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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 focus of what we've been doing.

Public School Insights: Now that you have this kind of alignment, do you think that the data you get through your system inform instruction in a richer way than they did before?

Bamberg: I do, though I think that we've always done this. We really began our reform efforts in the ‘90s and a lot of things we do now we did by hand then—we did it on spreadsheets and things like that. But we started that training. We started the conversation about data and what we needed to do to adjust our instruction, provide enrichment and reteach or reassess. Now I think we’ve just streamlined some of the processes better. But the conversation still stems around what's best for kids based on what they’re learning and what they haven’t learned, and what we are going to do about it.

Public School Insights: A lot of the national conversation on school reform has focused on standards. There hasn't been as much talk about curriculum or other kinds of aligned tools for teachers.

Bamberg: I think you start with those standards.

I know there is a new national effort to get all the states involved in [creating a common core of standards]. I understand Texas is not participating at this time. But in Texas we’ve been working so diligently for this for so many years…

I look at it as, you've got these overarching standards—you’ve got that articulation at the state level. Then we further articulate them at a district level so what we actually teach is aligned to those standards so that children can meet expectations and master curriculum. It all should be aligned and it should be articulated at the local level so that we can meet the needs of our kids.

Public School Insights: Is there a staff development aspect of this alignment, to ensure that staff know what to do?

Bamberg: Absolutely. We do a lot of staff development based on teacher sessions discussing the next six weeks’ scope and sequence, the best ways to teach those skills, what kinds of assessments we should be doing—and on what level we should be assessing—and how that is all tied together.

When we look at assessment data and discover that students did not do well on a particular item or particular concept, what we sometimes discover is that we weren’t closely aligned in our understanding of it and then with our follow-through and instruction. We weren’t teaching on a high enough level that the kids would be able to show mastery on an assessment.

Public School Insights: With the kind of staff development and alignment you've been talking about, have you ever heard concerns from teachers that this constricts them or constrains the work that they do?

Bamberg: In the beginning, when we were really focusing on making sure we had a scope and sequence we all followed across the district, we did hear concerns from teachers.

But remember that at this time about 84% of our students are economically disadvantaged, which means that we have a lot of mobility going on in the district. Students are moving from campus to campus. So our purpose in saying at the district level, “This is our scope and sequence for second grade math, and this is what we will teach each six weeks,” was…The campuses still can sit down and look at the needs of their children and make adjustments within that. But we will wind up in all of our campuses being pretty closely aligned with instruction across the scope of the year.

In the beginning teachers did have some concerns. But after the first year, they saw that all children truly had access to the complete curriculum, and our test scores reflected that. We became a Recognized School District in one year. Recognized—that is a school designation in the state of Texas. What happened then is teachers were willing to do even more.

It's not that we were necessarily dictating every daily lesson to teachers. We really brought in their ideas and their good instructional strategies. We had some strategies at the district level that we taught everybody, and we still want people to use those. But our teachers are constantly bringing things to us—“This is a great lesson on this particular skill, and we want that lesson vetted, so to speak, and reviewed so that we can share that with everybody else.” Our teachers provide some of our greatest instructional practices.

Public School Insights: It sounds like there is a great deal of collaboration in the district and that teachers have the opportunity to show leadership.

Bamberg: We really push for that. I do want to say that when we find ourselves in a crisis, we [at the district] really say “We are going to do this project”—we are going to work together, we are going to do this and we are going to deliver this to you. But then we ask for collaboration as we develop it.

And what we really try to do is collaborate on a weekly and daily basis as teachers plan. We want the teachers to sit down together, look at their data and determine the best way to deliver instruction the next week and how to customize it for different groups of students.

[In this collaboration,] you’ve got the veteran teachers who have got so much to offer to our newer teachers, and our newer teachers who have maybe been exposed to new ideas and new strategies in their recent training. We try to get a blend of that. And we really do encourage our campuses to plan together through department, grade-level and subject.

So we really urge collaboration across the board, and when we are working on curriculum or working on particular projects that will be district-wide, teachers are always involved—and principals too—as far as designing the projects, the scope and sequence, and the actual instructional strategies.

Public School Insights: How do you make time for all that collaboration, especially in the case of teachers?

Bamberg: At some of the levels it is easier to do than others. At the intermediate, middle and high school level we put in the schedule and then made the financial commitment to pay [for an additional planning period]. So each teacher has an individual planning period, but they also have a department planning period that really works on a daily basis. They spend that time collaborating and developing lessons. Sometimes they're pulling children, tutoring and giving kids additional time, or doing the interventions in our Response to Intervention model, [which gives early assistance to children who are struggling.]

Elementary winds up being the biggest challenge. Our elementary principals are working with the guidelines of the required minutes that teachers are supposed to have in their day. They will perhaps alter the schedule on a certain day to give first-grade teachers time to meet together, and then another day for second-grade teachers. Sometimes they will cover bus duty at the end of day and certain periods so they can release teachers a little early, so the teachers do not stay after school for a long period of time but can start the planning. So it’s a flexible schedule that includes during school and after-school time. We try not to tax anybody on a frequent basis with all the time after school.

It is a challenge, but our principals have gotten very creative. And the teachers have really helped the principals come up with ways to find the time to collaborate.

Public School Insights: In a lot of other districts right now we are hearing stories about big fights. It’s almost as if nothing will change in schools unless there's blood on the floor afterwards, to put it in a bold term. But I don't hear that in Aldine. It sounds to me like you have a very strong set of people with strong commitments to the processes and the changes you've put in place.

Bamberg: I think that what you said is accurate. We have an incredible teaching staff. We have high expectations of our teachers, and they not only live up to those high expectations but the majority of them go well beyond as far as providing service to our children.

In addition to that, we have been fortunate to have some outstanding principals. And we have been working on developing instructional leaders for many years so that the focus for our principals is truly, how are you going to manage all your systems so that your focus is on the teaching and learning that is supposed to be happening on your campus?

In the beginning when we first started this, there were some very lively discussions about how things should be laid out. But we bring people back and review and tweak our system every year. And now the conversations are about, how can we make it work better? It is so much engrained in what we do in the district and what we have been doing for many years.

Public School Insights: You mentioned many years. It's interesting to note the consistency of leadership in Aldine. You don't have a revolving door of superintendents from the outside.

Bamberg: That has been a philosophy of our board. We've had some incredible leadership on our board, and a very stable board. And we've been incredibly fortunate and had a board that has truly been focused on how to do better for kids and not on individual agendas.

All of our [recent] superintendents have come from within the district. And when we named a campus for our previous superintendent Nadine Kujawa we had five Aldine superintendents or previous superintendents in the audience, and they had a picture taken together. That's kind of unusual for a district.

Public School Insights: You've been in Aldine for quite some time yourself, haven’t you?

Bamberg: I've been in Aldine since 1982. I started as a teacher—a reading and English teacher--at one of our middle schools, Hoffman Middle School.

Public School Insights: So you are growing your own.

Bamberg: That really is the philosophy. We grow our own in a lot of ways. Our cabinet has all been locally grown and selected by our previous two superintendents, Nadine and Sonny Donaldson.

A lot of our principals have been grown within the system—they have been teachers and assistant principals in the system before becoming principals. And when we have people apply from outside we usually tell them, “Your chances of being a principal in Aldine are best if you will come into the system as a teacher or an AP [assistant principal].”

Public School Insights: Do you find that it is challenging to fill teaching positions in Aldine, or is there a good deal of stability there as well?

Bamberg: We are a large enough organization that we do have turnover, but our turnover is less than 10 percent a year. We have some very strong recruiting programs with universities through our human resources department, and we do a lot to promote student teaching opportunities in the district. We have had the luxury in the past of being able to hire many of our student teachers, so they come into the district already having experienced working with our children and seeing what our expectations are.

Of course, right now the market is sort of different. Things are slowing down. We opened school this year with only three vacancies, and those were specialty positions. In past years we may have opened school with about 30 vacancies. But we usually fill those without too much trouble.

We recruit where it historically has been helpful across the nation. We always cut back if we see that we are not getting the kind of candidates we need out of a particular state or college. But we have worked to build a lot of partnerships with universities, and that has been very helpful to us. Plus, our local colleges and universities put out some great teaching candidates and we snap up as many of them as we can.

Public School Insights: Are there any other questions I should have asked you but didn’t?

Bamberg: I always want to tell people when they talk about the Broad Prize and they make these statements that go along with it—that it’s for the best urban school district, that kind of thing…People need to understand with the Broad Prize is about. It is about filling the gaps between income groups and student groups, and trying to make sure that we are providing an equal education for all students. But it does not mean that we have solved all the problems and we have all the answers. We are still working to increase our four-year completion rate—keeping children in school in an urban setting is difficult as kids get older. We face those same challenges that other school districts face.

I also want to say that the other finalists in the Broad Prize this year—Long Beach in California, Gwinnett in Georgia, Broward County in Florida, and Socorro in Texas—are all doing equally outstanding things in their districts. They have a lot to share and offer too.

We are very pleased to be the winner this year, but we know that we have a lot of work to do. It is exciting to see the recognition for our teachers for their hard work, and the kids are the big winners because they have the opportunity for these scholarships.

Public School Insights: One of the first things that we wrote about Aldine in our 2003 report was that in 1995 Aldine recognized that it was facing big challenges, and that it had to keep striving towards excellence. It sounds like that principle remains.

Bamberg: It does. We are still working diligently to make improvements for our kids.