1. High Instructional quality

• intellectual richness
• challenging tasks
• high expectations for all students
• coherenence of curriculum
• coherence of instruction within classes
• appropriate pacing
• gender and racial fairness

2. Personalization

• beneficial adult-student ratio
• attention to individual learning differences
• pedagogical responsiveness and flexibility
• longitudinal monitoring fo student progress (grade to grade)
• extended daily mentoring (e.g., an advisory system)
• multi-year mentoring (e.g., multi-age classrooms or "looping"

3. Student safety

• absence of violence (within school and enroute)
• freedom from harassment (within school and enroute)
• healthy disciplinary climate

4. Student experience of community

• students' sense of membership in a purposeful community
• good peer relations
• tolerance for human differences (gender, racial, cultural, etc.)
• students' sense of the larger community's investment in the school

5. Provision of other student supports

• access to physical and mental health services
• provision of social services
• sustained family involvement
• extended-day or summer opportunities

6. Beneficial stability

• continuity in leadership
• stability in staffing
• clarity and consistency of reform vision
• coherence of reform efforts

7. Professional community in school

• shared educational priorities
• active discourse about teaching and learning
• common conceptions of good teaching
• sustained collegial relations
• connections to professional networks

8. Professional resources

• sufficient subject-area expertise across staff
• other relevant expertise (e.g. bilingualism) across staff
• reform-sensitive recruitment and hiring practices

9. Availability of other organizational resources for reform

• effective leadership stability in staffing and student population
• parental and community support
• sufficient material resources (e.g. money for professional development activities, new books, technology infrastructure)
• sufficient flexibility in time and space
• compatible labor contracts

10. Organizational learning capacity

• shared and explicit goals
• capacity for collecting and analyzing data relative to organizational performance
• systems for reflecting on organizational problems
• tolerance for conflict in organizational inquiry
• habit of making organizational changes based on organizational inquiry

11. Community links to instruction

• "sense of place" in curriculum and instruction (e.g., teaching about community history and culture, using the community as a reference point in teaching about the larger world)
• use of community as a resource for learning (e.g., internships and community-based learning projects)
• contributions of school to community (e.g., community service projects, or projects that contirbute economic benefits to the community)
• use of parents as in-school resources and mentors
• business and community partnerships for learning
• school-to-work mentorships
• school links to institutions of higher education

Level 4:
Larger and intersecting educational systems
(district, county, union, region, state)

1. Institutional and policy impact

• salience of Challenge in district and state policies
• procedural realignments (e.g., management, budgeting, fiscal reporting)
• district or regional restructuring
• policy changes at district, regional, or state levels
• impact on union behavior and labor agreements
• impact on the relationship between schools and higher education

2. Resource impact

• redirection of public finding streams
• leverage on philanthropy
• reduction of public funding inequities
• spread of Challenge-generated expertise across systems

3. Professional mobilization

• diffusion of reform rhetoric across schools, districts, region, or state
• spread of teaching practices across schools, districts, region, or state
• impact on professional development offerings and practices
• replication of structures beyond funded schools or districts

4. Management of the larger systems' impact on the Challenge

• surviving leadership shifts
• co-opting policy shifts
• maintaing optimal program flexibility
• negotiating appropriate program adjustments

1. Academic benefits

• basic skills acquisition and improvement
• "new basic" skills or "higher-order skills" acquisition
• willingness to make challenging academics choices
• interest and participation in intellectual work
• meeting state university admission requirements
• college admissions
• school-to-work placements

2. Personal benefits

• self-esteem
• sense of autonomy
• aspirations beyond school
• pro-social attitudes
• appreciation of human diversity

3. Engagement in school

• good attendance
• interest in classwork
• completion of assignments or homework
• participation in co- and extra-curricular activities
• promotion and graduation

4. Equity of benefits

• distribution of student benefits across racial groups
• distribution of students benefits with respect to gender
• distribution of student benefits across native and non-native English speakers
  

Level 3:
Intermediate Structures
(Externally sponsored networks, feeder-pattern clusters, regional cross-school affinity groups, etc.)


1. Organizational salience

• awareness of the structures among teachers and other stakeholders
• express purpose and function of the sturctures
• regular cross-school meetings
• clear operating procedures
• stable governance

2. Value to schools

• enhanced availabiltity and use of cross-school expertise
• enhanced availabilty and use of external expertise
• enhanced access to and use of researched-based knowledge
• enhanced capacity for organizational leanring
• development of shared discourse
• enhanced accountability (e.g, schools holding eachother accountable for program qualities and/or student benefits

3. Durability beyond Challenge funding

• integration into district structures and culture
• assumption of functions ordinarily performed elsewhere (e.g., by district or county)
• impact on school identity
• impact on transitions (e.g., with respect to crises or changes in leadership)

Level 5
Mobilization of support


1. Public engagement

• school openness to public input
• public confidence in schools
• public interest in school events
• public support for change
• public tolerance for the stress and pace of change

2. Coalition building

• parent activism for reform
• local cultural involvement and support (by ethnic communities, religious groups, artists, etc.)
• contructive engagement with and by the press
• philanthropic interest and support
• business involvement and support