|
February 2005
| Volume 62 | Number 5
How Schools Improve
Sifting the Sources
Marge Scherer
Pathways to Reform: Start With Values
David J. Ferrero
There are many ways for a school to be excellent, asserts the author, and the move to small, distinctive schools of choice offers an opportunity to capitalize on a rich variety of approaches to education. To achieve the goal of “common ends, diverse pathways,” those who create new school communities or transform existing schools need to reflect on and articulate their own core beliefs. Ferrero points out that our differing judgments about education practice reflect “deeply held philosophical worldviews.” Although good schools of all kinds share many research-based principles and values, their differing philosophies lead to a wide range of legitimate practices. The article offers a process for groups of educators to understand their own philosophical judgments by asking such questions as, What motivated me to go into teaching? What do I think students should know and be able to do? and What colleagues share my vision?
How Schools Sustain Success
Valerie Chrisman
Sustaining increases in student achievement is problematic for underperforming schools. Looking at California's Immediate Intervention Underperforming Schools Program, the author points out that only 83 of the 430 schools involved met their students' test score growth targets for two consecutive years. A comparison of the successful and unsuccessful schools in the program reveals that success seems to depend on the quality of leadership and on the effectiveness of instructional programs and practices. In successful schools, teacher leadership developed when teachers were given ample opportunities to make decisions about teaching and learning, when they collaboratively engaged in action research to discover instructional practices that improved student achievement, and when they developed such internal leadership structures as team teaching and mentoring new teachers. Principal leadership in successful schools often set the bar on expectations for student achievement, and schools with effective district leadership received far more services, such as onsite support, professional development, and district-provided benchmark assessments, than unsuccessful schools received. Also, at the successful schools, an instructional focus on academic English gave all students—both native and nonnative speakers of English—an advantage on the state test. And students who performed below grade level in language arts and mathematics at successful schools were far more likely to receive intervention instruction in addition to their regular instruction than students attending unsuccessful schools.
Looking at Student Work
Georgea M. Langer and Amy B. Colton
By collaboratively analyzing student work, teachers discover the relationship between their instruction and student performance on classroom assessments and other samples of student work. Collaborative inquiry is most powerful when teachers inquire over time into their students' progress toward learning standards, when a theoretical framework guides the inquiry process, when teachers teach collaborative norms, and when leadership and structures support the inquiry. In the process, teachers discover how specific students' understanding evolves and how they, as teachers, can promote this understanding. Teachers begin by selecting a focus student who represents a common challenge. As a group, the teachers analyze a different focus student's work sample each week to learn why that student is or is not making progress in the identified area. Teachers experiment with various instructional practices and analyze the resulting student work to determine the next steps. Two ideas central to this process are that teacher learning appears to proceed from the specific to the general and that professionals construct new understandings over a period of time. Collaborative analysis of student learning invites multiple interpretations for the same event, prompts teachers to reconsider limiting assumptions, enriches and transforms the teacher's knowledge base, and drives school improvement.
The Trouble with Takeovers
Stan Karp
In 1989, New Jersey became the first state in the nation to take full operational control of a local school district. In all three districts, low test scores and fiscal mismanagement led to the replacement of the superintendent, central office administrators, and the local school board by a new, state-appointed superintendent with broad powers to implement reforms. The takeover has resulted in only minimal education improvement. The state's emphasis has been on accountability and assessment rather than on intervention that would provide quality education programs. The 1998 New Jersey Supreme Court ruling, Abbott v. Burke, broke new ground by establishing an equality standard for the allocation of education resources to poor urban children. But the state has undercut the ruling by outsourcing the reform program and squashing requests for supplemental aid. No Child Left Behind and Abbott represent opposite directions for the future of state intervention in low-performing districts.
The Promise of Public/Private Partnerships
Chris Whittle
Using private-sector entities to improve public schools is not a matter of right or wrong, says the CEO of Edison Schools. It's simply a question of what public educators believe is the best strategy to improve achievement in their districts. Since the state intervention in Philadelphia schools, the district is now celebrating great gains in student achievement, gains that are more than 10 times what the district had achieved in the past decade. The Philadelphia/Edison Schools partnership shows that the public/private multi-provider model can achieve dramatic results and that a state takeover can jumpstart school districts stuck in neutral or reverse.
Improving Schools One Student at a Time
Allan Olson
No Child Left Behind's model for measuring Adequate Yearly Progress is flawed, writes Olson. This model identifies schools as successful or unsuccessful on the basis of the percentage of students in each grade who have attained the minimum “proficient” level. The result is skewed school improvement efforts aimed at getting more student scores above the proficiency level—efforts that ignore the progress of individual students who may perform far below or far above that level. The traditional assessment tools endorsed by NCLB do not provide the data needed to accurately assess individual student progress. Olson describes how some schools and districts are using computer adaptive testing (CAT) to adjust curriculum, instructional strategies, and professional development efforts to individual students' needs.
Increasing Diversity in Challenging Classes
Eileen Gale Kugler and Erin McVadon Albright
In the late 1990s, the recently diversified Annandale High School in Virginia pulled together administrators, teachers, parents, and other elements in its community to build an accepting climate and draw students from all cultural groups into advanced classes. Rapid changes in the student body led to a school that now serves students from 92 different countries, speaking more than 45 native languages. The school chose an intentionally broadened International Baccalaureate program as a vehicle for extended entrée into advanced classes to students from many races and cultures. They capitalized on the international nature of IB's curriculum, assessments and approach, even offering advanced classes in cultures other than English, to widen the circle of students enrolled in challenging classes. African American students' participation in 11th and 12th grade IB classes has doubled in the past three years, and participation by Latino students has tripled. Individual portraits of several IB diploma candidates from nonmajority cultures reflect the success of Annandale's crusade.
From Chaos to Consistency
Susan McCloud
The principal of T. C. Cherry, an urban elementary school in Bowling Green, Kentucky, recounts how her school transformed a disorganized school where children ran wild into an environment of safety and respect. A grant from the Kentucky Instructional Discipline and Support Project enabled school leaders to train in a behavioral management program (Foundations, based on the ideas of Randy Sprick) and a classroom management program that helps teachers identify desired classroom behaviors and teach them explicitly. McCloud describes how the school implemented the principles of Foundations. They surveyed staff, students, and parents about what they observed and experienced in different areas of the school. School leaders then developed a comprehensive plan that lays out in detail the responsibilities of everyone who interacts within the school building, and the logistics of every school activity. Since beginning the change, student scores on Kentucky's standardized achievement test have risen from the 41st percentile to the 78th percentile, and the U.S. Department of Education has named T. C. Cherry a National Blue Ribbon School.
Using Observation to Improve Instruction
William Powell and Susan Napoliello
Administrators from the International School of Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia describe a structured observation and feedback strategy that they developed to help teachers become more confident and more aware of the theory behind their practices in teaching through differentiated instruction. School administrators Powell and Napoliello identified key indicators of differentiated instruction that they might expect to see when observing classrooms. They then conducted brief walk-through observations of each elementary class in the school. By providing immediate, nonjudgmental feedback on practices they witnessed—combined with background information connected to each practice—Powell and Napoliello raised teachers' awareness of each instructional approach and how they might sharpen their use of it. The strategy also involved posing provocative questions about instructional practices that teachers reflected on and researched in collaborative teams.
The Power of Teacher Leadership
Barnett Berry, Dylan Johnson and Diana Montgomery
Research has documented the close relationship between teacher quality and student achievement. This article addresses the challenges of identifying, attracting, and retaining a cadre of expert teachers and involving them in instructional leadership. The article describes a rural school in North Carolina that has encouraged its National Board Certified Teachers to lead professional development and school improvement efforts. Several years of state assessment data demonstrate that the profiled school has progressed from a probationary status to a state “School of Distinction.” The authors explain that both school district policies and North Carolina's state-level policies have created a context in which schools recognize the potential of National Board Certified Teachers to lead school reform.
Leadership for Lasting Reform
Linda Lambert
Once you create a great school, how do you maintain at least a close approximation of that high quality for the long term? On the basis of more than 20 years of experience working with school leadership issues as well as a recent study of 15 schools, the author concludes that building high leadership capacity is a gradual process. Schools in her study traveled through three phases of development as they implemented school improvement plans—instructive, transitional, and high capacity. During each phase, the principal's role changed as leadership became more distributive and teachers took on more responsibility. The author suggests that the ultimate criterion for a high leadership capacity school might be the ability to thrive without a formal, full-time principal.
Data Tools for School Improvement
Victoria L. Bernhardt
Bernhardt defines the three main data tools school districts are now using to electronically collect student demographic and achievement data (student information systems), to organize information into databases (data warehouses), and to keep track of student performance on assessments and plan lessons accordingly (instructional management systems). She describes how each tool, designed and used well, can help educators analyze how each student learns and how to boost student achievement. These tools also need to be able to “talk” to each other, which is a key consideration in setting up a data management system. Bernhardt provides guidance for schools preparing to purchase and begin using these three data tools.
A School Reclaims Itself
Pete Hall
Anderson Elementary—a school in Reno, Nevada, that had slipped from status as a high-achieving school to one in which most students failed standardized tests—turned itself around in three years through focusing intensely on literacy and teacher collaboration. Principal Pete Hall narrates the school's progress from the precipice of state takeover (for failing to make adequate yearly progress three years running) to an energized school whose test scores went up and stayed high. Anderson now provides three hours of literacy instruction daily and has built in teacher planning and reflection periods. Data show a dramatically increased percentage of students—particularly, limited English proficient students—passing in the proficient range on state tests.
Ivy-Covered Malls and Creeping Commercialism
Alex Molnar
The author reports on the seventh annual survey of commercialism in schools conducted by the Commercialism in Education Research Unit of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University. CERU's annual survey tracks media references to schoolhouse commercialism in eight categories. During the period of June 2003–July 2004, media references to commercialism in schools rose in five categories (sponsorship of programs and activities, exclusive agreements, appropriation of space, electronic marketing, and fund-raising); fell in the categories of sponsored educational materials and privatization; and stayed the same in the incentive programs category. Schools are increasingly like auctioning off school naming rights to pay for basic school operating expenses, not just extracurricular activities. The author discusses the subtly and overtly harmful implications of school-corporate partnerships for the public schools in the United States.
How Student Progress Monitoring Improves Instruction
Nancy Safer and Steve Fleischman
Students' Attitudes Count
W. James Popham
School Culture: An Invisible Essential
Joanne Rooney
Educational Leadership's Themes for 2005–2006
The Funding Gap
Amy M. Azzam
ASCD Community in Action
How Schools Improve
Carolyn Pool
How Schools Improve
Naomi Thiers
Copyright © 2004 by Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development
|