Cleveland's Vision 21 Community Model School Plan: An analysis of the relationship of school reform initiatives and student achievement (Ohio)

This study sought to inform the current push to reform by examining the success of a previous school reform effort. With the 2000 Reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) also known as "No Child Left Behind" schools are mandated to show "adequate yearly progress" on standardized tests. In Ohio, scores on the Ohio Tests of Academic Proficiency (OPT) have shown a clear discrepancy in scores of Black and White students especially in urban districts across the state since the tests began in 1994-long before ESEA. The Vision 21: Community Model Schools Plan in Cleveland, Ohio during 1995--2000 was an effort to raise the scores of students, specifically African-American students in a school district found to have created a segregated school experience. Specifically examined were factors internal and external to the schools control that affected the performance of students on the Math and Reading Ohio Proficiency Test subtests during that effort.; During the Vision 21 reform effort, each of the Cleveland elementary schools was to adopt a template for the "guiding principle" (or mission) of the school in order to address various factors pertaining to student achievement. Sixty-three of eighty-two Cleveland elementary schools adopted one of the Vision 21 "community models". The others were already magnet schools (16) or never adopted any school reform model (3).; Using the statistical measures, Analyses of Variance (ANOVA), Pearson-r correlations and regression analysis, it was found that as a factor under the control of the school, "guiding principle" did have some effect on scores of the reading OPT scores. Length of principal tenure was also positively related to both math and reading achievement. Other "internal" factors (school size, percent African-American staff) were not found to explain significant unique variance in achievement scores.; Dealing with factors external to the control of the schools, poverty was shown to explain much of the variance in student achievement. In this study, mobility was not found to be significantly related to OPT pass rates.; It was planned that mission of the Vision 21 Project was to be revisited for success at the end of the 2000--2001 school year. However, no program evaluation was conducted. The importance of this study is to examine that reform effort and utilize the results as, in the near future, districts again use the "model schools" method of school reform to attempt to raise student achievement.