Innovations help districts across U.S. make difference
By CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY
FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER
Third of five parts
In Charlotte, N.C., the best principals and teachers are hand picked to lead the worst schools.
In Washington, D.C., the may or appoints the schools chancel lor.
In New York, Wisconsin and Florida, parents on public assis tance lose a chunk of their welfare benefits if their kids continually miss school.
These are some of the drastic solutions for schools with low stu dent performance, chronic truan cy and other issues affecting achievement. But the innovative changes have made a difference: Students are showing up for class and doing better on tests, and teachers are being held account able for making sure students succeed.
Would any of them work here? Education experts and observ ers say Michigan needs big, pro vocative ideas for turning around its low-performing schools and raising academic performance in general across the state.
Big ideas for Mich. schools
Solutions from other states can aid achievement
By CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY, ROBIN ERB and LORI HIGGINS
FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITERS
As the state considers new standards for statewide testing of students, some also see hope for Michigan’s educational system in the sweeping reforms recently announced by the state. Others see promise in the state’s application for $526 million in Race to the Top federal funds, meant to stimulate innovative school reform efforts.
Still others say Michigan can learn strate gies from other states that have found ways to improve learning and accountability.
Here’s a look at how some of them could work, especially in the state’s largest dis trict, Detroit Public Schools.
BOOSTING ATTENDANCE IN SCHOOLS
On any given day in DPS, 16% of students are absent. The average high school student missed 46 days of school, and nearly 10% of high school students missed more than 100 days of school, according to district data.
Yet the district doesn’t have an atten dance policy, and teachers say that affects achievement.
Keith Johnson, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers, says he favors an attendance policy such as the one adopted in New York, where students are required to attend school 90% of the school year in or der to graduate.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he said, for a deficit-ridden district such as DPS not to have a policy, because state funding is tied to the number of students enrolled.
In addition, under the federal No Child Left Behind law, schools nationwide face sanctions that could lead to a school closing if they don’t make annual progress toward academic and attendance standards.
Michigan should also consider a program under which parents lose public assistance if their children are chronically truant, John son said. That’s what New York, Wisconsin and Florida do, under a system called Learn Fare.
Wisconsin pioneered it in 1988. If a stu dent whose family is on public assistance misses 10 days of school, a monthly monitor ing system kicks in. If that student then has two unexcused absences, his or her family could lose a portion of their welfare benefits. Wisconsin’s program has appeared to close the enrollment gap between dropouts and school attendees by 41%, according to a report released last year by Thomas Dee, director of the Public Policy Program at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pa.
SENDING THE BEST TO THE WORST
In Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the best principals and teachers head to the worst schools.
And that may be the single most impor tant factor in turning around the district’s poorest performing schools, said Ann Clark, the district’s chief academic officer, who calls this strategic staffing “the most excit ing project I’ve worked on — absolutely.”
It works like this: Each year, the district identifies its poorest performing schools and its best school principals. Those principals are invited to head into those troubled schools — along with a handpicked team of seven teachers and support staff — to turn them around.
Principals are tapped based on their ex pertise: A principal with strong human re sources skills might be assigned to a school with a disgruntled or unhappy staff; a principal with expertise in instruction might be sent to a school where students are falling behind in certain skills.
“I have to say quickly we’re not a union state, we’re a right-to-work state,” Clark said. “But no one is forced to go.”
In fact, the initiative, now in its third year, has engaged teachers and school lead ers: “Now we’re at a place where principals want to be designated. … They’re intrigued and want to be part of a turnaround.”
Of 18 urban districts that took the nation wide National Assessment of Educational Progress test as part of a Trial Urban Dis trict Assessment in 2009, Charlotte-Mecklenburg scored best in fourth-grade math and second best in eighth-grade math. The fourth- and eighth-graders in Charlotte’s school district outperform the national average, as well.
ADDING TEACHER ACCOUNTABILITY
Teacher accountability is inescapable at Charlotte-Mecklenburg — teachers and students are linked through ID numbers to an online database. The user’s identity— teacher, student, parent — determines what information he or she can view.
The system is comprehensive — for ex ample, a math teacher can search test re sults to see how his or her class performed as a whole on a certain test or test question, or how a specific student performed. The teacher also can access attendance and discipline records.
A principal can see how students per formed in a particular teacher’s class, which in turn helps measure teacher effectiveness. Tying performance to teachers can be tricky, however, because test results don’t account for the fact that not all students start at the same mark or learn at the same pace, said Sharon Lewis, research director at the Washington-D.C. Council of the Great City Schools. Still, it’s a solid start.
Tying performance to teachers estab lishes goals and tracks who is meeting them and who is not, Lewis said.
“Charlotte was one of the first districts to have a strong accountability system … and each year, they’ve gotten more sophisticated in the way they examine the data,” she said.
DPS expects to have the same online system accessible district-wide by fall, in hopes of using the data to improve test scores and teacher accountability.
The system allows the kind of teacher accountability that the state also is seeking.
Michigan’s Race to the Top application includes plans for a separate statewide data base that would allow the public to see how individual teachers’ students performed.
NARROWING TEACHER CERTIFICATION
Changing the way the state certifies ele mentary school teachers would contribute significantly to improving the quality of teaching in Detroit, said June Green-Rivers, who retired in July as executive director of literacy for DPS.
Currently, teachers can get certificates that cover grades K-5 or K-8.
“But that’s too broad,” Green-Rivers said. What ends up happening, particularly in frequently downsizing districts such as DPS, is that teachers who have taught one grade for decades might end up teaching a grade they have never taught and with which they have no familiarity.
Narrowing the certification — to K-3 and 4-6 — would address that issue, she said.
Green-Rivers said she believes the change is crucial because students who have teachers who are unfamiliar with the grade they’re teaching “are crippled for the rest of their academic career.”
DEVELOPING TEACHERS Under a $39-million contract with Hough ton Mifflin Harcourt, DPS has purchased a system called Learning Village that will allow teachers and parents to access test results and textbooks as well as data from lesson plans and professional development materials.
This should help teachers understand what was confusing to students and what should be done differently in instruction, said Barbara Byrd-Bennett, DPS’s chief academic and accountability auditor.
“This technology is an equalizer,” Byrd Bennett said.
DPS teacher Kimberly Kyff, named Mich igan Teacher of the Year in 2006, says Web based training could work well because professional development works best on an ongoing, consistent basis, instead of once or twice a year.
“The power of online development is that it provides teachers with needed flexibility, removing time constraints,” she said. “Per sonally, I stay abreast of new research through podcasts and other online tools.
Learning new ways to enhance your profes sional repertoire is always a good thing.”
Everyone in the district should be able to access the new system by fall.
Sean Vann, principal at Frederick Doug lass Academy, an all-boys school in the dis trict, said professional development should be consistent and varied. Last month, he sent his staff to spend a day observing teachers at some of the best private schools in the area, including Cranbrook Schools in Bloomfield Hills, University Liggett in Grosse Pointe Woods, the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Bloomfield Hills and the University of Detroit Mercy.
“They were impressed,” Vann said. “They saw that the successful schools are teaching skills and critical thinking.”
He also said there should be an exit exam for every grade, and teachers should be held accountable for their students’ performance.
LETTING THE MAYOR CONTROL SCHOOLS
In Detroit, some have debated whether Mayor Dave Bing should take control of the city’s schools. The mayoral-control model, which did little to improve achievement in Detroit from 1999 to 2005, has shown mixed results nationwide but is credited with con tributing to incremental aca demic gains in places such as Washington, D.C.
The District of Columbia Public Schools’ new chancellor, Michelle Rhee, has been lauded as a take-no-prisoners leader who has challenged unions, fired teachers at underper forming schools and imple mented new rules in daily op erations.
Rather than trying to please several members of a school board, answering to Mayor Adrian Fenty — and having his sup port — has enabled Rhee’s “attitude of just charging ahead,” said Jack Jennings, of the D.C.-based Center for Education Policy.
There and elsewhere, bullishness backed by the mayor may help school leaders plow through bureaucracy and step onto turf that others cannot.
Boston Mayor Thomas Menino has been a vocal schools advocate for years, telling voters in 1996 to “judge me harshly” if the schools didn’t improve. He appoints the school board, and more recently, he pushed for legislation that gives extraordinary pow er to the superintendent to overhaul the worst schools.
In Boston, eighth-grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam have risen by 16%, and fourth-grade math scores have increased by 18% since 2003.
The key might not be so much an issue of control, but that strong leaders share the same vision, said district spokesman Mat thew Wilder. “In any city where you have really educational innovations taking place, you have strong support from the mayor,” Wilder said.
Still, top-down control can be tricky, especially in a state like Michigan, where teachers unions and local school boards have long set the pace for issues such as curriculum. In Detroit, the state Legislature would have to approve a mayoral takeover.
Bing has said he would take control of DPS if Detroiters showed their approval by vot ing in favor of an advisory question on a ballot.
“You get a lot better buy-in when local people have a say in … decisions,” said Jen nings, at the Center for Education Policy.
REQUIRING PRESCHOOL Early childhood experts say a key to im proving academic achievement in Detroit is ensuring that children come to kindergarten prepared to learn. And that means they need to attend a quality preschool program.
Some states are pushing for universal preschool, which would guarantee a head start for every child. Michigan, though, is moving in the opposite direction: Funding for state-run programs was cut this school year.
Still, there might be a way to give more youngsters access to those programs, said former lawmaker Matt Gillard, who is now a consultant with the Lansing-based Early Childhood Investment Corp.
He said Michigan’s pre school programs mostly are separated into three catego ries: programs that are paid by federal Head Start funds, those paid with Michigan Great Start Readiness Program funds and those programs for which par ents pay tuition.
Low-income parents can’t afford some of the tuition based preschools; parents who can afford tuition don’t qualify for high quality schools that take dollars generally reserved for children at risk of starting school behind.
By merging the programs, tuition dollars could help offset some of the costs for chil dren in the subsidized programs. It’s not truly universal preschool, but “we might get close,” Gillard said.
Short of universal pre-school, there’s a need to make sure existing programs have teachers with specific training in early child hood development. That’s because preschool shouldn’t be about babysitting — it’s about laying a foundation for kindergarten, said Paula Wood, dean of education at Wayne State University.
It’s not that children need to know how to read, it’s that they should understand that books hold words and words convey mean ing. And they should know how to weigh options and know that decisions have conse quences, Wood said. “The research is so clear on the long term benefits,” said Karen Paciorek, profes sor of early childhood education at Eastern Michigan University. “It is one of the best things you can do.”
A quality preschool program, Paciorek said, teaches kids how to solve problems and work with others.
One Michigan preschool program has provided some of the best evidence of how much impact a quality program can have on disadvantaged children: Over the course of more than 40 years, research on children who attended the Perry Preschool in Ypsi lanti has found that the students not only were more likely to graduate high school and perform better academically than their peers who didn’t attend a similar program, but later in life, they were more likely to be employed and had higher salaries.
ALIGNING TUTORING AND STANDARDS
Federally funded small-group and one-on one tutoring is offered in many DPS schools, but gets poor grades from parents because test scores have not improved, according to teacher and parent surveys obtained by the Free Press.
The fix is easy, said Wesley Ganson, for mer principal at Trix Elementary in Detroit.
To make effective use of the money and time, the state and school district need to require that the tutoring is aligned with district, state and Michigan Educational Assessment Program test standards. The tutors should also be certified teachers, he said.
In DPS, 43 of the 172 schools must pro vide tutoring services. That’s because the federal No Child Left Behind law requires schools that receive funding for programs for low-income students — but fail to meet federal standards for three or more years — to use a portion of those funds to provide free tutoring.
The fees can cost up to about $2,000 per student per year.
The state approves the companies that can provide the tutoring, and parents choose the company that they want to tutor their children.
It sounds good, but in practice, it hasn’t made a significant difference in achievement or standardized test scores.
“A lot of times, there are people just do ing it for the money and it’s not always the best fit for the children,” said Ganson, who’s also executive director of the DPS Center for Student Advocacy. “You need the cream of the crop to work with these at-risk young sters who are already failing, already behind.”
Detroit schools
Faculty, officials protest testing
Some say Bobb might gain control
By CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY
FREE PRESS EDUCATION WRITER
Teachers, parents and school board mem bers wary of a new standardized test being administered this week in Detroit Public Schools tried to halt the testing Monday.
Some teachers said they were afraid that the test would be used as a political tool to help DPS Financial Manager Robert Bobb lobby the state Legislature for academic con trol over DPS.
“For such a test to have been imposed by a financial manager who is not an educator … without giving anybody else a chance to re view the test, it’s a stick for him to use against the students and teachers to further degrade and then privatize our public education sys tem,” said Joyce Schon, an attorney repre senting some of the teachers. Even though the teachers rallied outside DPS’ administrative offices, the test went on in some schools Monday.
“This is a standard practice across the country,” said Steve Was ko, a spokesman for DPS. “Are the critics, self-fo cused on their adult needs, not interested in knowing what students are learning and using that information to improve teaching and learning? What are they afraid of?”
Bobb, the state-appoint ed emergency financial manager for DPS, is in a political and court battle with the school board over academic control of the district. A Wayne County judge has said academic authority rests with the board, but Bobb has lobbied the Legislature to create a law to give him academic control. School board President Otis Mathis sent Bobb a letter on Friday requesting that he “cease and desist” making academic deci sions, “specifically, administering this bench mark assessment.”
Tracy Martin, the deputy chief academic and accountability auditor for DPS, said the test will be used to determine whether stu dents are progressing toward MEAP standards and the higher standards set by the Na tional Assessment of Educational Progress for fourth and eighth grade.
Without the testing, “we’re kind (of) just going blindly,” she said. “You absolutely need to have regular ongoing formative assess ments.”
Last year, DPS students scored the lowest in the nation in the 40-year history of the NAEP.
Martin said the test will not be used to evaluate teachers or determine good schools from bad. She said students are not expected to set aside time to study for the tests.
Keith Johnson, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers union, said confusion and paranoia would’ve been minimized if the test had been explained to teachers before hand.
| CONTACT CHASTITY PRATT DAWSEY: 313-223-4537 OR CPRATT@FREEPRESS.COM
EVEN THOUGH TEACHERS RALLIED, THE TEST WENT ON IN SOME SCHOOLS.
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