PROLOGUE

Wow, that was quite a year, thought Truman High School principal Trina Meadows. As she breathed a sigh of relief and stretched out at her desk, she listened to the quiet that meant the end of another school year. The last group of teachers, the science team, had just checked out for the end-of-the-year room inspection, and now the school year had officially come to a close.

It was a pretty successful year, all things considered. Graduation went well, with many hugs and mercifully few pranks. Only 35 of the 650 seniors did not make it through the year, a remarkable improvement over the 25% of seniors who did not make it to graduation when Meadows came to the school as principal three years earlier. Not only were the graduation rates going up, but ACT scores and college placement rates were starting to look promising. The gains were not evenly shared across the student community-the special education students continued to struggle to make progress-but there seemed to be a shared sense of progress being made in the school and the teachers were coming together as a staff, committed to improving learning for all students.

Also, it looked as if most of the staff would come back in the fall. Of course, the usual number of last-minute replacements would need to be made, but the new hiring and retention processes Meadows and the district leadership team had developed seemed to be making a difference. Meadows and her team had met with each of the parents whose children were involved in summer school beginning in two weeks, and she thought she could finally catch her breath.

As she relaxed into her chair, she was drawn to a copy of the school's strategic plan posted next to her window. She leaned forward and opened the top folder on the pile to the list of initiatives that had guided Truman's leadership agenda this past year. It was an impressive list, thought Meadows; she and her staff had accomplished good work. In addition to educating 2,200 students, her team had designed and implemented a new data system that would document teacher practices toward their professional learning goals, a new discipline program, a personalized learning initiative for students to develop study and time management skills, a transportation plan to involve all families in school activities, and a new hands-on science curriculum that got students and teachers out into the community. Many students, teachers, and community members cared deeply about these initiatives, and Meadows was proud of the ways her team channeled their desire to improve teaching, learning, and support into meaningful programs for students.

Meadows's thoughts turned to the new restorative justice program. Truman's teachers worked with the guidance staff to develop a program for students to make amends instead of submitting to the traditional disciplinary program. Truman guidance staff reported that the zero-tolerance discipline policies that Meadows and her staff had inherited had the unintended consequence of overpunishing the school's Spanish-speaking students. The department chairs and the guidance team suggested restorative justice as a path for students to learn about their obligations to the community and to make good on the harm their behavior had caused. At first, a few parents spoke in the press about their fears of declining behavioral standards in the school, but Meadows explained how the new program was beginning to work by inviting students to address the consequences of their actions. Meadows was proud of the efforts that students, staff, and teachers had made over the year to transform the school climate. What is our next step? wondered Meadows. How can we build on the promising start of the restorative justice initiative?

As she reviewed the other initiatives on the list, she reflected on the new teacher evaluation system. The district data team was excited about using this approach to help teachers track their learning goals. At first, Meadows was nervous about this approach: it sounded too much like surveillance, and many of the teachers shared her concerns. Still, a group of math teachers volunteered to use the system to collect data on their professional learning plans, and Meadows was surprised at how the math department meetings began to focus on classroom practice and discussions about what kinds of data should count as evidence for learning. Seeing these good practices in action led Meadows to wonder how to get some of the other departments to participate in the same way.

The other programs on the list led her to similar reflections: each of the new initiatives was built on good research and brought together faculty and staff around common problems that needed to be solved. Meadows thought that she had developed a strong professional community across the school around improvement. She led the effort to develop a shared vocabulary for talking about practice and reform, building on the district initiative to use the right kinds of information to guide their work. Since coming to Truman, she had made a commitment to be out in the school every day, visiting classrooms and making connections with teachers, staff, students, and families so that she was school community. She knew that her colleagues in several other district schools were envious of the community she had built at Truman, and the results her team was seeing made it easier to get support from the district and from families and businesses in the community. It was a good year, she thought, and she should celebrate a job well done.

Lingering over this pile of reports, though, began to make Meadows feel a little uneasy about the road ahead. Although she and her staff had made progress, many problems remained to be solved. Some of the new programs started at Truman seemed to be working, but in other areas, there were big gaps that Meadows had struggled to address. For example, the school had started a new study skills program two years ago when several teachers spoke up about how to support students who needed the most help. It was pretty clear, though, that many teachers did not know about the program and that many of the students who could benefit from it were not involved. Meadows also knew that addressing student learning at the level of study skills did not really get at the real issue: improving classroom teaching. She struggled with how to reconcile the group of educators who wanted a short-term solution with the others who felt that shortcuts would not solve the problem of student engagement.

She thought about the big problems the school was facing from the surrounding community. Outside the school, the Truman area of the city had been hit hard by the recent recession, and as the unemployment rate rose, the pressure on the school to serve as a safe haven also rose. The number of students on free and reduced-price lunch had increased 50% since her arrival, and the numbers of families needing language support continued to rise. Meadows knew that she could not address these community problems directly, but students and families brought issues from home into the school, and she and her staff needed to provide the right kinds of support for learners to succeed.

The transportation program, for example, seemed to be working for families involved in the sports programs, but she did not know how the other families felt about the school's transportation efforts. Meadows did know, however, that a group of parents of successful students had started a website to oppose the new inquiry-based science track for students who struggled in math and science. This group of vocal (and influential) Truman parents argued for keeping the existing science program stable as a college-prep pathway for their children. Their concerns made her think about how she and her leadership team could reach out better and include these groups in new efforts moving forward.

Meadows thought that meeting these challenges would require better information about current practices and perspectives in the school. The district press to use data to inform decision making led her to reflect on the information resources she had built with her Truman team. Last year, she persuaded a colleague from her graduate program to join her staff to reform the school data practices. Together they built a strong data system, based on the district data warehouse, to track student progress, disciplinary and placement data, and teacher professional development information. Teachers had access to Google Classroom sites to complement their in-person classrooms; students had access to personal sites to collect and share their work. Meadows thought that if any school in the district had access to the right information to inform planning and progress, it was Truman.

The data the school had collected, however, proved too thin and too removed from practice to guide decision making about strategic priorities. Meadows knew, for example, that the student discipline referral rate had declined in the past year, but she did not know why. It was tempting to attribute the change to the restorative justice program, but she also knew that this was a controversial program and that not all teachers knew about it or how it worked. She knew that the ACT scores had risen slightly over the past two years, but again, she didn't know why. The data they had collected could not tell her team about the effects of their initiatives on the school community or even whether the school community knew about what the leadership team was trying to do in the school.

In her graduate program, several professors had taught about the...