The Essential Supports for School Improvement

The idea of the “five essential supports for school improvement ” was developed in the mid-1990s as a way to capture and summarize evidence-based findings on widely agreed-upon characteristics of good schools. The initial framework was used in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to guide school-improvement planning and self-assessment efforts. Though researchers from the Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR) took the lead in developing this framework, many Chicago educators participated, including CPS leaders and others across the city. We particularly note the contributions of Donald Moore of Designs for Change to the development of these and related concepts. In the intervening years, as we have collected more evidence and conducted more analyses, these ideas have evolved. We thank many of our Steering Committee members and other colleagues who have helped in this evolution. Among them is the late Barbara Sizemore, who pushed our thinking on the concept of school leadership. We gratefully acknowledge our former colleague Robert Matthew Gladden, who helped to conceptualize and then conducted many of the analyses of community context. Matt developed a great deal of expertise with datasets provided by the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, the Chicago Police Department, and Chapin Hall Center for Children at the University