Promoting Excellence: Good to Great, NYC's District 2, and the Case of a High-Performing School District

Abstract

This paper compares two celebrated studies—New York City Community School District 2 (Elmore & Burney, 1999), and Good to Great (Collins, 2001), which examined sustained success in American corporations—to the case of a single high-performing school district. The question of interest concerns how school districts achieve and maintain high performance. The study focuses on five central issues from a combined theory from District 2 and Good to Great: 1) An organizationwide disciplined system that provides boundaries for participants but allows for creativity and innovation within those boundaries; 2) a central defined organizational focus that drives day-to-day decisions and is separate from an organization's vision and mission; 3) getting the right people into the organization through innovative hiring and training practices; 4) funneling budgetary resources to district priorities through multipocket budgeting; and 5) a long-term commitment to success through continuous improvement while maintaining a focus on the current challenges facing the organization.

This work has been supported through a generous grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Grant 2004-4151.

The author would like to thank Gary Sykes and for his support of this study and his thoughtful review of this manuscript, as well as Susan Printy for her work on the study and her thoughtful review of this manuscript.

Notes

1. While the District 2 story is compelling, the effort to translate these principles into the setting of the San Diego Public Schools apparently has stalled and its future there is uncertain. Final evaluations are not yet complete, but the San Diego case reminds us once again about the complex interaction between context and reform. For additional details on the San Diego case, see Darling-Hammond, et al., 2005 and Hess, 2005.

2. It is acknowledged that state test scores that show that a district is performing well above state averages are only single measures of performance, and do not exclusively provide evidence of district excellence. However, in combination with regression analysis, test scores do provide an initial means to compare districts with the intent to select a single high-performing district from among all districts in a state for in-depth qualitative analysis to study how a district may be promoting high performance.

3. Of note, as a comparison to Middleville, NYC's District 2 included only K–8 schools and so did not face the distinctive challenges posed by high schools.