CHICAGO--Policymakers are devising all sorts of ways to improve schools, but researchers are finding no silver bullets. In a nutshell, this is the perception given by a myriad of sessions at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association on various aspects of school reform.

Among the policy strategies examined by researchers:

• Reconstitution of failing schools. School systems must stand up and say "no more" to consistently failing schools, said Jennifer O'Day of Stanford University, but reconstitution is an "iffy" strategy. Her study of this practice in San Francisco found that in the schools that had been "reconstituted" and a new "critical mass" of different teachers assigned, student achievement improved and there was more outreach to parents. However, the student bodies also changed, becoming more selective than in the previous schools, she said. Failing schools must be given a "full realm of support" before radical changes are made, and districts must put better resources at such schools (e.g., more experienced teachers).
  
  

• Charter schools. Standards and accountability are secondary issues for charter schools, according to researchers from the University of Southern California. Studying charter schools in three states, they found that states require little of the charters and that most charter schools did not have the expertise or time to develop standards and accountability methods. Most states just require the schools "to make reasonable progress," but do not specify what that is, they said.
  
  

• Decentralization of urban school systems. A study of six urban districts that have adopted school-site decisionmaking found that only two of the efforts so far have produced higher student achievement. The plans sometimes improved parent/school relationships and certainly changed the situation for principals, said a panel of researchers. However, the central office sought "a limited definition of school autonomy," and superintendents, who generally favored decentralization, often "ran into serious resistance from their central offices." Commenting on the research, Michael Kirst of Stanford University said dencentralization "reads like a death certificate." There was not enough autonomy nor enough accountability at the school level, he said. "I think this era of decentralization is like that of the 1970s," Kirst said. "It will not amount to much. We need more radical changes."
  
  

Similarly, David Cohen of the University of Michigan, reporting on a long-range study of the effect of state policy on changes in classroom instruction, found that teachers who used specific development opportunities based on state frameworks in math reported more significant change in classroom practice and higher student assessment scores than teachers in traditional professional development. "We have to invent structures and roles that enable people to stick to the reforms," he said.