Struggling schools need more than hope; they need a plan. They need proven strategies that will enhance students' learning while complying with the adequate yearly progress requirements imposed by the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law. According to the Center on Education Policy, nearly a third of U.S. schools risk being labeled "in need of improvement." Though no district has found the magic formula to boost student performance, several lessons can be learned from the efforts taking place every day in struggling schools.
A Mammoth Task
Despite years of experience in Baltimore City Public Schools, Mary Minter found she had a lot to learn when she took over leadership of the city's William Paca Elementary School in 2000. "It was a mammoth task," says Minter. Not only was William Paca Baltimore City's largest elementary school, it was also its lowest-performing. Minter last year was named a Maryland State Department of Education Distinguished Principal Fellow. Each year, a few of the state's best principals are offered bigger paychecks in exchange for working at least three years at some of the state's lowest-performing schools, and Minter was one of the chosen few.
Strong Leadership
The fellowship program is founded on the belief—supported by reports like the Fordham Foundation's Can Failing Schools Be Fixed?—that central to successful reform is strong school-level leadership. During their stay, the fellows lead intensive training and development activities aimed at helping educators reach urban or at-risk students. In some years, they have trained principal interns to be placed in other low-achieving schools. Every year, they work closely with their teaching staff to cultivate leadership from within.
The program has the immediate benefits of improving student learning and school rankings, and in the long term it helps build a strong base of future school leaders.
For Minter, a big part of building leadership at William Paca was changing the attitudes of her staff. They were "not ready to accept that some of the problems that existed in the school were there because of teachers—their low expectations of the children," asserts Minter. "It had to start with the teachers. The teachers had to be convinced that if they could change, so could the students."
When Minter first arrived in 2000, William Paca scored a dismal 18.2 percent on the school performance index for the Maryland School Performance Assessment Program (MSPAP). She quickly learned that it was vital "to motivate your students and staff, and communicate the shared vision of school improvement" to exact any sort of lasting change.
The following year, school scores on the MSPAP rose to 28.9 percent, and in 2003 they rose to 33.1 percent. "There was the sense that we'd been down for too long," comments Minter. The parents, students, and teachers at her school all decided it was time for a change, she says.
Ed Cozzolino, the principal fellow at Baltimore's Brehms Lane Elementary, says he applied for one of the state fellowships because he thought the prospect of infusing a historically low-achieving school with quality leadership was "exciting and challenging." He learned just how challenging when he discovered that 55 percent of the teachers in Baltimore City are provisional—meaning anybody with a degree who commits to entering a certification program may teach.
The provisional teachers often have no training in classroom management, differentiating instruction, or collaborating with other teachers—they've received no professional development. "You could have anywhere between a 30-year veteran teacher to a teacher with zero certification coursework," notes Cozzolino. His challenge, he says, was this: "How do you create differentiated professional development that works for veteran teachers as well as the novice just off the street?"
To unify a disparate group, Cozzolino worked with his staff to create key schoolwide strategies based on gathering data and looking at student work. He conducted a five-day workshop to discuss the staff's mission and vision for the school and to foster collaboration and reflection.
In fact, for two weeks Cozzolino took over a 5th grade class during language arts, and he invited teachers to watch his lessons and then debrief and provide feedback. "There is a strong reflective power that often goes untapped in teachers," he notes. "Reflection and evaluation are more than just a process; they're part of making you a better professional."
He tells the story of one novice teacher, George, who went from being on the verge of quitting about 10 times during his first year as a teacher to having the highest-achieving 4th grade class this year. "It's like someone turned a switch on in George," notes Cozzolino. "His lessons are better thought out, and his class is like his family. He's putting in a lot of time, and he's moved out of the struggle of the first year into a really fun experience."
Connecting and Reflecting
Teaching is traditionally an isolated profession—individual teachers do most of their work on their own, behind closed doors. However, there is a growing consensus that if schools are to rise out of failure they are going to need to forge supportive networks within the school building and beyond.
One such network that has proved successful is the National School Reform Faculty (NSRF), housed at the Harmony Education Center in Bloomington, Ind. Founded in 1995, it is a professional development initiative that aims to increase student achievement. Faculty members focus on developing collegial relationships, encouraging reflective practice, and rethinking leadership in urban and rural schools undergoing restructuring. "The whole notion centers around creating a collaborative culture within schools, where teachers make their practice public to their peers and develop habits of reflective practice," explains Daniel Baron, NSRF codirector.
Baron says that opening the teaching practice to collaboration is essential for knowing kids well, being able to construct a coherent curriculum, and building connections between subjects. He also advocates moving from a deficit-focused design for professional development and school reform to a more assets-based approach. Instead of focusing on what schools are doing poorly, we should be "building on and uncovering, discovering and recovering the talents of our teachers and children in schools, so that we can rekindle the curiosity and desire to embrace learning," he argues.
Frustrated in Florida
The NSRF uses inquiry and reflection to constantly refine reform strategies. Many state education departments, however, feeling pressure under NCLB requirements to improve quickly, focus on state test scores to gauge achievement.
In Florida, for example, many educators say the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) unfairly serves as the sole measure of a school's merit. Mark Pudlow, communications director at the Florida Education Association, acknowledges that setting standards for students to meet is a great idea. However, he argues, focusing only on FCAT scores is myopic. "When one standardized test is the be-all and end-all of an education system, I think you're failing a lot of kids," he observes.
For example, Pudlow explains, many of Florida's students do not speak English as their first language, but they have to pass the FCAT in English. Those students' FCAT scores aren't a reflection of how intelligent they are or how successful they can be, he says. Even when a school's overall FCAT scores are improving each year, he says, "teachers are frustrated, and the nonachieving kids just have no reason to stick around." Many students who struggle in Florida's schools drop out and get jobs, Pudlow says, because school is no longer fun for them. Ironically, school achievement rates rise when low-achieving students get tired of the drill and grill and decide to drop out, he notes.
Diagnosis or Prognosis?
Although critics say test regimes in Florida and other states are pushing low-achieving students out of schools, some educators are using the diagnostic power of tests to embrace all learners. In the study After the Test: How Schools Are Using Data to Close the Achievement Gap, the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BARSC) in San Francisco looked at achievement levels in two groups of K-8 schools with similar ethnic and low-income populations. The schools that succeeded at raising the achievement levels of black and Latino students did so by using frequent tests to diagnose students' needs. Teachers then used that data to fine-tune how they taught.
Merrill Vargo, executive director of BARSC, says this report has broad implications for schools labeled as low-achieving. "It is possible to improve schools on purpose," she says. "That's a revolutionary idea in education because, in so many places, two ideas work together to keep achievement low. One is that teaching is an art—you're either good at it or you're not," she says. "The other is that demographics are destiny. If you've got a certain student population, that's going to determine your test score patterns and the learning levels in the school." She argues that those two ideas, deeply rooted in the education community, unnecessarily put a ceiling on what schools can achieve.
Committed to Leading the Way
Baltimore City is proving Vargo's assertion to be true. Ed Cozzolino says he's constantly impressed by his teachers' commitment—despite working in a system that doesn't always meet basic education needs. "A lot of our schools don't even have copiers," he says. "So, our teachers go out and make copies with their own money. And it's not just that it's money out of their pocket; it's that they know that this is the only way kids are going to learn."