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Scaling Up of Innovative School Models
Significance. The design of secondary schooling in the United States, relatively stable throughout most of the twentieth
century, is becoming much less so in response to forces that are fundamentally economic. The drive to improve human capital -
throughout the globe, in both developed and developing nations - calls into question key assumptions underlying the structure and
culture of the twentieth-century high school in the United States. This is particularly true of the urban high school, whose
practices in general are widely regarded as inefficient from an economic perspective, and unjust from a moral one. In response to
this problem, policies have been created over the course of the last five to ten years to promote or force change: standards and
assessment, chartering and vouchers, and restructuring of high schools into small learning communities, as well as the development
of free-standing small high schools. Funding opportunities have followed, involving both federal and foundation dollars, which
have in turn encouraged a whole industry of school designing. This industry depends on protocols for scaling up the designs it
produces - that is, for implementing and supporting the designs in some number of actual schools. These protocols, however, are
largely under-theorized as well as un-researched. As a result, best practices are hard to determine and difficult to spread.
The Ross Lab School for Educational Innovation is in the early stages of scaling up its school design and is well positioned to do
this work in a number of globally focused cities.
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Research Questions |
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Research in this area will focus on key challenges in scaling up school designs and will identify promising strategies for managing them.
Our preliminary definition of these challenges is as follows:
 | Balancing fidelity and adaptation |
| Teaching and learning the design |
| Instilling shared ownership of the desig |
| Communicating effectively across contexts |
| Using experience in new settings to improve the design |
| Obtaining and managing the resources sufficient to scale |
| Negotiating the politics of local adoption |
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