Accomplishing Districtwide Reform

Abstract

This is a mystery story. It is about a district that apparently did the right things but seemed not to get commensurate results across all classrooms and schools. In this article, we look closely at the details and discover an important lesson about districtwide reform. The district is York Region District School Board, which is a large multicultural district just north of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. York is a rapidly growing district with a diverse sociocultural and linguistic population, with over 100 different languages spoken in its schools. The school board has been opening, on average, at least 5 elementary schools a year for the last 5 years. There are 140 elementary schools and 27 secondary schools, with over 108,000 students and 8,000 teachers.