DR. BORMAN: Because I am from the State of Florida and we know Texas very well because our policies overlap quite a bit I thought I would go ahead and make a presentation here and we need the money.

So, Leave No Child Behind, challenges and opportunities for conducting research during Phase II of the Austin blueprint. I am going to assume, Pat that you are going to move ahead and implement your seven characteristics or components that you know are working well, that you suspect are working very well.

I think the challenges are the fact that there are 10 components, seven of which appear to be the hallmarks of the system that is in place that one suspects given news from the field are the ones that are making a difference.

However, some of these components are resource dependent. What happens when resources aren't present to deliver those elements? What happens if funds dry up to support professional development for example?

Some components are implemented before others,that is professional development though it occurs alongside of the implementation of the reforms at the school level still must occur beforehand for the most part to get teachers up to speed,introduced into the curriculum and so on and all components are implemented in a school context. A unique feature of course is that the context in some respects extends beyond the school because these principals are now working together logistically to give each other feedback for one another difficult times of implementing the Austin blueprint and so on.

So, there are certainly a number of challenges. However, there really are I think a number of opportunities as well. Austin is a large urban school district and it has lots of schools. So, if indeed the school board and the administrative staff remain one could implement a randomized experiment with controls, that is put in place in some select schools perhaps a school that varied by racial and ethnic compositions, SES certainly and so on and holding others with similar characteristics as controls.

This may not be politically advisable, however, given the revolving door of the superintendents in the State of Texas and it might therefore be advisable in fact to put this reform in place in the remaining elementary schools.

Now, another asset I think, another positive dimension is that students' assessment data is moved to specific classroom teachers. This is powerful. Florida has a similar arrangement. It is important because teacher characteristics can be linked to specific student outcomes. So, we can know if for example Pat's suspicion that 2 years of prior experience and a credential in the field are in fact making a difference, and also parents, principals, teachers and other stakeholders are on board and this is extremely important and Pat has a new contract. So, what more can you want?

Also, distributed administrative staffing, very supportive as well and we need to go the extra mile with evaluation and assessment.

Okay, I think that the research question given Pat's concerns and those of his staff are two. At least these are the ones I would suggest. How are the components of the Austin blueprint interrelated? Is there some synergy that develops among these components that produces the kind of outcome that is desirable, that is increased student achievement and reduced differences across student groups? How do components of the Austin blueprint contribute to the outcomes and this is the second question. Well, I am going to rely on the National Science Foundation's model to inform the research design and I am not going to talk about sampling today. There isn't time. I am going to talk about a design framework based on this model which I think in important ways subsumes each of the panel or seven components of the Austin blueprint.

Now, these are all linked in the way that has been presented here. We found empirically in fact using analytic techniques that these various drivers or policy levers, call them what you will were interrelated in this fashion.

At the center of course is standards based instruction and this is where the rubber meets the road. This is where classroom instruction, the materials that teachers use and so on are achieved. In fact, this is the driver one according to the NSF model and according to their definition and I looked at this a long time it is the implementation of a comprehensive standards based curriculum and instructional materials aligned with standards based high-quality assessments in mathematics and science in the case of NSF but certainly we could extend that to reading and language arts as well.

Unified policies, coherent consistency of policies and standards-based reform, application of resources refers to the convergence of all resources, technology, professional development and so on that are applied to the reform, mobilization of stakeholders, broad-based support including parents, institutions and the case of Chicago when they implemented the urban systemic initiative and so on.

Now, the outcome measures, reduced differences in achievement across student groups and increased attainment for all students. We added school culture as another component and I think in the case of the Austin blueprint school culture is going to be very important to measure because there are going to be no doubt school differences and that is in the way that the reform is implemented. There are going to be some schools that are going to be more successful than others in implementing the reform with the hoped-for results, reduced differences and increased attainment and so school culture and perhaps school culture writ large across the groups of principals working together would be important to assess.

Now, in the case of unified policies thinking about the blueprint model frequent assessment of students and immediate interventions is one aspect of the unified policies that are place in this reform. Multiple measures would be useful here including student surveys, parents, community interviews, teacher logs, principal interviews and the like.

Depending on how much is available with respect to resources one could think about a subset of these but what is really very good about this model that I am proposing when it becomes an analytic model is, and using path(?) analysis as the analytic tool what is required are multiple measures of each of the particular drivers or levers.

Another aspect of unified policies, every teacher hired with at least 2 years of experience and all teachers certified in the subjects that they are teaching, these are all components of the Austin model now grouped under these conceptual headers that I have arrayed, strong experienced principals under the direction of a master principal and here I would use and very effective I think in this case, a school improvement plan. School improvement plans I think are a little-used document in educational research and they really can be a treasure trove of information about what is important, what is going on at the school level. All schools are required to keep them and so they are readily available.

Application of resources in the case of Austin model, we have enhanced technology to monitor and improve student achievement. That is the component from the Austin model that resonates with this particular driver. Teacher models, again, teacher interviews, teacher self-reports, district spending with respect to the allocation of resources to the school again which can be identified through the SIPS(?). Mobilization of stakeholders. Partnerships with parents and science contacts are critical aspects of this reform and can be measured through interviews and also SIPS and assigned contacts which presumably are on file.

Standards-based instruction, the key to the whole effectiveness of this reform, clearly, more time or reading, writing, grammar and math every day for every child. Teacher logs or other forms of teacher self-reports. Certainly classroom observations if resources are available to support such activity. I think they would be important and really key to understanding which of these components is most effectively at work in engineering this reform and which are not and finally we have the outcome measures, increased attainment and reduced differences and as we know from the blueprint, the Austin blueprint we have guaranteed improvements of student achievement to meet standards and test scores and student assessment data because these are the hallmarks of accountability in Texas and this is the way each school is in fact measured and judged it is really important to keep that in place as an outcome measure.

I think it would be important as well to at least in some instances, some cases, some elementary schools involved in this research to have other more fine-grained kinds of measures as well.

School culture. I think that for this component we have to recognize that there is a powerful synergy that can occur or not depending on the professional community in the school and using Newman and Rogers' construction of school cultures, shared values, shared understanding, shared professional norms and so on are all components or elements of school culture. There is a survey that we have used in the past that might be appropriate here but certainly teacher interviews, teacher focus group interviews and the like. There is actually another measure that was developed by Lois Lank and Andy Porter of the federally enacted curriculum in the study of classroom practices that we found to be very useful in this kind of research.

Thank you.