A key premise of this toolkit is that given that needs vary from school to school, there is no "one-size-fits-all" starting point for launching a systemic reform initiative. Rather, schools typically begin a reform in one of the three school system domains — say, a technical domain issue, like curriculum alignment, and soon find that they need address issues in other domains. For example, they may need to address personal domain issues, like school climate and culture or organizational domain issues like resource allocation.

Nonetheless, we know that school leaders are often pressured to improve student achievement dramatically and in many cases, rapidly. So a natural question that arises for school leadership teams is what can we do to get, as it were, the biggest bang for our buck? What improvement strategies have been shown to have the most dramatic impact on student achievement?

To help address these questions, McREL undertook a meta-analysis — an analytic technique for merging the results of several, varied research studies together — to determine which school factors are most strongly associated with gains in student achievement. The results of this analyses are in the study report titled A New Era of School Reform: Going Where the Research Takes Us released in 2000.

The central premise of this report is that the cumulative research of the last 40 years provides educators with some clear guidance about the characteristics of effective schools and effective teaching. After aggregating data from several different research studies on the effects of school, teacher, and student variables on student achievement, the report concluded that schools can strongly influence student achievement if they

1. Provide teachers with a well-articulated curriculum aligned with assessments and ensure that the curriculum is actually taught;
2. Optimize teachers' use of instructional time;
3. Establish and monitor achievement goals for students;
4. Clearly communicate that high academic achievement as the primary goal of their school;
5. Involve parents in the processes of setting and enforcing policies;
6. Maintain an orderly environment for learning;
7. Maintain a cooperative environment for learning; and
8. Involve staff in key decisions and establish clear lines of communication and leadership roles.