The Bay Area School Reform Collaborative, also known as BASRC, is currently working on a best practices study drawn from high-performing classrooms, schools and districts. According to Ida Oberman, BASRC's Director of Research and Evaluation, among the study's findings is a pattern of high performance facilitated through knowledge accessed from the outside. High performers tend to tap into external knowledge sources.
This pattern should not be surprising. The first chapter of Bill Ouchi's Making Schools Work touches on this pattern in the transformation of one of the worst-performing elementary schools in Chicago into a high-performing school. In the process, teachers at the school conducted research and imported a reading program from New Zealand to help children who are in danger of falling behind. Their willingness and readiness to adopt best practices from outside certainly contributed to their success.
By encouraging and helping more schools and districts to look beyond themselves and their communities in order to identify best practices for their students, we should be able to improve student achievement without reinventing the wheel.
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