Chief Academic Officer Terry Edwards talks about how Everett Public Schools has dramatically improved graduation rates over the past seven years.
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Seven years ago, Washington’s Everett School District awoke to a harsh reality. A change in how the state calculated graduation rates revealed that only 53% of the district’s students graduated on-time. Officials were shocked and embarrassed. They sprang into action.
Today, Everett’s on-time graduation rate is just under 84%. Its extended graduation rate is just over 90%. And the improvement has occurred across the board, in all ethnic groups and special populations.
To what do they credit their success? Getting a group of committed adults focused on the problem and meeting regularly to try to solve it. And they also moved from numbers to names—getting personal about who is not on track to graduate and what they can do about it. Everett’s Chief Academic Officer Terry Edwards recently told us more.
Public School Insights: Your district has recently gotten some press because of its improved graduation rates. Could you tell me a bit about the success you have had?
Edwards: It is something that I call “An overnight wonder that took seven years to get here.”
About seven years ago, in 2003-2004, the state of Washington changed how it calculated graduation rates. It moved from looking at the number of graduates in the senior class plus those who dropped out over the past four years to a cohort model, the on-time model that the federal government has adopted. This model looks at the number of kids who enter in ninth grade and the number who graduate four years later.
When we converted to that model, our district’s graduation rate was 53%. That was very hard for Everett to accept, because we had always believed that we were a very good school district and doing a good job. 53% was shocking and embarrassing. And it did not seem to follow what we perceived as reality. We did not see hundreds of children standing around on street corners in ...
It is no secret that districts are struggling in the current economic climate. They are looking to cut costs every way they can.
One area worth exploring in cost-cutting debates is energy. With energy costs rising—to say nothing of the environmental impact it is becoming more and more clear that our current sources of energy can have—districts need to take a closer look at how they are using energy.
Louisiana’s St. Tammany Parish Public Schools did. And as a result, this growing district, which currently has 72 facilities and serves about 36,000 students, has saved about six million dollars in utility costs over the past four and a half years. They’ve put that money back into schools, providing resources to help the district maintain its reputation as one of the best in the state. And they’ve received national and state recognition for their work.
How did they do it? A comprehensive energy management program. And when we say comprehensive, we mean COMPREHENSIVE. The program includes everything from customized reports for principals on their school’s energy performance (generated by the district’s two energy management tracking systems) to an energy awareness curriculum correlated to the state’s grade-level expectations. Automated lighting and temperature controls to daily reminders of energy saving behaviors in the form of posters, stickers and morning announcements. And much, much more.
Of course, in a time of fiscal crisis, districts may not be able to afford the upfront costs of some of the software and automation that St. Tammany now has. But it is important to note that St. Tammany started this program right after Hurricane Katrina, at a time when they were unable to do more than tell principals to turn off the lights and set thermostats to the lowest possible setting in the winter and the highest in the summer. But those behaviors alone saved the district 7% in energy costs.
We recently spoke to the district’s supervisor of administration, John Swang. He told us more about the program and its results. Below are some highlights of our conversation. Or read the full edited transcript.
At the Beginning: Runaway Energy Costs
Public School Insights: Why did St. Tammany Parish decide to start a comprehensive energy management program?
Swang: About four and a half years ago, our energy bills were skyrocketing. At one point, the cost of energy doubled in three years. We were sending a lot of our resources to the utility companies. It was no different than what the rest of the country was experiencing—it was a kind of runaway situation. And still, to a large extent, the cost of energy is increasing and probably will continue to do so.
But at that point the St. Tammany Parish School Board began talking about getting control of ...
An innovative program out of Boston College is making a big difference for children in 11 Boston elementary schools. City Connects (CCNX) works with the schools to link each child to a "tailored set of intervention, prevention and enrichment services located in the community."
Its efforts have gone a good distance towards closing achievement gaps between the low-income children in the program and children who meet state averages. CCNX's results offer powerful support for what should be common sense: When we address the challenges poor students face both within and beyond schools, they flourish.
A rigorous study (PDF) of the program's outcomes tells a pretty stunning story:
- The beneficial impact of BCNX [the former name of CCNX] on student growth in academic achievement (across grades 1 to 5) was, on average, approximately three times the harmful impact of poverty.
- By the end of grade 5, achievement differences between BCNX and comparison students indicated that the BCNX intervention moves students at the 50th percentile up to or near the 75th percentile, and the students at the 25th percentile up to or near the 50th.
- For multiple outcomes, the treatment effects were largest for students at greatest risk for academic failure. For example, English language learners experienced the largest treatment benefits on literacy outcomes, by third grade demonstrating similar report card scores to those proficient in English in comparison schools. In fact,as a result of BCNX, there was no longer an achievement gap between these students.
- After grade 5, the lasting positive effects ofthe BCNX intervention can be seen in middle-school MCAS scores. The size ofthe positive effect of BCNX ranged from approximately 50% to 130% as large as the negative effects of poverty on these scores.1
We recently caught up with two of the program's leaders: Dr. Mary Walsh, its Executive Director, and Patrice DiNatale, its Director of Practice.
Public School Insights: What is City Connects?
Walsh: City Connects is a systemic, evidence-based approach to school-based student support. It involves assessing, in conversation with teachers and other school staff, each child in the school at the beginning of the school year and then developing a tailored student support plan based on that student's strengths and needs in four areas: academic, social emotional/behavioral, health and family.
That support plan involves accessing services, supports, resources and enrichment for the child, both school-based resources as well as, and importantly, community resources. A trained professional with a Master’s degree—either ...
[Editor's note: This is the second in a series of three posts on school-based health centers. Yesterday we briefly reviewed evidence supporting the use of these clinics. Today, Linda Gann talks about how her district founded two such centers. Soon Jennifer Danielson will take us through a day in the life of a nurse practitioner and tell us how her school-based health center has impacted kids.]
School-based health clinics have shown a great deal of promise in improving health outcomes for students, decreasing Medicaid costs at a time when every penny counts and even in potentially raising academic outcomes for low-income students. But yet there are only about 2,000 school-based health clinics (SBHCs) in the United States. Why don’t more districts take this approach? Does it seem too expensive? Too risky? Too separate from the district’s academic mission?
We recently spoke to Linda Gann, Communications and Special Project Coordinator in Colorado’s Montrose County School District RE-1J, to learn more about how her district came to embrace SBHCs. She also told us about her experience planning and implementing the district’s first school-based health clinic three years ago and its second a few months ago. Some keys to their success? The clinics get all their funding outside the general fund. They keep the community engaged in and informed about these efforts. And they consider not only the physical but also the mental health needs of students.
SBHCs alone will not close the achievement gap. But in Montrose, they are part of a broad strategy to address the needs of its growing Hispanic community. And that strategy appears to be working—for example, the district has a 20% higher graduation rate for Hispanic students than the state does.
Here's the story as Gann told it to us in a recent phone conversation.
About Montrose County School District RE-1J
I think from a researcher’s standpoint our district is almost a perfect universe, as far as data analysis goes. We are located in west central Colorado. We are five hours away from Denver. We are about 1,100 square miles, with two distinct communities. Montrose is about 30,000 people. Olathe is probably about 8,000 people. So we are not very large. And we are separated from our neighboring districts by open space, so it is really easy to tell where our school district stops and another one starts.
In our district, we have 6,500 students. District-wide, 54% receive a free or reduced price lunch. But on the south end of our district, which is close to the ski resort of Telluride, the houses are larger, and there are more families considered upper middle class. The free and reduced price lunch population at the elementary school in that area is about 11%. On the north end of our district, the free and reduced price lunch population is 80%. ...
The US economy is improving overall, but our schools will be among the last to share in the wealth. Deep and persistent economic troubles can be a deadweight on vital reforms.
A new survey of superintendents released by AASA reveals the depth of the problem. School leaders report that things were bad last year and worse this year. And they're likely to be even worse next year.
A full 80 percent expect cuts in state and local revenues before next year, and many expect those cuts to be more severe than they were last year.
The AASA report's title is as clever as it is grim: "A Cliff Hanger: How America’s Public Schools Continue to Feel the Impact of the Economic Downturn." The cliff, of course, is the abrupt drop in funding districts will face when stimulus funds run dry. And lest people think district cups have been running over with stimulus dollars, almost nine in ten superintendents "reported that [those] dollars did not represent a funding increase."
This is an important point, because it challenges the notion that districts had gobs of new money to support new reforms. System leaders were clearly grateful for ...
It seems we're in for another tiresome round of arguments that we have to fire school district staff to focus our dollars in the Classroom. Del Stover recently came across these words from a Maryland State Senator:
We don’t want to cut public education, so we’re going to have to go to superintendents of schools and say: "Listen, you’ve got to find us some administrators, some bureaucrats, some public relations people that we can cut, because we’re not going to furlough teachers."
Stover praises the Senator for wanting to save teachers' jobs, but he bridles at the suggestion that central offices are "bloated, stuffed by people who don't do essential work."
After all, someone has to write those paychecks. Someone has to make sure the schools are compliant with the myriad laws and ...
Many school reformers have eagerly adopted the language of the business world, and that makes a lot of people nervous. I'm not worried by the business speak per se. I'm more concerned about what happens when we draw the wrong lessons from business.
The School Administrator has a wonderful set of articles this month on a promising reform strategy that first came from the business world: the balanced scorecard. They make for very good reading, because they take us far beyond the standard story about reforms inspired by business. You can pretty much sum up that story in four short sentences: Focus on outcomes. Be innovative. Give people choices. Get the incentives right.
The balanced scorecard goes a good deal farther. It looks at process, a word that gets precious little respect these days. Here's how Atlanta superintendent Beverly Hall describes it in The School Administrator's feature article:
All school systems focus on student achievement — these are the critical outcomes that we track as educators. But to get to those outcomes, you must measure and evaluate everything we do as a district. The balanced scorecard is our way to look across all ...
Recent debates about charter schools are shedding more heat than light. There's enough evidence out there now to keep both the critics and the boosters busy. But as most people know by now, arguments over whether charters are "good" or "bad" are a waste of time. The real question is whether we can create enough of the good ones to make a real dent in student achievement. And that's not at all clear.
Charter boosters got some more wind in their sails after Stanford's CREDO released a study of New York City charters. Their findings: students at charter schools make more academic progress than students at traditional public schools do. This study echoed earlier findings by another Stanford researcher, Carolyn Hoxby. The United Federation of Teachers countered that charters enroll fewer special education students and English language learners. (The City Education Department's data seem to bear this out.) Charter supporters responded in ...
We often hear that traditional public schools should learn from the successes of the best charter schools. That's true. But they have at least as much to learn from their struggles.
Here are some of the seldom acknowledged lessons we should learn from great charter schools:
You can't just do away with your central office. What a lovely, romantic idea: Thousands of schools homesteading on their own, free from those meddling, fat-cat administrators. Yet reality looks a bit different. Charter Management Organizations (CMOs) have had to expand their central offices as they create more schools. If you want to "scale up" a good model, you'll need something that looks like, well, a district.
The hard stuff costs lots of money. Charters were supposed to be more efficient, and therefore less expensive, than regular public schools. It turns out that many of the best ones have to rely on extra philanthropic dollars to serve their students well. Even when you account for the fact that some get less less from the government, they cost more.
Teachers should not have to be ascetics. Sure, you can run a few hundred schools that depend on teachers who are willing to forego families, sleep and sanity for the sake of their students--until, of course, they leave. But tens of thousands?
Schools have to do more to motivate children and families. The students who leave demanding charter schools don't just disappear. They go to less challenging schools. As long as first-rate charter schools can use their high ...
Long Before the Aldine Independent School District in Texas won the coveted Broad Prize for Urban Education, it was a model for school district reform. We at LFA wrote about Aldine's success back in 2003.
Since that time, Aldine has kept up its steady progress. The district has not lurched from one reform strategy to another. It has not hired on a succession of superintendent saviors. It has made progress without the knock-down, drag-out fights that the media can't resist.
Instead, Aldine has stuck with strategies it formed over ten years ago and trusted its own veteran staff to lead the hard work of school improvement. Superintendent Wanda Bamberg recently told me the story of her district's success.
Listen to our conversation on the Public School Insights podcast (~17:08)
Public School Insights: Back in 2003, we discussed Aldine’s focus on curriculum, the work you were doing to make sure you use data very well and staff development. There were a lot of other pieces to the puzzle, of course, but those were three of the big ones we noted. Do you have a sense that you are still carrying on in the same tradition now, or has there been a lot of change?
Bamberg: There really hasn't been a lot of change. I think that we have been following some of the same instructional plans that we started even before 2003. We started a lot of these things in the late 1990s.
One of the things that is different is that the system we have in place for capturing the scope and sequence [of the content we teach in our classrooms], our curriculum and lesson plans, and of course our assessment data is more sophisticated now than it used to be. Our system now has all three components together so that we are able to look at the scope and sequence, put in the [accompanying] lesson plans and then come back look at the data in the same system. So the difference might be that we have tried to become even more tightly aligned and tried to refine our processes. But there has been no major change in the ...
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