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Story posted August 27, 2009.  Results updated April 1, 2010.

Results:
• Math proficiency grew from nearly 20 percentage points below the state average in 2006 to the state average in 2009
• Reading proficiency grew over 15 percentage points between 2004 and 2009, staying consistently above the state average
• Named a 2008 National Title I Distinguished School based on "exceptional student performance for two or more consecutive years"

According to the numbers, Central Elementary School in Roundup, Montana, seems to fit the currently fashionable definition of a “turnaround” school. After many years of below-average test scores, the school has recently made double-digit gains in the number of its students meeting proficiency on the statewide assessment. In true turnaround fashion, that improvement appears to have happened in a very short period of time.

As recently as the 2005–2006 school year, for example, Central’s math score was nearly 20 percentage points below the state average. In the following school year that proficiency rate went up by 16 percent, and by 2007–2008 the school was six points higher than the state average in math. Meanwhile, the school’s reading score, while consistently above the state average, also rose by nearly 20 percentage points between 2003–2004 and 2007–2008. This fall the school received a National Title I Distinguished School award, based on “exceptional student performance for two or more consecutive years.”

Ask current principal Vicki Begin about the school’s success, however, and she’ll insist that it’s been anything but a quick turnaround. in fact, Begin (pronounced BEIGE–en), who is in her second year at Central, gives much of the credit not only to the school’s veteran teaching staff, which averages 23 years of experience, but also to her predecessor, Joe Ingalls, who guided the school from 1994–1995 to 2006–2007. Obviously, this is not a case of overnight success or of cleaning house and starting over.

In fact, there would seem to be little in common between Central Elementary and the handful of schools that have gained national media attention for their dramatic turnarounds and the drastic measures, such as total reconstitution, they have occasionally taken. As a small, rural school in a perpetually cash-strapped state, Roundup’s only K–6 elementary school has turned things around gradually, without a major influx of funds, resources, new personnel, or outside technical assistance.

While that may make the label “turnaround school” an uncomfortable fit, it also makes Central representative of the hundreds of other schools around the country—including many in the predominantly rural West—who have been working hard for many years to put all the right pieces in place, often with minimal resources. In the end, it’s less important what you call Central Elementary, and more important how they got here.

A Hard Look in the Mirror
In the mid-1990s Joe Ingalls was a first-time principal still in the process of earning his doctorate via extension classes. A lot of the reading and discussion in those classes focused on the nuts and bolts of curriculum and instruction, and inevitably that information began to color the way Ingalls viewed the day-to-day operations at his school. “The research I was immersed in really indicated those things that needed to be in place for students to be successful,” says Ingalls. “And I could see that they were not in place at our school.”

Due to the school’s below-average achievement scores, Ingalls initiated a committee-based school improvement process, long before such a process would be required by the no Child Left Behind Act. Each staff member served on at least one committee, such as reading, math, school safety, population/demographics, or the overall school improvement steering committee. Although many of Central’s staff members had already been teaching for a decade or more, primarily within the Roundup School District, the committee approach gave them an opportunity to collectively evaluate and compare their instructional practices in a way they had never done before.

Anita Burch, a kindergarten teacher at Central, remembers how surprised the staff members were at what they discovered. “It was the first time we really sat down together and said: What are we actually teaching, at every grade level?” she says. “And one of the things we found is that we had big holes in our curriculum. There was an assumption that at third grade this was being taught and so fourth grade could just start from there. When in actuality that skill hadn’t been taught in third grade. And so, we had to go back and say: How do we fill those holes?”

Although Vicki Begin was a teacher in nearby Lewistown at the time, she relates to how difficult, exposing, and ultimately rewarding that kind of schoolwide look in the mirror can be. Often, she says, the problem is wrongly diagnosed as bad teaching.

“Teachers are the experts in learning,” she says. “They really are. They know what works for kids. And so, for example here [at Central], each of them would do exactly what they thought worked for kids, but the kids were having trouble connecting the pieces. It wasn’t that any one teacher wasn’t doing that important part of teaching, and it wasn’t that kids weren’t learning. It’s just that none of the pieces stacked together.”

During the improvement process Ingalls and the staff came to the same conclusion: The “pieces” of the school’s approach to curriculum and instruction were not coming together to make a unified whole.

The problem revealed itself in several ways, all of them interrelated. First, although the school had a core curriculum for both reading and math, neither was being used with fidelity by the entire K–6 staff. This was the main cause of the “big holes” in the curriculum that Burch and her fellow teachers noticed.

“Generally, what happens with a curriculum that is inadequate or poorly aligned is that it starts to splinter,” says Ingalls. “People begin to pick and choose what they want to use, and maybe what they don’t feel is as important goes by the wayside. That might work fine for an individual teacher, but ultimately it doesn’t work for kids.”

The second problem was also related to a lack of alignment in the curriculum, but in this case alignment to state standards. Although standards were in place by this time, the school had only aligned its curriculum to them in the most general way. The problem showed up most clearly when Ingalls asked each grade-level team a question. “For example,” says Ingalls, “if I sat down with a grade-level team and asked them: ‘Where should we be with number sense by the end of the year?’ the teachers weren’t able to verbalize that. It was a real challenge to know what the teachers expected of the students. And in most cases, their expectations were much lower than they should have been or would later come to be.”

The third major problem was an inadequate assessment strategy. Several assessments were in place, but the fragmented curriculum made them ineffective, especially for tracking a student’s progress over time. In addition, teachers were not adequately trained in how to use assessment data to drive their instruction.

The final problem was the lack of a common vision and a common language. The latter situation was sometimes literal. Even when a concept was being taught in the right sequence, for example, something might be lost in the translation between two teachers or two grade levels. As an example, Barbara Crosby, another veteran teacher, says: “When I taught third grade I used the term ‘statement’ to describe a certain kind of sentence. It wasn’t until I moved up to teach fourth grade that I realized they were using the term ‘declarative’ to describe the same kind of sentence. That might sound like a small matter, but it puts all the pressure on the student to make the connection and to build on the concept.”

Of course, Ingalls and the Central teaching staff did not come to a clear recognition of all these problems at once. The actual process of identifying them, facing up to them, and coming together as an entire school to address them was gradual and not entirely painless. “But the biggest key,” says Ingalls, “was that we had staff buy-in right away. That was essential.”

The Sum and the Parts
It was not by chance that Ingalls chose a committee-based school improvement process. As Begin says, “Joe and the staff developed a vision of where they wanted to be and that was part of the vision—the teachers had to be involved. Everyone had to take a piece of it and communicate with each other and share ownership.”

If there is a single theme that runs through Central Elementary’s decade-plus of hard work, it is that unity of vision. After looking their underachievement in the eye, the school made a collective decision that can be summarized as follows: We are no longer going to teach as individuals; from now on, we are a team. We will throw open the doors of our classrooms, speak a common language, and work for a common cause. And that cause will be one thing: the academic progress of each and every student in our school.

Without that vision, everything that followed would have been so many pieces and parts. With that in mind, here are some of the specific steps the school took to address its problems.

First, Ingalls and a staff committee spent a year, including one summer, on what he calls the “foundational piece” of identifying the essential learning skills embedded in the state standards and then aligning them to their core reading and math curricula. No longer would teachers be unable to identify what students should know and be able to do in a given skill area at the end of a grade level. Or, as Roberta Hagstrom, a member of that committee and the school’s current Title I director says, “We always want to know exactly what we’re teaching, at what point we’re teaching it, and why.”

In the process of identifying those essential learning skills, they realized that even if the current reading and math curricula were taught with fidelity, they would not be sufficient to the school’s needs. Eventually, they would replace both the core reading and the math programs, implement 6+1 Trait® Writing in all grades, and add ReadWell® as an intervention reading program in the primary grades. Intense staff training accompanied each of these curriculum adoptions, often in partnership with their regional educational cooperative or the Alliance for Curriculum Enhancement (ACE) Consortium, both of which allow the school to pool its resources for professional development and other purposes.

Each new curriculum was also mapped to the essential learning skills and aligned “horizontally and vertically”—or within and between grade levels. The math program, in particular, is also deliberately “spiraling,” a concept similar to but distinct from vertical alignment. The end result is that Central’s curriculum is now logical, sequenced, and transparent to all, while still allowing teachers some flexibility to personalize a given lesson.

Another significant step the school took was to update its assessment system. Early on they chose an assessment from the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA, no relation to NWREL), which met Ingalls’s goal of tracking student achievement over time. With the implementation of ReadWell they also began using the DIBELS assessment to monitor students’ progress more frequently. DIBELS has since been expanded schoolwide—all students take the diagnostic test at the beginning, middle, and end of the year. With this combination of assessments the school is no longer caught off guard by holes in the curriculum. Holes still show up, but they are caught and addressed almost immediately.

A final important strategy, what Begin calls “achievement-oriented teacher collaboration,” is almost synonymous with the school vision. Teachers are now in constant dialogue about student data, instructional strategies, interventions, curriculum, and everything else going on in each other’s classrooms. “For those of us who have been teaching for a very long time, it’s a much different type of teaching than we were brought in on,” says Begin. “The majority of our staff has 25-plus years of teaching experience. They had to learn to adapt and they have.”

At Central this collaboration includes all staff members, including the school’s invaluable paraeducators, who were named paraeducator staff of the year in 2007–2008 by the Montana Comprehensive System of professional Development.

As with the recognition of problems, this synopsis may give the illusion that all these actions happened smoothly and in a short period of time. In reality, although each piece of the puzzle was implemented logically, carefully, and with an eye toward research, it is worth reiterating that it has taken 15 years of hard work to get to this point.

A Constant Process
When Joe Ingalls took a job at an elementary school in Wyoming in 2007, he left Central Elementary much better than he found it. Still, he says, “It was difficult to leave, knowing that there were things that still needed our attention and needed more work.”

The hiring of Begin made his exit easier. “Vicki was the right person at the right time,” he says. “She came in and was able to see the vision we had and the direction that we were headed. She picked it up and ran with it and has done an incredible job.”

The school’s national recognition as a distinguished school is an acknowledgment of its continued progress. And the school continues to push ahead. In the past year and a half they have established a full-day kindergarten program, started implementing response to intervention, and focused professional development on improving teacher’s use of data to differentiate instruction. In Roundup, turning things around may have taken awhile, but it also never stops.

APRIL 2010 UPDATE: According to Montana's No Child Left Behind Report Card, Central is continuing to succeed.  Despite serving a significantly more disadvantaged population than the state as a whole, in 2009 84% of students met or exceeded proficiency standards in reading, better than the state average of 82%.  And 63% of students met or exceeded proficiency standards in math, right at the state average. 

For additional information, please contact:
Vicki Begin
Principal, Central Elementary School
vickibegin@roundup.k12.mt.us  

This story was originally published in the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory’s Spring-Summer 2009 Edition of Northwest Education.

Citation: Bracken Reed. The Long Turnaround. Northwest Education, Spring-Summer 2009, Volume 14, Number 3, p 25-27.

Photos by Bracken Reed.

Copyright © 2009, Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory.