State-Level Support for Comprehensive School Reform: Implications for Policy and Practice

Abstract

In the current context of standards-based reform and heightened accountability for school performance, state education agencies (SEAs) have an important, but not yet well-articulated, role to play in local school improvement efforts. This article starts to articulate such a role by examining the variety of approaches and strategies used by 7 SEAs to support schools and districts applying for and ultimately implementing the federal Comprehensive School Reform (CSR) program. Building from the assertion that SEAs can and do make choices about how to best implement federal programs, we explore the choices that the studied SEAs have made around (a) the integration of the CSR program with other state and federal initiatives, (b) the different levels of funding provided to schools, (c) the continuity of SEA leadership around CSR, and (d) the variety of support strategies provided to participating schools. Although these SEAs have supported CSR in different ways, we conclude that the most important state strategy for leveraging systemic advantage from CSR involves the extent to which SEA staff have stayed with the program and thus gained in-depth knowledge of the program necessary to improve CSR in their states.