Chief Academic Officer Terry Edwards talks about how Everett Public Schools has dramatically improved graduation rates over the past seven years.
Turnaround
Blog Entries
Denver’s North High School looks like a persistently struggling school. Back in 2006 (and also 2007), only 7% of 9th graders and 5% of 10th graders scored proficient or advanced on state math tests. Just 22% of 9th graders and 23% of 10th graders did so on reading tests. Fast forward to 2009. Just 6% of 9th graders and 3% of 10th graders met state proficiency standards in math. 22% of 9th graders and 34% of 10th graders did so in reading. It was the district’s lowest performing high school and in the bottom 5% of schools in the state as indicated by assessment scores. The district was recently awarded over a million dollars in grants to improve it.
Knowing this, you might not guess that North has “turned around.” But it has, if you use the definition of the term currently in vogue.
In 2007, the school’s entire faculty was dismissed (though they could reapply for their jobs). The next year, about 75% of the faculty was new. There were other changes, too. The school was selected to participate in a program that focuses on teacher training and development to change expectations and drive student performance, includes a math and English curriculum and provides access to study skills programs, among other things. The school would also ...
Dubious school turnaround outfits are rushing in where some more experienced groups fear to tread, The New York Times reports. Of course, we can expect this sort of thing to happen whenever speculators and pitchmen smell billions of federal dollars. But the hype that attends much of the talk about school reform can make matters worse.
The uncomfortable truth is that no single turnaround strategy is a sure bet. A recent review (PDF) of major turnaround models found that none rested on strong evidence. The research base remains thin.
That has not stopped quite a few people from insisting that, to save a struggling school, you have to start from scratch. You have to give the staff its walking papers if you want to see big changes, the theory goes. Powerful people often invoke the Harvard School of Excellence in Chicago as proof of this strategy. After the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) cleaned house at this elementary school, test scores soared.
Few have paid much attention to the Chicago public schools whose gains have equaled or surpassed Harvard's. Cardenas and Cather elementary schools were among the most improved schools in the city, and neither school fired staff to jump start its reform efforts.
Cardenas and Cather are among eight schools working with a Chicago non-profit called Strategic Learning Initiatives (SLI). Those schools have made big strides since 2007 without replacing staff. And their turnaround efforts have cost a fraction of what the restart model costs. None of the SLI schools has enjoyed the kind of praise heaped on Harvard. (For more information on SLI's work, see our interview with SLI president John Simmons).
Harvard has earned the praise, but the uneven media coverage of school reform efforts offers a very skewed vision of our turnaround options. Indeed, the New York Times piece on turnarounds implicitly endorses the restart model. It quotes someone from AUSL who calls ...
Earlier this week the California Department of Education awarded (though only temporarily) $315 million in School Improvement Grants to over 100 schools in 31 districts. These grants are designed to reform persistently low-achieving schools, so this is great news, right? Over 100 low-performing schools have a better chance to improve.
The problem is that California identified 188 persistently low-achieving schools back in March, which means that not all the schools that need this money got it.
Now, this was a competitive grant program. Districts containing schools identified as persistently low-achieving applied for the funds to reform them, knowing that the state would decide whom to fund. So we knew going in there would be winners and losers.
The kicker is how they chose the winners:
[S]tate officials gave priority to those [districts] that requested grants to help turn around all campuses on the list. Districts that didn’t request money for each of their lowest-achieving schools were placed behind others for funding, even if the other districts didn’t score as highly ...
Reform costs money. That's an inconvenient truth as school districts face their bleakest budget forecasts in decades.
Long before the first stimulus dollar made its way to a central office, some pundits felt that lean budgets would be a good thing, an antidote to the bloat and bureaucracy that, they said, were a deadweight on school performance. Now, as districts prepare to spend what may be their last stimulus dollar, the story of Locke High School should give the pundits pause.
The New York Times reports that the effort to turn around this LA high school has cost some 15 million dollars a year. But this isn't the story of bureaucratic bloat. Locke has all the features that should endear it to the reformiest of reformers. It's run by a charter management group. That group, Green Dot Schools, enjoys support from funders who have made big gambles on school reform: Gates, Broad, Walton and the New Schools Venture Fund, among others. Green Dot replaced most of the old teachers. And Arne Duncan has praised Locke as a successful turnaround.
But Locke hasn't hit on any secret for nickling and diming its way to success. And "success" is a relative term here. Locke made big improvements to the ...
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."
,,,
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 ...
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 ...
The "persistently low achieving" label can be a mixed blessing for schools. The stigma it brings can be just one more burden on a school already laboring under so many others. But it can also supply a bracing dose of reality to a school that sorely needs it. Leaders and policy makers will have to play their cards right if they want the label to have the best possible effect.
That's the main lesson I drew from an op-ed by Patrick Welsh in yesterday's Washington Post. Welsh, an English teacher at TC Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia, makes an uneasy peace with the dreaded "low-achieving" label after the feds apply it to his school:
Labels can be unfair. They never tell the whole story. But though we never wanted to achieve our new label, I have no doubt that it will help us get back to achieving our best.
Welsh writes that the label forced him to face facts. The school sends its top students to colleges like MIT and Yale, but too many of its low-income students don't even master basic skills. Welsh wasn't prepared for the challenges he would face as the school's demographics changed. "I just never thought that I would need to teach reading in the 12th grade." Williams is a good school, he suggests, but only for some of its students.
But the label can also do harm. Students can feel the sting, too. Welsh quotes a 10th-grader: "There are a lot of smart, hard-working kids here who are ...
When Principal Theresa Mattison came to Carstens Elementary in 1997 “achievement was zero.” Student behavior was a problem. Some staff seemed uncommitted. As parent liaison Abby Phelps puts it, “This school was in the middle of chaos.”
Today Carstens is a beacon of light for the surrounding community. It is one of the top-performing schools in Detroit. In 2009 third graders at this school—where 98% of students are from high poverty homes—outscored the state as a whole on all tested subjects.
How did the school turn itself around? School staff points to the leadership of Dr. Mattison. Dr. Mattison points back to her incredible staff. And everyone recognizes the importance of meeting more than just the academic needs of students.
Members of the Carstens community recently told us the school’s story. In on the conversation were Principal Theresa Mattison, parent liaison Abby Phelps, school social worker Gail Nawrock, and teachers Barbara Haug, Vannessa Jones, Rebecca Kelly and Violet Kiricovski.
Public School Insights: How would you describe Carstens Elementary?
Violet Kiricovski: Carstens shares the Comer philosophy. And we all work together. Teamwork really is our strong point.
Rebecca Kelly: The way I would describe Carstens is that it is actually more than a school. I just saw a presentation in which they described it as a “beacon of light.” And the parents, the families, the students and the businesses are all working together.
Abby Phelps: Carstens incorporates a city philosophy. We offer all services. We have it all.
Public School Insights: What kind of a population does the school serve?
Barbara Haug: We serve a deserving population. Statistically, they are considered high poverty—98% of them come from high poverty homes. And our population is about 98% African-American. But we do not think that statistics are something that describes somebody’s potential. It just describes the situation that needs to be considered when you look at the needs of the individual child or the children. What it boils down to is that they are children who deserve a good education.
Public School Insights: What was student achievement like back in the 1990s?
Theresa Mattison: Achievement was zero…We had people who did not care and it was very, very, very hard. But it is not hard anymore, because everyone cares and everyone shares leadership and responsibility.
Abby Phelps: Having been affiliated with Carstens before Dr. Mattison got here, I can tell you that this school was in the middle of chaos. And I am not exaggerating. I have been here since 1989. The capacity of the teachers and their concern ...
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 ...
We sorely need to define what we mean when we say "turnaround." That's becoming more and more apparent as the media start finding romance and drama in turnaround stories. Here's the problem: One person can see a budding turnaround story where another sees a school mired in failure. In this climate, ideology can trump evidence.
We also need to decide what the milestones on the road to excellence look like. That's not at all easy. Take, for example, the case of Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. President Obama points to its rock-bottom math scores as a reason for starting over. Teachers point to rising reading and writing scores as a reason for staying the course. Similar debates are swirling around other troubled schools in the state.
As the press hungers for stories about triumph and failure, the tendency to find conflicting meanings in the same numbers will only grow. And that will create the perfect climate for spin doctors. (Just look at Chicago. The "results" of the city's school reforms have been spun in so many ways by boosters and critics alike that I'm getting dizzy.) You would think you'd just know a turnaround story when you ...
SIGN UP
Sign up for our e-newsletter on public school success.
A VISION FOR GREAT SCHOOLS
On this website, educators, parents and policymakers from coast to coast are sharing what's already working in public schools--and sparking a national conversation about how to make it work for children in every school. Join the conversation!
