Chief Academic Officer Terry Edwards talks about how Everett Public Schools has dramatically improved graduation rates over the past seven years.
Professional Collaboration
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About two weeks ago, we posted a conversation with two leaders from Boston's City Connects (CCNX) program, which is working with 11 schools to link each child to a "tailored set of intervention, prevention and enrichment services in the community." The approach has helped raise grades and test scores for the mostly low income children in these schools.
We recently spoke with people in two CCNX schools. Traci Walker Griffith is principal at the Eliot K-8 School, and Kathleen Carlisle is the CCNX site coordinator at the Mission Hill School. Each has an insider's view of this remarkable program at work.
Public School Insights: How has City Connects worked in your school? What changes have been made since it began?
Traci Walker Griffith: A number of changes have occurred at the Eliot School. I came in as principal in March of 2007. In May of 2007 the school was identified as one that would take on City Connects.
We were fortunate because the mission and vision of the Eliot School aligned with City Connects in that we are serving the whole child--academically, socially, emotionally. So we have worked amazingly well together in identifying students’ academic and social/emotional needs. And as we began the program I found that the structures and systems that it offers—whole class review, individual student review, and providing a school site coordinator to maintain and sustain partnerships—really aligned with what we wanted to start at the Eliot School at the time.
Kathleen Carlisle: I would echo many of the things that Traci just said. The whole child philosophy especially stands out in my mind—that is a City Connects and also a Mission Hill philosophy. And I think that the presence of City Connects in Mission Hill has especially impacted the identification of student needs and ways to meet those needs, be they social/emotional, academic, health or family. I think there has been greater connection between supports and needs, and also consistent follow-up.
Public School Insights: Do you have a sense of the results of the City Connects work in your respective schools?
Traci Walker Griffith: When I came on at the Eliot, a school identified as underperforming and in correction, all of the pieces we needed to put in place to increase student achievement were aligned with what City Connects was working on: identifying services and enrichment opportunities for students both inside and outside the school; working with community agencies that in the past had difficulty working ...
These days, we hear a great deal about problems with current teacher evaluation systems. The received wisdom seems to be that teachers will always close ranks and protect their worst colleagues. Why else cling to systems that rate almost every teacher as top notch?
A new study out of Chicago offers a very different view of what teachers want. When teachers evaluate each other, it turns out, they're a good deal more discerning than the district has been. In a pilot study of 44 Chicago schools, "37 percent of teachers received one of the two highest ratings, compared to 91 percent under the district’s existing system," reports Catalyst Chicago.
In fact, teachers turned out to be more demanding than principals.
They were less likely than principals to give a “distinguished” rating—the highest—on instruction, a finding that bolsters the view that teachers themselves are the toughest judge when it comes ...
One step forward and two steps back. If you're a school leader who has made real progress against tough odds in the past few years, then brace yourself for those two steps back. Budget cuts and layoffs may threaten much of what you've done. And to add insult to injury, some people will read you sermons on efficiency as you dismantle much of what you and your staff have worked for.
A piece in today's San Francisco Chronicle tells the heart-breaking story of a Blue Ribbon school that has to undo many of its reforms as it cuts staff. "Stability drove the success of Dold's school," authors W. Norton Grubb and Lynda Tredway write:
"I have an incredible staff," Dold says. "My teachers don't leave, unless they retire or move." On her watch, E.R. Taylor Elementary became a National Blue Ribbon School, one of just 25 in California, and one of 300 in the United States. How? Dold led her entire faculty to collaborate to catch struggling readers early. Three reading-recovery specialists ran 120 intense, daily half-hour lessons for every struggling first-grade reader.
"Six years ago," Dold recalls, "just 17 percent of our Latino students were proficient readers. Now 50 percent are."
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Their reward for such inspiring results? The last bilingual paraprofessional? Gone. After-school staff? Cut. A popular upper-grade teacher with a pink slip says, "I can't wait any longer. I need to pay my mortgage." This year's cuts could top the past nine.
Some commentators have portrayed budget cuts as a threat to the status quo rather than a threat to reform. But that sort of thinking betrays a narrow conception of reform. If reform is purely structural--pay teachers differently, hire and fire ...
It was in a pedagogy seminar years ago that I learned one of the most important lessons I have ever learned about what it takes to motivate people: Don't assume the worst in them. That lesson seems lost on far too many policy makers and pundits.
Oddly enough, it was also lost on the person leading the seminar. (We'll call him Nathan.) He assumed the worst in me. From the start, he signaled to my peers that I was a difficult student. It began on the first day, when I leaned far back in my chair to give him a clear view of my neighbor, who was asking him a question.
"Stop!" he cried, cutting her off in mid-sentence. "Notice that Claus is slouching in his chair, playing the confident man. Emily [who was across the table from me] is sitting upright, close to the table, listening carefully. Your students' body language can tell you a lot about their attitude."
When I protested that he had misread my cues, he used my protest as more evidence that I was a problem student.
I was dumbstruck. I was an adult among adults. What's more, I wasn't used to my new role. In school, I had always been the good child. I had been meek. I used to come home from school with facial muscles sore from the strain of wearing a compliant, attentive face all day. I would drive my more rebellious older brother to distraction with my constant fears that I could get into trouble somehow and ...
Kathleen Parker could have been writing about school reform when she penned the following lines: "What some may see as cooperation is viewed by true believers as weakness. Any attempt to compromise is viewed as surrendering principle."
Her target is tea party members. Many of them are ganging up on GOP policy makers who made the tough decision to vote for bank bailouts when our financial system was on the verge of collapse. But cooperation has become a dirty word in school reform, too. That has to change.
Collaboration has become particularly déclassé since Arne Duncan cited it as a reason for some states' success in the Race to the Top. Some bloggers assume that buy-in from unions and other groups on the front lines of any big change ...
Back in 2005, Idaho’s Sacajawea Elementary School was struggling. The school had had four principals in four years, had never made Adequate Yearly Progress and lacked direction. But that changed with the arrival of Greg Alexander.
Now in his fourth full year as principal, Alexander presides over an award-winning school. After making AYP the last two years and seeing tremendous growth in its Limited English Proficient students' reading scores in particular, Sacajawea was named one of only three Distinguished Schools in Idaho for 2009. What are the keys to its success? A focus on recruiting and retaining excellent teachers, a consistent discipline strategy, a strong reading program and a host of other efforts designed to meet students’ individual needs. Principal Alexander recently told us more.
Public School Insights: How would you describe Sacajawea Elementary?
Alexander: Sacajawea Elementary is located in Caldwell, Idaho, a suburb of the capital city of Boise, just a good 20 minutes away. I actually live in Boise and commute to this community. We have a neat facility. We are up on a hill, overlooking what is called the Treasure Valley. There is a story about a young boy sitting on the edge of a cliff off beyond our school, looking over the valley as the wagon trains came through. The sagebrush was so high that you could only see their canopies. And we look up at the Cascade Mountains. It is just a really beautiful campus.
On this beautiful campus we serve 500 students from pre-K through fifth grade. We are 60% Hispanic and 23% ELL, or LEP [Limited English Proficient], students. We are about 36% Caucasian students, and then just a few percentage of a variety of other students. We have 7% that have special education needs, and we are 90% free and ...
When Melissa Glee-Woodard became principal of Maryland’s Lewisdale Elementary School four years ago, it was struggling. The school was in the dreaded “school improvement” process because of the performance of multiple subgroups of students, and it needed change.
Change is what it got. But not the dramatic “fire-all-teachers” change that has been making the papers. Rather, Glee-Woodard inspired teachers, parents and students with a new vision. The staff began focusing on student data in a meaningful way. Targeted professional development addressed areas of weakness in the instructional program. And new summer programs ensured that students kept their academic success going even when school was not technically in session.
As a result, Lewisdale has made AYP every year Glee-Woodard has been principal. The National Association of Elementary School Principals recently honored her for her transformational leadership.
She joined us for a conversation about the school and its journey.
Public School Insights: How would you describe Lewisdale?
Glee-Woodard: Lewisdale Elementary School is located in an urban setting in Prince George's County, Maryland. We are in the backyard of the University of Maryland, College Park. It is a working-class neighborhood. 80% of our students are Hispanic. 17% are African-American.
All of our students walk to school each and every day, and we are a neighborhood school. Our parents are very actively involved. Anytime that you are outside in the morning, you will see a lot of parents either walking their children to school or dropping their children off in cars.
Lewisdale is also a Title I school. 84% of our students qualify for free or reduced meals. And 54% of our students speak English as their second language. So that gives you a general idea of ...
A Conversation with Stephanie Hirsh and René Islas of the National Staff Development Council
As a national debate swirls around how to hire or fire teachers, we hear precious little about how best to support teachers in the classroom. If you ask Stephanie Hirsh, though, investments in the current teacher corps are among the most important investments we can make. It's just that we have to make those investments more wisely than we ever have.
We recently spoke with Hirsh, who is executive director of the National Staff Development Council (NSDC), and René Islas, her federal policy advisor. Schools don't have much to show for the billions of dollars the feds have spent on professional development (PD) over the past eight years, they told us. But 
unlike critics who would all but de-fund PD, they argue for much better use of PD dollars.
Hirsh and Islas believe that a "school-wide, team-based approach" to professional learning, an approach outlined in NSDC's Standards for Staff Development, will pay big dividends. And they believe that federal law can foster that approach in schools across the country.
Improving Our Investments
Public School Insights: Title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) already includes money for professional development. Why do you think we need something different?
Stephanie Hirsh: The federal government is committed to improving teaching quality, and the single most powerful way to do that is through professional learning. We believe that the federal government has a responsibility to take a position on what effective professional learning is and how it wants to spend its dollars to support it.
The money that has been allocated for professional development over the last several years has not resulted in any significant overall improvement in teacher practice or student learning. New evidence gives us better information on the kinds of professional development that improve practice. So if we can focus the resources we have at the federal level toward more effective PD we can achieve better results.
In addition, PD as included in previous ESEA authorizations has promoted a fragmented, individualized approach to professional learning. The PD that we are advocating promotes a ...
Principal Stephanie Smith of Seaford Middle School has seen the highs and lows of school reform. She has seen her school shake off the stigma it bore as a school "in need of improvement." (Delaware named her its 2008 Principal of the Year for her role in that school's remarkable transformation.) She has seen the school sustain its students' performance despite the fact that many more now live in poverty than did just a few years ago. She has even seen the school begin to stem the tide of its highest-performing students into a neighboring charter school.
But now she worries that the school might not be able to keep clearing the bar that No Child Left Behind sets higher every year. And she faces the prospect of slipping back into "needs improvement" status less than a decade after her school emerged from it.
We recently spoke with Smith, who told us the remarkable story of her school's triumphs and struggles in the era of No Child Left Behind.
Public School Insights: What kind of a school is Seaford Middle School?
Smith: It is a grade six through eight middle school. We are the only middle school in our school system. We have four feeder elementary schools and we feed into one high school. We have about 750 students.
Seaford is a demographically diverse school. We really don’t have a majority population anymore—we run about 40% African-American and Caucasian populations, with a Hispanic population as well. We are 71% free and reduced price lunch. That number has gone up drastically, probably since you last got information on our school. We are about 21% special ed.
Public School Insights: What do you think prompted the rise in free and reduced price lunch numbers?
Smith: I think just the status of the economy. Our community—the city of Seaford and its outlying areas—has been given the title of the poorest community in ...
North Carolina’s Laurel Hill Elementary School is a model school. Its rural, diverse and high-poverty student population consistently exceeds state targets on standardized test scores, and the school has made AYP each year since 2003. It has also been recognized for its great working conditions.
But getting there wasn’t easy. In the early 2000s, one challenge stood out: The school failed to make AYP because of the performance of its students with disabilities (known in North Carolina as its “exceptional children”). Rather than throw up their hands at the daunting task of educating special education students, staff at Laurel Hill made lemonade out of lemons. They took the opportunity to study their school and its structure, revise its schedule and move to full inclusion. The result? A Blue Ribbon school that can confidently say it is meeting the needs of all its children. Principal Cindy Goodman recently told us about the school and its journey.
Public School Insights: How would you describe Laurel Hill Elementary?
Goodman: Laurel Hill is a pre-K through fifth grade community school. We have about 500 students and are located in an extremely rural community. We have a very nice facility, which is about 11 years old.
We have an outstanding staff that holds our children to very high standards for behavior, for academics…just high standards in general.
Public School Insights: What kind of population does the school serve?
Goodman: Our community, the little town of Laurel Hill, is located in Scotland County, North Carolina. The county currently has, and for a good while has had, the highest unemployment rate in the state. So it is a very poor area. Between ...
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