Districts That Succeed: Breaking the Correlation Between Race, Poverty, and Achievement - Paperback

by Karin Chenoweth (Author)

In Districts That Succeed, long-time education writer Karin Chenoweth turns her attention from effective schools to effective districts. Leveraging new, cutting-edge national research on district performance as well as in-depth reporting, Chenoweth profiles five districts that have successfully broken the correlation between race, poverty, and achievement.

Focusing on high performing or rapidly improving districts that serve children of color and children from low-income backgrounds, the book explores the common elements that have led to the districts' successes, including leadership, processes, and systems. Districts That Succeed reveals that helping more students achieve is not a matter of adopting a program or practice. Rather, it requires developing a district-wide culture where all adults feel responsible for the academic well-being of students and adopt systems and processes that support that culture.

Chenoweth explores how districts, from urban Chicago, Illinois to rural Seaford, Delaware, have organized themselves to look at data to guide improvement. Her research highlights the essential role of districts in closing achievement gaps and illustrates how successful outliers can serve as resources for other districts.

With important lessons for district leaders and policy makers alike, Chenoweth offers the hard-won wisdom of educators who understand the power of schools to, as one superintendent says, "change the path of poverty."

Back Jacket

Karin Chenoweth leverages new, cutting-edge national research on district performance as well as in-depth reporting to profile five districts that have successfully broken the correlation between race, poverty, and achievement. Focusing on high performing or rapidly improving districts that serve children of color and children from low-income backgrounds, Districts That Succeed explores the common elements that have led to success, including leadership, processes, and systems.

With important lessons for district leaders and policy makers alike, Chenoweth offers the hard-won wisdom of educators who understand the power of schools to, as one superintendent says, "change the path of poverty."

"Districts That Succeed provides valuable exemplars of school districts that have beaten the odds, raising academic achievement of children who supposedly can't learn effectively. Karin Chenoweth provides clear descriptions of these cases and masterfully reveals what it is that district leaders must do to put their schools on track for success."
--Timothy Shanahan, distinguished professor emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago

"In this timely and important book, Karin Chenoweth takes a broad look at America's public education system and shows us how the leaders of successful school districts create and maintain the conditions in which students are most likely to thrive. Through examples that reflect the country's diversity and its many challenges, she elicits key lessons and inspires us with a sense of what is possible."
--Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, president, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

"Inspirational yet practical, Karin Chenoweth's latest book reflects lessons gleaned from the field that debunk a relationship between background and achievement. A must read, Districts That Succeed highlights an award-winning recipe for quality learning experiences that yield both academic and social/emotional success for all students."
--Susan S. Bunting, secretary of education, Delaware Department of Education

Karin Chenoweth is the writer-in-residence at The Education Trust.

Author Biography

Karin Chenoweth is the writer-in-residence at The Education Trust, a national education advocacy organization that works to improve the academic achievement of all children, particularly children of color and children who live in poverty.

She is author of four books previously published by Harvard Education Press:

Schools That Succeed: How Educators Marshal the Power of Systems for Improvement (2017);
Getting It Done: Leading Success in Unexpected Schools, coauthored with Christina Theokas (2011);
HOW It's Getting Done: Urgent Lessons from Unexpected Schools (2009); and
It's Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools (2007).

She is also the creator of the ExtraOrdinary Districts podcast and its pandemic spinoff, ExtraOrdinary Districts in Extraordinary Times.

A longtime education writer, she wrote a weekly column on schools and education for the Washington Post for five years and for several years wrote regular posts for Huffington Post and the now-defunct Britannica Blog. She was senior writer and editor at Black Issues In Higher Education (now Diverse); reporter and editorial editor of the now-defunct Montgomery Journal; and a stringer with a byline for UPI reporting from Ankara, Turkey. Her work has appeared in Education Week, Kappan, and Educational Leadership. She graduated from Columbia University's School of Journalism in 1979.