Eye on Leadership
Closing the Achievement Gap - Take a Giant Step

It is the first day of district-wide professional development at Harris Elementary School in Springfield, Massachusetts.  Principal Deb Lantaigne takes great pleasure in announcing to the faculty that she just received this year’s test scores, and they made school wide AYP.   Jubilant teachers, those returning and those new to the staff, applaud each other and specific students whose progress has been a particular focus.  It is the news every faculty wants to hear to energize them for the work ahead.

But the principal goes on to say, “So we have made AYP.  Does this mean we can relax?”   With that she directs her colleagues to a visual, showing a much more detailed story of the work ahead.  Multi-colored circles representing the progress of individual students clearly disclose the number at goal, the number proficient, and the number needing improvement.  From the conversations that follow, it is obvious to Cornerstone partners that teachers can see the faces of certain students in those circles, and while they will be congratulated often for making AYP, they cannot fully celebrate until those circles tell a different story.  

It is the first day of professional development at Harris.   If you peruse the agenda, it is much like professional development in any other school across the country.  Except that with a simple set of graphics about results for subgroups, Deb Lantaigne and the faculty of Harris take a major step toward closing the achievement gap.

Further south in Stamford, Connecticut, a wall of the faculty meeting room at Springdale Elementary tells a similar story.  Every child is represented by a posted note with markings to show interventions used to improve DRA scores.  Each child’s marker is color-coded to reveal teacher and grade.  Grid lines clearly indicate goals and a timeline. Routinely, the leadership and grade level discussions in this room are about the story unfolding on the wall. 

Data walls are becoming common in schools, but what makes this one much more than an addition to the décor?   Principal Shelly Woodson, Assistant  Principal Kathy Cibulskas-Lane, and the Springdale faculty use the wall as a tool for determining how adult work impacts student achievement.  What else is different?  With every discussion, they improve their capacity to analyze the evidence, to reflect on their practices and use what they are learning.  A grade level personnel change has been made as a result. The leadership team has moved from looking at the commonalities among successful interventions to determining the extent to which particular teaching styles and strategies contribute to success.   The Springdale team has also decided that the next wall should make CMT results and interventions more transparent.  Keeping the wall current requires a lot of time and work, but Kathy says she doesn’t delegate it because with each change, individual student needs become fixed in her mind.  Another team might think this investment of time and energy too much to manage, but the Springdale team sees it as an investment in their children—all of them.  With their use of the data wall, they are creating a culture in which giant steps are possible.

Both Harris and Springdale (see “Extreme Makeover” in this newsletter issue), as well as Talladega and other schools throughout the Cornerstone network are developing the disciplines for closing the achievement gap and learning that despite forces beyond our control, districts and schools can make a significant difference by confronting the obstacles within our walls.  Some districts are beginning to see that success does not lie in introducing dozens of initiatives, flying in the “expert of the month,” and overwhelming schools already overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of students who are not meeting standards.  It does not matter that schools have literacy coaches, math coaches, instructional specialists, lead teachers, differentiation coaches, teacher mentors, principal mentors, inclusion teachers, bilingual teachers, and other supports if coaches have no time to learn and coach.  Principals are realizing that improvement of teacher practice cannot be voluntary.  Professional development cannot be episodic.  Accountability (districts holding schools more accountable, principals holding teachers more accountable, the public holding districts more accountable, the federal government holding states more accountable) cannot be something to avoid at all costs.

News on “progress” toward closing the achievement gap for poor and minority students (and significantly raising achievement for all students) is not the good news educators and the larger public hope to hear.  Doing more is simply not enough.  The literature on closing the achievement gap asserts that if we are serious about serving all students well, we must take bold steps, courageous steps, giant steps.   Here is what those who have been studying the gap recommend:

Honestly examine our beliefs and assumptions about children.
Belinda Williams writes in Lessons Along the Cultural Spectrum, “Closing the achievement gaps requires the education community to rethink assumptions, beliefs, values, policies, and traditional practices to create opportunities to educate all children. When viewed through the lens of the majority culture that prevails in schools, the abilities and potential of children who are racial or language minorities, or lower socioeconomic status are often overlooked.  The knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values—the strengths these children bring to the classroom—are often in conflict with those school values.  In other words, what these children know, what they can do, their world view, and what is important to them do not always match what the school wants them to do, how it wants them to view the world, what it considers important. The school and teachers often label this mismatch as low ability or lack of intelligence.  As a result, children who are very capable in other settings are often rendered ineffective in school.” 

Fully implement promising initiatives.
In his essay, So Much Reform, So Little Change, Duke University Professor Charles Payne warns:  “so many efforts at implementing reform in urban systems continue to proceed in innocence, as if implementation were just a matter of bringing good ideas and clear thinking to the benighted.” Districts have become masters of introducing reforms, but rarely fully implementing anything, leaving those at the school level to conclude that either the initiative doesn’t work or some children really can’t learn.

Some of the barriers to full implementation include:

• Lack of time, including time for training, planning, reflection, for key people to exchange information in a timely fashion; competing time demands made by different programs.
• Inadequate instructional supervision of teachers; absence of accountability for instructional programs; fragmented staff development; generalized belief in program failure (We’ve seen programs come and go); resource needs.
• Distrust among parents, teachers, administrators; low mutual expectations; poor communication; “Happy Talk” culture--tendency to put the best face on everything.
• Lack of follow-through, little accountability, inconsistent district support for school change.

External reviewers of Cornerstone say the evidence shows a direct connection between high implementation and student achievement.   When coaches have time to build their own capacity and coach (the equivalent of ½ day daily), when leadership teams develop knowledge and skills to address implementation challenges, when teachers and principals routinely engage in professional learning, using data and addressing students’ varied needs, when districts support schools and hold them accountable for high implementation, students achieve. 

Ensure equity.
Daniel Baron begins his February, 2007 article in Principal Leadership with these words: “Today, there is overwhelming statistical evidence that rather than leveling the playing field, schools actually accentuate the inequities and injustices of society.” It’s not enough to have equity of access, he says; students need equity of rigor. When schools provide this and other key ingredients, he believes, they will “eliminate the predictive value of race, social class, ethnicity, and disability and interrupt past practices that do not serve each student well.” This means principals working with their faculties “to uncover and interrupt the ways that our schools are replicating the social injustices in society and purposefully take action to support the success of student groups that have been historically disenfranchised.”

            Baron believes that the following school attributes create conditions in which all students can succeed:
            • Rigor – This means that students master a curriculum that is complex, ambiguous, provocative, and personally and emotionally challenging – and are evaluated on whether they can apply what they learn in novel situations.
            • Self-study – The school reaches out to multiple constituencies for feedback and suggestions on how to improve.
            • Data-driven instruction – Staff members do more than analyze, reflect, discuss, and debate.  They use collaboration as the vehicle to change their practice. They continuously look for more effective ways to engage all students in their learning.
            • Relevance – This means infusing the cultures, ancestries, and historical contributions of all groups into the curriculum – as well as confronting historical inequities.
            • Relationships – Strong ties between and among students and staff members are based on mutual aspirations and interests, and time is built into each week for professional learning communities to plan for student success.
            • Resiliency – Effective schools can help students recover from misfortune, adapt, reflect, and maintain a sense of humor while staying true to their convictions.
            • Revision – With detailed and supportive feedback from their teachers, all students revise their work until it’s the best they can produce.

Ensure every child has an effective principal and effective teachers in every class, every day.
In a 2005 article of Theory into Practice, Kati Haycock of Education Trust  is quoted, “No single ingredient has greater impact on student achievement than the quality of the teacher in the classroom.  However, not all teachers are adequately prepared to meet the diverse needs of today’s students.  And it is impossible to think about replacing every ineffective teacher with a more competent one.  Instead, attention must be given to finding strategies to assist less successful teachers to improve.”

Also in 2005, Kati Haycock had this to say as testimony to the United States House of Representatives:  “Despite knowing the importance of teacher quality, especially for students with little support for education outside of school, and despite all of the lofty language and public commitments to closing the achievement gap, we systematically assign our most vulnerable students to our least qualified, least experienced teachers. When there are shortages, poor and minority students get out-of-field teachers; as teachers accrue valuable experience, they often transfer into - and are paid more to teach in - the most affluent schools. So high-poverty and high-minority schools tend to have a harder time recruiting quality teachers, and then serve as a revolving door for the novice teachers they help train.”

When principals allow teachers to only volunteer for professional learning, classroom observations, or other forms of coaching, they exacerbate the inequities children experience.  The same is true when new teachers are left to flounder during what can be a challenging first year.  “Highly qualified” can vary in interpretation from district to district.   In some, it may mean that high poverty schools are populated with teachers holding appropriate credentials, but not necessarily the knowledge and skills to teach children well.  A simple exercise for principals and leadership teams already charting student progress is to develop a data chart of teachers, showing years of experience, level of education, professional development experience/history, and professional learning for the year.   Then overlay with  post-its color-coded to show how low performing students are being served.  Also overlay with Cornerstone coach contact time, principal/district observations/school review recommendations and other data. Then look for opportunities for giant steps.

Work for social and economic reforms necessary to close the achievement gap.
In his book, Class and Schools:  Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap, Richard Rothstein writes, “One of the great impediments to effective policies that might enhance more equal outcomes between children of different social class backgrounds is the tendency of educators to think only about school reforms.  In reality, however, for lower-class families, low wages for working parents with children, poor health care, inadequate housing, and lack of opportunity for high-quality childhood, after-school and summer activities are all educational problems.  When a parent’s earned income falls, or a parent loses a job, there are educational consequences for their children. Educators who are concerned about the educational consequences should not fail to take notice of the economic and social conditions that cause poor school performance.”

Rothstein goes on to say in a National Staff Development Council interview with Kati Haycock and Holly Holland, “Teachers are also citizens, as are superintendents, school board members, and school administrators.  And nobody is in a better position to know the damage that the social and economic inequalities in society do to low income children than the educators who see these children every day.  So faculty members have two roles to play.  One is what they do inside their schools. But the other is what they do as citizens, and they need to be much more vocal about these issues that they alone have expertise in.”

If we are serious about closing the achievement gap, we must stop expecting significant progress from minimal effort. Just because we are doing a lot, doesn’t mean we are doing anything different.  Small measures are not enough.   The challenges are daunting: ensuring all children have equitable access to best teachers, the best instruction, the best leaders, the best in educational innovations, and the social and economic conditions that make significant achievement possible.  If we think the goals are too ambitious, we have already gone backwards.  With this article, Cornerstone invites its partner districts to take our conversations about closing the achievement gap to the next level, a level that will require giant steps.

Sources:

Baron, Daniel. “Using Text-Based Protocols: The Five R’s” in Principal Leadership, February, 2007 (Vol. 7, #6, p. 50-51).

Haycock, Kati, Director, Education Trust. Testimony to the Committee on Education and the Workforce, United States House of Representatives. "Closing the Achievement Gap in America's Public Schools: The No Child Left Behind Act," September 29, 2005.

Payne, Charles.  “So Much Reform, So Little Change: Building Level Obstacles to School Reform.”Northwestern University, 2001.

Rothstein, Richard.  Class and Schools—Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap.  New York:  Teachers College Press.

Williams, Belinda.  “Lessons Along the Cultural Spectrum.”  Journal of Staff Development, Fall, 2006 (Vol. 27, #4, pp. 10-14)