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Long Beach Unified School District in California has long been recognized as a model urban school system. Winner of the coveted Broad Prize for Urban Education in 2003, it has been a finalist for that award five times.

The district hasn’t achieved this success by flitting from reform to reform or looking for silver bullets. Rather, it has spent most of the past two decades building on the same educational strategies, focusing on data, community buy-in and staff development. We recently spoke to Superintendent Christopher Steinhauser (who has spent the past 28 years in the district as a teacher, principal, deputy superintendent and, since 2002, superintendent) about the “Long Beach way.”

Public School Insights: What prompted Long Beach to undertake big reforms for its kids in the first place?

Steinhauser: We've been on this long journey since about 1992. What really prompted it at that time was a massive economic meltdown. Our city was closing its naval base. And McDonnell Douglas [a major area employer] was going through a massive shutdown. They laid off 35,000 employees over a two year period. Also, if you remember, those were the days of major civil unrest in the LA area. We were having massive flight from our system, mainly of Caucasian students.

Basically what we did was say, “Okay. We have got to stop this.” So our board adopted several major initiatives. We implemented K-8 uniforms. We were the first district in California to end social promotion. We introduced a program called the 3rd Grade Reading Initiative to help with that goal, and we also developed a policy that eighth-graders who had two or more Fs could not go on to high school. And we launched a major partnership called Seamless Education with our local junior college and ...

"Welcome to my world," said the traditional public school to the charter.

Reformers who get mugged by reality can sound an awful lot like the dreaded "establishment." Take, for example, the story of the Opportunity Charter School in Harlem. Started by ardent reformers, the school now faces closure if it can't raise students' scores by next year. The reformers are crying foul.

Their arguments sound familiar and reasonable. The school takes the city's lowest achievers, half of them with learning disabilities, so it has a tougher road to travel. The state's tests can't measure the kinds of progress the school has made with those students. And the one-year deadline is unreasonable.

The reformers are on shakier ground when they seek to distance themselves from traditional public schools. The charter's assistant principal claims that the state can't "expect the school to be accountable for a system that has failed ...

Who knew Michelle Rhee was such a lilly-livered apologist for failing schools? Who knew that Jay Mathews would join her in finding excuses to squirm out from under real accountability?

Mathews tells the story of DC's Shaw Middle School, whose test scores actually dropped after Rhee installed a new and well-regarded principal. He praises Rhee for her continued confidence in the principal. Rhee is willing to wait, because "the Shaw people are doing nearly everything that the most successful school turnaround artists have done." There was even a mitigating factor: "Only 17 percent of Shaw's 2009 students had attended the school in 2008, distorting the official test score comparisons." Excuses, excuses.

Even Mathews's title is just the kind of thing that earns groans from accountability hawks: "Measuring Progress At Shaw With More Than Numbers."

Of course, Rhee and Mathews are right. It would be foolish to expect dramatic gains a scant year after the turnaround process begins. Shaw needs time. Shaw needs understanding and support.

And I'll admit that I've indulged in caricature here. Rhee and Mathews aren't accountability ogres. Rhee is doing what any reasonable person would do under the circumstances.

What concerns me most about Mathews's article is the gulf between the rhetoric and the reality of reform. Liam Goldrick puts it best:

I would argue that, in addition to doing the right thing (as happened in this instance), reform advocates and school leaders like Rhee also have a responsibility to say and advocate for the right thing. They have a responsibility to be honest about the complexity of student learning and the inability of student assessments to accurately capture all of the nuance going on within schools and classrooms

As Goldrick notes, Rhee's enthusiasm for "year-to-year" gains in test scores defies logic. Scores fluctuate from one year to the next, and unexpected winds can ...

Principal John O'Neill has earned his chops as a turnaround expert. In the past ten years, he has helped turn around two schools in two different states--no mean feat for a man who once struggled in school.

As principal of Forest Grove High School in Oregon, he has presided over a dramatic surge in test scores and graduation rates. In addition, many more low-income students have been signing up for challenging AP courses since O'Neill arrived in 2002. (Read our story about Forest Grove here.)

O'Neill recently told us about his school's journey from mediocrity to distinction. Some big lessons emerge from his story of school turnaround:

• Create a climate of personal attention to student needs.
• Do not remediate. Accelerate.
• Build broad commitment to change.
• Go for early, visible successes.
• Create reforms for the long haul.

Public School Insights: There has been a lot of talk recently about school turnarounds. I understand you have actually turned around two different schools. Is there some kind of a broad prescription, do you think, for a successful turnaround strategy?

O’Neill: I think you need to have a clear plan of action and clear targets that you want to impact. For myself, in ...