U.S. Department of Defense

When we first began working with the United States Department of Defense, the department selected 16 of its lowest-performing schools worldwide to provide intensive support for the principals and teachers.

Each of the 16 schools shared many of the same challenges — communities with low socio-economic demographics, relative isolation (such as one school in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) and a transient population of soldiers' families in which often one and sometimes both parents were deployed on missions.

We worked with the principals and leadership teams at each of the 16 schools to provide training every quarter on an instructional framework developed specifically for the schools, as well as how each school could implement it in its own unique way.

The power of collaboration

Each school's team worked and planned together with the teams from the other schools to develop the methods they would use to implement the new framework within their individual schools.

The power of this inter-school collaboration was evident as a team from a school located outside of Hanau, Germany shared its work at creating a plan to broaden its structured approach to read aloud with a school from Ft. Benning, Ga., and implemented a school-wide writing assessment to middle school and high school at Ft. Buchanan in San Juan, P.R.

From low-performing to out-performing

The Framework schools, as they came to be known, improved student achievement more than other schools in the DoDEA system as measured by scores on the Terra Nova multi-subject test. While other non-Framework DoDEA raised their scores an average of 1.4 points, the Framework schools that worked with Focus On Results gained an average of 4.1 percentile points — nearly three times as great a gain.

After 18 months of support, these schools showed impressive results in multiple areas of the Terra Nova. By the end of the initiative, the 16 schools had gone from the lowest performers in the system to actually out-performing the system in growth in multiple academic areas.



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