The Delta Issue #81

Improving student outcomes is hard—but not complicated.

Hi y’all, Jessica here.

Kunjan and I are just returning from Jacksonville, Arkansas, where we spent a morning visiting an elementary school that is the underdog story school leaders dream of. In the span of just five years, Murrell Taylor Elementary School went from an F to a B on the state’s rating scale, with students across all groups showing year-on-year growth.

How? This school didn’t have a gazillion dollars for fancy interventions. They didn’t embed AI in every classroom. What they had was a relentless focus on implementation. They had a curriculum that mattered and strong support for teachers tailored to that specific curriculum. They had a mechanism for identifying which students needed the most help and providing additional help. And their entire school team was committed to using data about student performance to drive improvement.

That’s it.

The beauty of this approach is not just that it’s simple, but also that it’s structural. In other words, it’s a system. Too many districts skip this step, which makes real improvement seem more complicated than it really is. All schools reach a point where improving student outcomes means they need to finesse the nuances of, say, whether students are getting the right balance of phonics versus reading comprehension instruction. But without the basic system in place, layering on complexity only makes things more complex—not better.

That means educators should first ask whether they truly are doing the simple stuff well, and then dare to be boring. Kunjan calls this “the courage to think small,” and I find it a powerful heuristic.

So today, let’s talk about what it looks like to get the foundation right and what we’d suggest state leaders look for when they visit schools. We talk all the time about the implementation chain—the sequence of adults whose actions influence what happens in classrooms. When we visit a school, we use the implementation chain as our “field guide,” beginning in the classroom and working backwards to the principal’s office, the central office, and finally, the state.

In the classroom

When I walk into a classroom, here are three groups of questions that I set out to answer:

Are teachers using high-quality instructional materials? Are they fluent in the materials? Are the lessons meaningful? Are the tasks and questions worthy of students’ time?
How much of the time are kids doing work themselves rather than watching their teachers work? What proportion of students are participating in the lesson?
What proportion of kids are mastering the hardest parts of the lesson? Do students know something at the end of the lesson that they didn’t know at the beginning?

What “good” looks like in practice:

In a fourth-grade classroom at the school we visited, we watched children read and discuss a nonfiction passage. At the top was an informational paragraph about the Great Migration, followed by a personal account of a man who lived it. Students were asked to break into small groups and discuss: Why was the man’s personal account part of the text? What is the point of having a first-person narrative in a non-fiction text?

The students were engaged—taking turns reading, popcorning their ideas, and debating their answers—because the texts were worth reading and the questions were worth answering. They were doing real work led by a teacher who understood her curriculum and had purposefully structured time to allow kids to do the heavy lifting.

In the principal’s office

Let’s move up the implementation chain to principals, teacher coaches, and instructional leaders. Teachers are most effective when their school leadership is effective. When I’m meeting with principals, coaches, and instructional leaders, I’m looking to answer the following questions:

Have the leaders ensured that teachers have the high-quality curriculum materials and are trained on those materials?
Have leaders ensured that all teacher collaborative time is focused on teachers learning the curriculum or reflecting on student work to determine how to adapt for the needs of kids?
Across the school do all teachers, teacher coaches, and leaders know which students need the most help and have a plan to help them?

What “good” looks like in practice:

When we asked how the school turned things around, the principal said, “We didn’t do all of this at once.” Instead it took a deliberate, multi-year strategy.

First, they adopted a high-quality curriculum and focused on training teachers. After that, they brought in literacy coaches to provide on-the-job support for delivering the curriculum. And once that was locked in, they piloted additional student supports to help students who were behind get back on track.

The work is not glamorous. It’s as simple as can be—but just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s easy.

In the central office

With the right data and a bias towards action, district leaders can be extraordinary drivers of student outcomes. The district leaders we met in Arkansas gave clear answers to questions like:

Have you procured all the high-quality curricula and secured training for the whole district?
Does the bell schedule give teachers enough time for instruction given the curriculum and enough collaborative time to learn the curriculum?
How are students performing on 1-2 (as opposed to 5) common assessments? Which students need the most support? How will they receive it?
What are the barriers to success in each school and how are we helping overcome those barriers?

What “good” looks like in practice:

One of the most remarkable things about our visit to Jacksonville was that central office leaders knew which kids needed support, were committed to supporting their teachers, and were checking in on their progress. It is highly unusual for the leaders in any school district to be able to tell you which kids need the most support or what’s being done to help them. But the district leaders in Jacksonville had charts in their offices showing which students were behind in each school, and they could tell us exactly which cohorts of teachers and coaches were responsible for those kids.

They chose curricula from the state’s vetted list. And most importantly, they were responsive to the incentives in the system that state education leaders had built. Clear guidance from the state was helpful—not harmful, as many state leaders fear.

In the state chief’s office

State leaders shouldn’t aim for “command and control.” Instead, I’m looking for whether they are creating the enabling conditions for schools like the one we visited to drive real improvement.

What “good” looks like in practice:

Arkansas state leaders incentivized good curriculum, so schools bought good curriculum. They funded and trained literacy coaches, so schools had literacy coaches. They updated their statewide assessment to provide meaningful data about student learning that parents and teachers could clearly understand. The state redesigned its school report card to make improvement for kids performing in the bottom 25% worth twice the points of the top 75%, so schools are rewarded for growing student achievement—not just keeping high achievers on track. All of these changes made it easier for districts and schools to focus on what matters most.

We talk about implementation all the time in the Delta because it is the number one thing driving how policy influences what kids experience in the classroom. What made Murrell Taylor Elementary School exceptional was not shiny new tech or a radical reinvention of its public education system. It was its unwavering commitment to implementation.