V94 N1 kappanmagazine.org 45 Photo courtesy the author Comments? Like PDK at www. facebook.com/pdkintl The situation at Sandfields Comprehensive School in south- ern Wales could hardly have been more grim in 1996. The British government had recently decided that it would close any school that persistently had fewer than 20% of its students achiev- ing solid scores on the national assessments given to all 16-year- olds. High-poverty Sandfields had two consecutive years of 13%. One of the most depressing challenges facing the school was that many parents decided not to send their children to the school because they had attended it themselves and didn’t believe the school was socially or academically supportive of students. Even parents who enrolled their children at Sandfields didn’t get them there often enough: Student attendance was less than 80%. The school and grounds were littered with trash and graffiti. Serving students in the same relatively high-poverty Neath Port Talbot Local Authority, Cwmtawe Secondary School’s situation was troubling but less dire. The school had a new building and with 32% of its students doing well on the exams, Cwmtawe’s performance was only moderately below district and national averages. However, Cwmtawe’s leadership and teachers shared with Sand- fields’ a desire for dramatic improvement. Their shared improvement opportunity began when their headteach- ers (equivalent to principals in the U.S.) invited coauthor David Reynolds to speak about high-reliability organizations (HROs) (Roberts, 1993, 2009). HROs are organizations — like air traffic control towers and electric power grids — that are assigned the very challenging task of operating without critically cascading errors the first time, every time. Could this work in schools? Reynolds and the coauthors embarked on a four-year relationship with Sandfields, Cwmtawe, and nine other schools in the Neath Port Talbot district of Wales to learn. The researchers worked with the schools from 1996 to 2000, and the schools produced stunning results. Making best practice standard — and lasting A 16-year-old effort to improve schools in a challenged, high-poverty area in Wales could offer lessons to schools elsewhere. By Sam Stringfield, David Reynolds, and Eugene Schaffer SAM STRINGFIELD (sam.stringfield@uc.edu) is director of the School of Education, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, and was at the University of Louisville (Ky.) while working on the project described in this article. DAVID REYNOLDS is a professor of education at the University of Southampton, England. EUGENE SCHAFFER is a professor and chair of the education department at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. Scotland • Neath Port Talbot England Wales