Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk: Report #65

The Center for Research on the Education of Students Placed at Risk (CRESPAR) was established in 1994 and continued until 2004. It was a collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and Howard University. CRESPAR’s mission was to conduct research, development, evaluation, and dissemination of replicable strategies designed to transform schooling for students who were placed at risk due to inadequate institutional responses to such factors as poverty, ethnic minority status, and non-English-speaking home background.Criticizing school district bureaucracies has become a growth industry over the past couple of decades. In the face of all this anti-district and anti–central office rhetoric, it is important to recognize the growing number of scholars who are emphasizing the importance of the district in school reform efforts and the research base that examines the role of the central office. Building on previous reviews of school district leadership, this review adds a new focus on the role of school district central offices in improving instruction and raising student achievement. We examine the functional tasks of the central office and the internal dynamics of relations between the central office and district schools (with their principals, teachers, and students). The review concludes with a heuristic model of how the central office influences classroom instruction and student achievement in district schools.Grant (No. R117-D40005) from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES, formerly OERI) at the U.S. Department of Educatio