Anthony S Bryk
Biographic Data
| ID | 280965 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Anthony S Bryk |
| GIVEN NAMES | Anthony S |
| FAMILY NAME | Bryk |
| SIGNATURE | BRYK A S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2,746 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 35 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Introduction to Themed Issue
Measuring Educators’ Perceived Benefits of Participation in Educational Improvement Networks
Examining the Validity of Practical Measures of Improvement Network Health and Development
Bringing Scientific-Professional Learning Communities into Practice
The Design of an Information System to Support Network Development
Catalyzing Scientific-Professional Learning Communities
Changing the school system improvement narrative
Districts are struggling to accelerate students’ learning, support their health and wellness, and close the achievement gap. Labeled “worst” in 1987, by 2017 Chicago Public Schools was among the nation’s most improved school systems. Chicago’s story embeds many lessons about system change. Sharon Greenberg and Anthony S. Bryk illustrate how local research evidence helped leaders target a few high-leverage processes and informed their ongoing effo…
Charting Chicago School Reform
Politics as a Lever for Organizational Change
Aera Distinguished Lecture
A chasm is growing between our rapidly rising aspirations for our educational systems and what schools can routinely accomplish. Education needs an improvement paradigm—one that recognizes the complexity of the work of education and the wide variability in outcomes that our systems currently produce. This article sketches out such a paradigm. It joins together the discipline of improvement science with the power of structured networked communitie…
Getting Ideas into Action
Organizing Schools for Improvement
Research on Chicago school improvement indicates that improving elementary schools requires coherent, orchestrated action across five essential supports.
Organizing Schools for Improvement
Alexander Elementary School and Hancock Elementary School began the 1990s as two of the worst schools in Chicago in terms of math and reading achievement. Only two miles apart, the schools are in bordering neighborhoods and appear similar in many ways. Both enrolled nearly 100% minority students from families considered low income.
Hierarchical linear models
Instructional Program Coherence
We present the concept of instructional program coherence and explain why school improvement frameworks that incorporate instructional program coherence are more likely to advance student achievement than multiple, unrelated efforts. We present evidence that Chicago elementary schools with stronger instructional program coherence make higher gains in student achievement. We also share observations on how, in specific schools, principals and exter…
Professional Community in Chicago Elementary Schools
Professional community is receiving markedly increased attention as part of both practitioner and scholarly efforts to promote improvements in instruction and student learning. Interest in this area joins two previously distinct literatures, one dealing with the benefits of communal school organization and another with enhanced teacher professionalism, to formulate a theoretical framework for a school-based professional community. Using data from…
Assessing School Academic Productivity
Response to Rasinski
R asinski's critique of Comparing Instructional Models fo the Literacy Education of High-Risk First Graders (Pinnell, Lyons, DeFord, Bryk, & Seltzer, 1994) highlights dilemmas confronting researchers who conduct large field studies involving complex educational phenomena. It focuses on the results of study, rather than on Reading Recovery (RR) per se. Rasinski acknowledges RR as one of the most promising approaches to corrective instruction avail…
Comparing Instructional Models for the Literacy Education of High-Risk First Graders
Comparing instructional models for the literacy education of high-risk first graders THIS TUDY was designed to examine the effectiveness of Reading Recovery as compared to three other instructional models. Treatments included (a) a treatment modeled on Reading Recovery provided by teachers trained in a shortened program, (b) a one-onone skills practice model, and (c) a group treatment taught by trained Reading Recovery teachers. The lowest achiev…
Measuring Achievement Gains in the Chicago Public Schools
Catholic Schools and the Common Good
Catholic Schools and the Common Good
The authors found that Catholic schools have an independent effect on achievement, especially in reducing disparities between disadvantaged and privileged students. Today’s Catholic school, they show, is informed by a Dewey-like vision of the school as a community committed to democratic education and the common good of all students.
Early vocabulary growth
This study examines the role of exposure to speech in children's early vocabulary growth. It is generally assumed that individual differences in vocabulary depend, in large part, on variations in learning capacity. However, variations in exposure have not been systematically explored. In this study we characterize vocabulary growth rates for each of 22 children by using data obtained at several time points from 14 to 26 months. We find a substant…
The effects of high school organization on dropping out
The Effects of High School Organization on Dropping out
A hierarchical linear model analysis (Raudenbush & Bryk, 1986) is used to investigate directly the effects of structural and normative features of schools on both the probability of dropping out and the strongest behavioral predictor of dropping out, absenteeism. We hypothesized that high levels of internal differentiation within high schools and weak normative environments contribute to the problems of absenteeism and dropping out. Conversely, t…
Hierarchical linear models
Early vocabulary growth
This study examines the role of exposure to speech in children's early vocabulary growth. It is generally assumed that individual differences in vocabulary depend, in large part, on variations in learning capacity. However, variations in exposure have not been systematically explored. In this study we characterize vocabulary growth rates for each of 22 children by using data obtained at several time points from 14 to 26 months. We find a substant…
Application of hierarchical linear models to assessing change
Developments over the past 10 years in the statistical theory of hierarchical linear models (HLMs) now enable an integrated approach for (a) studying the structure of individual growth and estimating important statistical and psychometric properties of collections of growth trajectories; (b) discovering correlates of change factors that influence the rate at which individuals develop; and (c) testing hypotheses about the effects of on or more exp…
A Hierarchical Model for Studying School Effects
When researchers investigate how school policies, practices, or climates affect student outcomes, they use multilevel, hierarchical data. Though methodologists have consistently warned of the formidable inferential problems such data pose for traditional statistical methods, no comprehensive alternative analytic strategy has been available. This paper presents a general statistical methodology for such hierarchically structured data and illustrat…
Organizing Schools for Improvement
Alexander Elementary School and Hancock Elementary School began the 1990s as two of the worst schools in Chicago in terms of math and reading achievement. Only two miles apart, the schools are in bordering neighborhoods and appear similar in many ways. Both enrolled nearly 100% minority students from families considered low income.
A Multilevel Model of the Social Distribution of High School Achievement
The study reported here identified some characteristics of secondary schools that encourage a high level of achievement and promote an equitable distribution of achievement across the diverse social class, racial/ethnic, and academic backgrounds of students. The data consisted of a subsample of 10,187 students in 160 high schools from High School and Beyond. Hierarchical linear modeling techniques were used to investigate the effect of the normat…
The Effects of High School Organization on Dropping out
A hierarchical linear model analysis (Raudenbush & Bryk, 1986) is used to investigate directly the effects of structural and normative features of schools on both the probability of dropping out and the strongest behavioral predictor of dropping out, absenteeism. We hypothesized that high levels of internal differentiation within high schools and weak normative environments contribute to the problems of absenteeism and dropping out. Conversely, t…
Curriculum Tracking as Mediating the Social Distribution of High School Achievement
The study reported here investigated the social distribution of mathematics achievement in a random sample of students and high schools drawn from the base year and first followup of High School and Beyond. It focused on the academic experiences of these students, particularly on the differences in curriculum tracking and the enrollment in academic courses in Catholic and public schools. We found that students are more likely to be assigned to th…
Aera Distinguished Lecture
A chasm is growing between our rapidly rising aspirations for our educational systems and what schools can routinely accomplish. Education needs an improvement paradigm—one that recognizes the complexity of the work of education and the wide variability in outcomes that our systems currently produce. This article sketches out such a paradigm. It joins together the discipline of improvement science with the power of structured networked communitie…
Comparing Instructional Models for the Literacy Education of High-Risk First Graders
Comparing instructional models for the literacy education of high-risk first graders THIS TUDY was designed to examine the effectiveness of Reading Recovery as compared to three other instructional models. Treatments included (a) a treatment modeled on Reading Recovery provided by teachers trained in a shortened program, (b) a one-onone skills practice model, and (c) a group treatment taught by trained Reading Recovery teachers. The lowest achiev…
Toward a More Appropriate Conceptualization of Research on School Effects
Two aspects of educational research--that children's learning is typically the object of inquiry and that this learning usually occurs in organizational settings of classrooms and schools--locate educational research at the nexus of two of the most troublesome and persistent methodological problems in the social sciences: the measurement of change and the "unit-of-analysis" problems. Over the past several years, a satisfactory solution to these p…
Catalyzing Scientific-Professional Learning Communities
Musings on the Moral Life of Schools
Use of the nonequivalent control group design when subjects are growing
Examining the Validity of Practical Measures of Improvement Network Health and Development
Measuring Achievement Gains in the Chicago Public Schools
Measuring Educators’ Perceived Benefits of Participation in Educational Improvement Networks
Bringing Scientific-Professional Learning Communities into Practice
The Design of an Information System to Support Network Development
Introduction to Themed Issue
Assessing School Academic Productivity
Response to Rasinski
R asinski's critique of Comparing Instructional Models fo the Literacy Education of High-Risk First Graders (Pinnell, Lyons, DeFord, Bryk, & Seltzer, 1994) highlights dilemmas confronting researchers who conduct large field studies involving complex educational phenomena. It focuses on the results of study, rather than on Reading Recovery (RR) per se. Rasinski acknowledges RR as one of the most promising approaches to corrective instruction avail…
Catholic Schools and the Common Good
Use of the nonequivalent control group design when subjects are growing
Effects of single-sex secondary schools on student achievement and attitudes.
A movement away from single-sex education occurred in the 1960s and 1970s, just as research was beginning to document positive effects of women's colleges. There has been very little investigation of single-sex education at the secondary level, however. In this study, we compared the effects of sing
A Hierarchical Model for Studying School Effects
When researchers investigate how school policies, practices, or climates affect student outcomes, they use multilevel, hierarchical data. Though methodologists have consistently warned of the formidable inferential problems such data pose for traditional statistical methods, no comprehensive alternative analytic strategy has been available. This paper presents a general statistical methodology for such hierarchically structured data and illustrat…
Application of hierarchical linear models to assessing change
Developments over the past 10 years in the statistical theory of hierarchical linear models (HLMs) now enable an integrated approach for (a) studying the structure of individual growth and estimating important statistical and psychometric properties of collections of growth trajectories; (b) discovering correlates of change factors that influence the rate at which individuals develop; and (c) testing hypotheses about the effects of on or more exp…
Heterogeneity of variance in experimental studies
The presence of heterogeneity of variance across groups indicates that the standard statistical model for treatment effects no longer applies. Specifically, the assumption that treatments add a constant to each subject's development fails. An alternative model is required to represent how treatment effects are distributed across individuals. We develop in this article a simple statistical model to demonstrate the link between heterogeneity of var…
Musings on the Moral Life of Schools
Toward a More Appropriate Conceptualization of Research on School Effects
Two aspects of educational research--that children's learning is typically the object of inquiry and that this learning usually occurs in organizational settings of classrooms and schools--locate educational research at the nexus of two of the most troublesome and persistent methodological problems in the social sciences: the measurement of change and the "unit-of-analysis" problems. Over the past several years, a satisfactory solution to these p…
Heterogeneity of variance in experimental studies
Curriculum Tracking as Mediating the Social Distribution of High School Achievement
The study reported here investigated the social distribution of mathematics achievement in a random sample of students and high schools drawn from the base year and first followup of High School and Beyond. It focused on the academic experiences of these students, particularly on the differences in curriculum tracking and the enrollment in academic courses in Catholic and public schools. We found that students are more likely to be assigned to th…
The effects of high school organization on dropping out
The Effects of High School Organization on Dropping out
A hierarchical linear model analysis (Raudenbush & Bryk, 1986) is used to investigate directly the effects of structural and normative features of schools on both the probability of dropping out and the strongest behavioral predictor of dropping out, absenteeism. We hypothesized that high levels of internal differentiation within high schools and weak normative environments contribute to the problems of absenteeism and dropping out. Conversely, t…
A Multilevel Model of the Social Distribution of High School Achievement
The study reported here identified some characteristics of secondary schools that encourage a high level of achievement and promote an equitable distribution of achievement across the diverse social class, racial/ethnic, and academic backgrounds of students. The data consisted of a subsample of 10,187 students in 160 high schools from High School and Beyond. Hierarchical linear modeling techniques were used to investigate the effect of the normat…
Early vocabulary growth
This study examines the role of exposure to speech in children's early vocabulary growth. It is generally assumed that individual differences in vocabulary depend, in large part, on variations in learning capacity. However, variations in exposure have not been systematically explored. In this study we characterize vocabulary growth rates for each of 22 children by using data obtained at several time points from 14 to 26 months. We find a substant…
Catholic Schools and the Common Good
The authors found that Catholic schools have an independent effect on achievement, especially in reducing disparities between disadvantaged and privileged students. Today’s Catholic school, they show, is informed by a Dewey-like vision of the school as a community committed to democratic education and the common good of all students.
Comparing Instructional Models for the Literacy Education of High-Risk First Graders
Comparing instructional models for the literacy education of high-risk first graders THIS TUDY was designed to examine the effectiveness of Reading Recovery as compared to three other instructional models. Treatments included (a) a treatment modeled on Reading Recovery provided by teachers trained in a shortened program, (b) a one-onone skills practice model, and (c) a group treatment taught by trained Reading Recovery teachers. The lowest achiev…
Measuring Achievement Gains in the Chicago Public Schools
Catholic Schools and the Common Good
Response to Rasinski
R asinski's critique of Comparing Instructional Models fo the Literacy Education of High-Risk First Graders (Pinnell, Lyons, DeFord, Bryk, & Seltzer, 1994) highlights dilemmas confronting researchers who conduct large field studies involving complex educational phenomena. It focuses on the results of study, rather than on Reading Recovery (RR) per se. Rasinski acknowledges RR as one of the most promising approaches to corrective instruction avail…
Assessing School Academic Productivity
Professional Community in Chicago Elementary Schools
Professional community is receiving markedly increased attention as part of both practitioner and scholarly efforts to promote improvements in instruction and student learning. Interest in this area joins two previously distinct literatures, one dealing with the benefits of communal school organization and another with enhanced teacher professionalism, to formulate a theoretical framework for a school-based professional community. Using data from…
Instructional Program Coherence
We present the concept of instructional program coherence and explain why school improvement frameworks that incorporate instructional program coherence are more likely to advance student achievement than multiple, unrelated efforts. We present evidence that Chicago elementary schools with stronger instructional program coherence make higher gains in student achievement. We also share observations on how, in specific schools, principals and exter…
Hierarchical linear models
Organizing Schools for Improvement
Alexander Elementary School and Hancock Elementary School began the 1990s as two of the worst schools in Chicago in terms of math and reading achievement. Only two miles apart, the schools are in bordering neighborhoods and appear similar in many ways. Both enrolled nearly 100% minority students from families considered low income.
Organizing Schools for Improvement
Research on Chicago school improvement indicates that improving elementary schools requires coherent, orchestrated action across five essential supports.
Getting Ideas into Action
Psychology (29 works) · Mathematics education (20 works) · Pedagogy (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Educational Assessment and Improvement (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · School Choice and Performance (10 works) · Academic achievement (7 works) · Evaluation and Performance Assessment (7 works)