What is the shoulder-to-the grindstone work of transforming underperforming schools into higher performing schools? What makes this work so difficult? This book sheds light on these questions from the perspective of the Success for All Foundation (SFAF), an organization that has collaborated with thousands of elementary schools to enact a common strategy for comprehensive school reform, all in an effort to improve the reading achievement of millions of students. This story of SFAF spans twenty turbulent years. It begins in 1987, with the strategy of improving reading achievement by improving s ... More

What is the shoulder-to-the grindstone work of transforming underperforming schools into higher performing schools? What makes this work so difficult? This book sheds light on these questions from the perspective of the Success for All Foundation (SFAF), an organization that has collaborated with thousands of elementary schools to enact a common strategy for comprehensive school reform, all in an effort to improve the reading achievement of millions of students. This story of SFAF spans twenty turbulent years. It begins in 1987, with the strategy of improving reading achievement by improving students’ cooperative learning in classrooms. It stretches through 2008, with efforts to influence federal education policy to support that strategy. There is nothing in the story to suggest a quick fix. Rather, the theme that emerges is that the problems and possibilities of effective, large-scale, sustainable education reform lie in the complexity of public education: in interdependencies among underperforming schools, programs of reform, the organizations that advance those programs, and the environments in which all operate. The story ultimately locates the problems of education reform not in schools but, instead, in reformers, themselves. By tracing SFAF’s deep push into public education, the purpose of the book is to assist a wide array of reformers in seeing, understanding, and ultimately confronting its complexity.