Establishing a Strong Foundation for School Improvement (page 2)

Organizing for Effective Reform

Step 1: Commit to basing school improvement efforts on a full, honest, and transparent accounting of the current state of affairs.

Because the core function of education traditionally takes place behind closed classroom doors and the actions of teachers remain hidden and mysterious, educators have long been free to ascribe responsibility for student achievement to any number of factors “outside the control of schools.” After all, why work hard to make difficult changes in classroom instruction if schools do not contribute all that much to learning com- pared with all the other things in children’s lives?

Such notions have long provided a kind of perverse disincentive to examine instruction-related practices in any comprehensive way: “If we are relatively powerless to affect student learning, how can we reasonably be held responsible for improving it?” But recent research suggests that these assumptions are profoundly wrong.

For example, we now know that good teaching matters tremendously. One influential study in Tennessee found that two groups of students who start out with the same level of achievement can end up 50 points apart on a 100-point scale if one group is assigned three ineffective teachers in a row and the other is assigned three effective teachers in a row.⁶ A more recent study in Texas found that the impact of classroom teaching is so great that “having five years of good teachers in a row could overcome the average seventh-grade mathematics achievement gap between lower-income kids and those from higher-income families.”⁷

The right curriculum can be powerful as well. A 1999 study by Clifford Adelman at the U.S. Department of Education found that the quality and rigor of high school courses had a greater impact than any other factors on whether students who go to college succeed in earning a degree. The average college completion gap between white and African-American freshmen shrinks by two thirds among students who complete a rigorous set of academic courses before enrolling in college.⁸

This is not to say that “outside factors” have no impact on teaching and learning, or that they do not make teaching harder in high-poverty communities beset with more social problems. Of course, poverty matters. Family problems matter. Community ills matter. Watching television instead of completing homework will have a negative impact on most any child’s learning.

But schools can and do matter more than these things.

A big part of organizing for more effective improvement, then, entails tearing down the wall of tradition that shields instructional factors from scrutiny and intervention. As Kati Haycock, director of The Education Trust, has written, we must “find a way to set aside all the old bargains, the old politeness, and do what it takes to make needed changes.”⁹

Those concerned with improving schools must learn to dig deeper than ever before by seeking evidence first and foremost in the following three areas:

I. Performance Gaps
Examining achievement data is nothing new; it forms the heart of a traditional “needs assessment.” And the data requirements of NCLB mean that more data, and more meaningful data, are available than ever before. However, such efforts are often still too cursory and fail to consider data from enough angles to help educators kick free of tired myths about student achievement. Groups such as the National Center for Educational Accountability and The Education Trust, for example, recommend comparing results—overall, by group, and over time— to top performing schools that educate similar populations of students. Many Web sites have cropped up to aid such efforts. (See “Resources for Digging Deeper Into School Performance.”)

II. Opportunity Gaps
If, as research suggests, such in-school factors as qualified, effective teachers and rigorous curriculum have a large impact on student learning, we need to come clean about the extent to which students receive these things, and especially which students receive these things. Over the past decade, The Education Trust and other organizations have provided overwhelming documentation that, nationally and in most states, low-income and minority students are far less likely than their peers to be assigned qualified and effective teachers, to receive grade-level instruction in the classroom, and to be enrolled in rigorous courses.

To offer a few examples: The Dallas Public Schools recently began collecting data and crunching numbers on how effective the system’s teachers are at raising student achievement. Last year, the district’s research department found that, year in and year out, low-achieving students in Dallas are far more likely to be assigned to ineffective teachers than effective teachers, even though the data clearly show that students who start out behind are quick to make up lost ground when assigned to highly effective teachers.¹⁰ Such gaps are not simply the result of forces outside the schoolhouse door, either. Another recent study in North Carolina found that one quarter to one third of the state’s black-white gap in exposure to novice teachers is the result of assignment patterns across classrooms within schools.¹¹

There are important measurable gaps in curriculum as well. Specialists at a California-based company called DataWorks have worked with states and local school systems to identify the gap between what is expected in state standards and the level of instruction in classrooms, as measured by the assignments teachers give students. In one California elementary school, they found that only 2 percent of fifth-grade assignments were on grade level. Analyzing assignments in 14 South Carolina high schools revealed that the average 12th-grade assignment was just below 10th-grade level.¹²

Classroom grades offer a second way of measuring curriculum gaps. A massive study of the Title I program found that students who average “C” grades in low-poverty schools have higher test scores than students who average “A” grades in high-poverty schools.¹³  Clearly such findings are significant, since students cannot learn what they are not taught, nor achieve higher than the level of challenge set for them by their teachers. Yet all too often such opportunity gaps ¹⁴ remain either unidentified or unacknowledged within local communities and schools.

III. Practice Gaps
According to Jean Rutherford, director of educational initiatives for the National Center for Educational Accountability, “If you have a performance gap, you have a practice gap.” Her certainty is based on the center’s in- depth interviews, observations, and document analyses in more than 300 school systems over four years to study differences in practices between high- and average-performing schools and systems.

The center offers schools and school systems a self-audit tool that allows educators to compare their practices with those commonly found in places that achieve sustained high performance for students from all backgrounds. The questions are built around the following areas that together seem to explain the most about differences in outcomes:

• Curriculum and academic goals.
• Staff selection, leadership, and capacity building.
• Instructional programs, practices, and arrangements.
• Monitoring progress: compilation, analysis, and use of data.
• Recognition, intervention, and adjustments.

The message is clear: What teachers and administrators do in their day-to-day jobs can have a large impact on student learning. Honestly investigating practices and benchmarking them against what we know about teaching and learning in the nation’s most successful schools and districts must become an essential part of school improvement efforts.

None of this should imply that schools and districts can never profitably examine family and community factors as they organize and plan for school reform and improvement. But higher achieving, higher performing schools have learned to understand the instructional factors behind student achievement and plan for reform by working from the inside out. They first attend to performance, opportunity, and practice gaps, and then analyze the concrete family and community factors that can act as obstacles—or enablers—to building a stronger core instructional program. Because an “inside-out” approach can feel uncomfortable at first, and because of our atavistic tendency to look first to family and community factors to explain low achievement, this orientation is one that must be firmly established from the outset, before a needs assessment or data collection ever take place.

Step 2: Build support to ensure that knowledge can be translated into decisive action.

Making the commitment to digging more deeply into core instructional functions of schools will do little good if the resulting knowledge is not translated into action. Of course all such information, as well as the results of traditional “needs assessments,” should inform the formal written planning process required under federal and state laws. But what we are recommending is a commitment to action that goes deeper than that.

In an article about veteran school superintendent Eric Smith, The Washington Post relates a story from his days in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, that is as remarkable as it is revealing: Finding that SAT scores of African-American students had dipped, he asked for data on middle school course-taking, which revealed that such students were severely underrepresented in advanced math classes.

“Promptly, he tore up the schedules of 8,000 middle schoolers and started reassigning them. He can’t really be ripping up a summer’s worth of scheduling and starting over,teachers gasped when they heard. This can’t be happening, parents wailed when they called his office. [...] ‘We aren’t waiting another year,’ he told the dissenters. ‘These kids’ educations start now.’”¹⁵

Acting decisively and aggressively on the basis of important knowledge, not just in writing plans but in making all major administrative and instructional decisions, requires a great deal of support from important constituencies and adequate reserves of political capital. And that requires foresight and planning to build support for improvement from the very beginning of the process. Schools and systems must work hard to ensure that reform efforts are not only technically well crafted, but enjoy the kind of broad commitment that can help overcome cultural and political barriers to change. Taking the following actions can help:

1. Free up adequate amounts of “official” time for teachers to share responsibility for schoolwide or systemwide improvement efforts. To the maximum extent possible, teachers should not be forced into false choices between “real” classroom work and participation in “extracurricular” or “administrative” improvement activities. Both must be viewed as legitimate and important activities related to teaching and learning. Of course, actually finding ways to carve out such time can be difficult. But if school reform and improvement are meant to be teaching work, rather than simply administrative work or “committee work,” it is an effort all principals will have to make.
2. Reassure teachers that openly airing evidence on performance, opportunity, and practice gaps is not a form of “gotcha,” but rather a genuinely essential step in helping them do their jobs better so they, in turn, can help more students reach higher levels of achievement. A commitment to transparency in an atmosphere of trust is the result of careful work that takes place beforeany plans are ever written.
3. Involve a wide range of other stakeholders from the outset, including parents, representatives of community groups, and business leaders. Of course, “involvement” can take many forms. Too often, participants from outside the school or district are included simply to meet a requirement and are not full participants who share authority in decision making. But some amount of authority must be broadly shared to ensure collective responsibility and outside support. As one principal in a recent study of high-improving middle schools told researchers from the University of Texas, “When you have authority, you have responsibility. When you share authority, you share responsibility.”¹⁶
4. Share the knowledge essential to full participation in a serious improvement process. That includes evidence related to performance gaps, opportunity gaps, and practice gaps, no matter how embarrassing or uncomfortable such data can be. Including individuals from outside of a school or system is an empty gesture if crucial information is buried or otherwise kept confidential. Sharing information on performance, opportunity, and practice gaps with community members might seem just this side of crazy to educators and administrators who have long survived in an American educational system that rewards exactly the opposite. But it is one of the only guarantees that reforms can be sustained at those inevitable points later on when cultural and political barriers within systems present tough choices between doing what is right and doing what is convenient. Education is not easy. Improving education is even less so. But it is worth doing, and it can be done. Making the effort to build the right foundation for school reform and improvement efforts can make all the difference between failure and success.