales hopes to bring similar increases to Vista Unified.... She drove home that point shortly after she was hired by telling administrators not to expect a raise until no student scores in the “far below basic” category on state exams…..

At a July school board meeting, teacher Douglas Beanan raised concerns about the cost and effectiveness of the reading program....  (He) asked the per-student cost of the Lindamood-Bell program. He didn't receive an answer....  Bales said the figure is hard to calculate, but that her staff will analyze the cost-benefit compared to another reading program the district has used for several years....

Bales also has introduced a computer-based math program called SuccessMaker by Pearson Digital Learning. The program tests students and creates individualized lessons.... The math program allows children to advance beyond their grade level and the district is pursuing a license from Pearson, so parents can access it at home.

Replication - the idea of reproducing success gained in one location in another place, has been a subject of great interest to the charter school comunity and comprehensive school reform for many years.  In the former, the vehicle of replicfation is the EMO/CMO; in the latter, the Design Team. Here in Vista Unified we have an example of the district-level approach - the superintendent and her school improvement provider. 

But in reading the piece, your editor can only wonder about the real reasons for success in Pueblo and whether they apply here.  How much was attributable to Lindamood-Bell, teacher training, and raising expectations as suggested by Keith Owen? A district-wide program plus the other two ingredients is so many superintendents' mantra for raising student performance, yet most don't succeed.

How much of the success in Pueblo was attributable to pre-existing conditions - the small size and relative stability of the city's system, where it looks like most staff remained in place and Bales was able to rise through the ranks to the top job? And how much was attributable to a program selection process Bales could manage as a deputy superintendent from the ranks?

In Vista Unified, Bales is an outsider imposing her program - and apparently a new program she has not experienced directly - on a teaching corps she does not know, let alone come from. If Lindamood-Bell was right for Pueblo, we have no reason to know it is right for Vista. In Pueblo the program was genuinely tested in one school and then expanded as it appeared to work; in Vista, it is being rolled out by fiat. Who knows about SuccessMaker? There is no evidence of general buy-in, except the inference that the Vista Unified board probably had fair warning that Lindamood-Bell was something Bales was bringing to the party. Still, the only stakeholder with a specific committment to either program is the superintendent.

That Bales has lost a third of her elementary school principals and a good part of district management, and has no cost-benefit data readily at hand to respond to the predictable questions and criticism, reinforces your editor's fear that Vista Unified's board thought it was hiring a "turn-around specialist," but actually got the manager "who doesn't know what she's doing and so is doing what she knows."

Turn-around is not a matter of replication - doing what you did the last time; it's about understanding the problem you face and having the full set of skills, tools and strategies to solve it. The article reads as if Bales believes Owen is right - districtwide school improvement is just a matter of programs and pressures. Perhaps Ms. Bales is not a "one trick pony", but the article implies as much.

Bales is not really the subject of this posting, merely an illustration. The point here for school improvement providers is that you have a hammer and every problem is not a nail. Whatever good Bales' did for Lindamood-Bell's reputation in Pueblo, she could just as easily undo in Vista. Over time a provider needs considerably more wins than losses to rise above the competition, and that ratio is all about client selection. The fit of the program with the district requires superintendent support, but there's really a lot more to it. 

One last thought. In public education, the quest for replication is driven by the desire to get the same result as the initial experiment.  When school x or district y performs well, the general demand is less for "that school" than "that school's outcomes."  The simple, simplistic solution is to recreate all the inputs associate with the first example's results. But it is impossible to know the full set of circumstances in the initial case, and if it were possible it is impossible to recreate those circumstances in a second location. We do not know how the circumstances in the first case intereracted to produce the outcome, so we can hardly know which are the most important circumstances and hope by choosing them we can achieve a similar outcome. Finally, it is impossible to reconstruct the process by which the first case produced its results. Students are not hamburgers, schools are not hamburger stands, and the central office is not the keeper of a brand name product. It would be far better for school boards to look at the circumstances shared by all successful schools and districts, and focus on establishing those conditions, than to seek the silver bullet in the form of a savior and her program.