Background

A History of Attempts

For the past fifty years, educators, parents, and inspired individuals have been trying to reform the U.S. education system to better meet the needs of students and to help graduating students to be more competitive in the new global economy. Over these decades, there have been seemingly endless, exhaustive attempts to set a new standard of excellence, but few, if any, have proved to be sustainable, replicable, or scalable. These attempts at improvement have included restructuring of failing schools, introducing a rigorous and more competitive curriculum through common core standards, additional resources to help systems innovate, and finally, the continuation of alternative options such as magnet schools, alternative schools and charter.

Struggling with Consistency

Although some improvements in student achievement have been documented, the vast majority of schools have failed and as a result too many students either don’t graduate from high school or graduate inadequately prepared for the future, unclear about direction, and not adequately prepared for success in college, work, and life. In some schools where there has been positive trends data on student achievement very few have been sustainable for more than a decade and fewer yet are replicable or scalable. Through all of our efforts we are still find ourselves with pockets of excellence and systems of mediocrity.

Richard DeLorenzo Change Agent

In 1994, Richard DeLorenzo was part of a team that set out to dramatically change how schools operate in a small rural district in Alaska. Literally, reinventing how schools should operate to help all children become successful in their journey through life. As a team of educators we look honestly into the results both academically, but more importantly the future success of our children once they left our system. We found huge gaps in what we believe they were achieving and the reality of the situation.

Recognized Successes

We committed ourselves to agreed values and beliefs about learning and set off to dramatically change the outcomes for all children. Several years later, after showing tremendous achievement growth, they were awarded the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige Award for organization excellence. Ironically, this was a business award of the highest nature given by the president of the United States for performance excellence. Unlike other national prestigious awards, this award involves proving your system is world class with positive trends over many years in 7 different categories. This includes a stringent overview from a team of experts who scrutinize every aspect of your system.

Reinventing Schools Coalition Foundation

As a result of this recognition, interest in our work continued to grow. There was a huge request for help from other struggling schools. Richard founded the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition(RISC) in 2002, whose mission was to transform 1,000 school districts in America hoping to reach a tipping point to impact our entire nation.. During the next several decades we were successful in transforming thousands of schools throughout America most notably in the Westminster Public Schools just north of Denver, Colorado and in the Lindsay Unified School District nearFresno, California. However, we never reached the tipping point of impacting the entire nation for many reasons. Primary among these was the hurdle of overcoming the inertia of the traditional system that has been cemented in school culture and the unintentional policies which are designed to protect their status.

Transformative Change on a National Scale

Ironically, many years later, Richard DeLorenzo was invited to help lead the transformation of the largest country in the world. Although daunting in its scope with over 72,000 schools and 5,000 universities, this is the proof of concept needed to convince other national leaders that this vision is not only doable, but possible to scale. With the support of key leaders and commitment from 35 regions, at the peak of this movement nearly 5,000 educators were trained every week, but because of the conflict in Ukraine, his safety could not be guaranteed and was forced to return to America. Now, more than 30 years after the initial experience of these efforts, we now can identify how to begin, sustain and scale quality Competency Based Education (CBE).