High Reliability Schools

The Marzano High Reliability Schools (HRS) framework serves as a strategic planning framework to help schools focus on specific, research-based conditions for continuous school improvement.

Many schools are already implementing a wide range of effective initiatives, and many educators are already practicing research-based strategies. The HRS framework does not replace professional learning communities, the Art and Science of Teaching framework, teacher evaluation and development, sound curriculum (including those aligned with the Common Core State Standards), vocabulary instruction, instruction in critical thinking and reasoning skills, formative assessment, standards-based grading and reporting systems, or student mastery systems.

Instead, this framework shows how best practices work together and provides indicators to empower districts and schools to measure their progress on attaining five increasing levels of reliability.

LEVEL01

Safe and Collaborative Culture

Level 1 addresses the day-to-day operation of a school: What are the rules? How do we follow them? What will happen when the rules are not followed? How do we work together to make the school run optimally?

LEVEL02

Effective Teaching in Every Classroom

Level 2 addresses the most commonly cited characteristic of effective schools: high-quality instruction in every classroom.

LEVEL03

Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum

Guaranteed means that the same curriculum is taught by all teachers, so that all students have an equal opportunity to learn it. Viable means that the amount of content in the curriculum is appropriate to the amount of time teachers have available to teach it.

LEVEL04

Standards-Referenced Reporting

Level 4 moves into a more rarefied level of school reform, because it involves reporting individual students’ progress on specific standards. At any point in time, the leaders of a level 4 school can identify individual students’ strengths and weaknesses relative to specific topics in each subject area.

LEVEL05

Competency-Based Education

Level 5 schools exist in the most rarified group of all—one in which students move to the next level of content as soon as they demonstrate competence at the previous level. Matriculation, then, is not based on the amount of time a student spends in a given course, but rather on his or her demonstrated mastery of content.