Pat Ryan: Schools that close the achievement gap do things differently, and there are three conventional wisdoms they do not subscribe to. They realize they’re actually wrong. There are three counter-intuitive truths that they understand, internalize and drive their success.

So the first conventional wisdom is that the thing that matters most is to have a highly-skilled teacher.

Now, that’s true, you want a highly-skilled teacher. There’s no question about it. But, in practice, great schools are built by teams. That team that’s highly aligned, that’s focused, that has a passionate commitment to working together to achieve it, all the great schools have that. If we don’t have alignment on how we want to run the school, what are the philosophies and beliefs and practices that we have, then it won’t work. It’s more than just great teaching that matters. It’s this highly-aligned team, committed, passionate, behind the right plan, executing it well.

The best schools spend more time up front on core academics. You may have envisioned to have the greatest writing program in the world, but if your kids don’t have basic literacy skills you can’t move on to the next level. You have to build one level at a time, starting with the foundation. That allows you to focus. In the end, you want to be great across the board, but that’s not how greatness is created. You need that hyper focus. You need to understand the sequence of how things work and how to build it. If you do that, then it’s achievable.

The third conventional wisdom is we’re very focused on inputs. We want to see good teaching. We want to see good implementation. We want to see that schools are using best practices. It turns out that the focus on inputs fails to put us in a position to learn. The great schools ask the question, is it working? Is our plan, the way we’re teaching, what we’re teaching, how we’re teaching, is it working?

They’re sitting down together going, “Did it work?” If not, hey, what are we going to do different next month. Oh, and by the way, how do we help the kids to make sure nobody gets left behind. That continuous improvement cycle is the secret to elite performance in anything. If you look to get better, you can create great things where kids can achieve whatever they’re capable of.