These days whenever someone in K-12 education manages to vault the yawning
achievement gap, a quiet stampede ensues among policymakers hoping to pinpoint
what went right and graft it onto every failing school in the country.
Most recently, Minnesota's education reformers have been parsing a list
of 15 schools that posted impressive results despite serving impoverished
student bodies. They're wondering what went right.
Or, as one quipped,
"What's the secret sauce?"
Earlier this month, alongside the grim news that the latest round of
statewide standardized tests show Minnesota has made precious little progress on
closing the gap, the Star Tribune published four column inches of good news.
Eye-popping
results at 'beat the odds' schools
Under the headline "Beating the
Odds," the paper printed two charts, naming the top 10 high-poverty metro-area
performers in math and reading. The lists included some eye-popping numbers and
endless food for thought.
Seven of the schools on each list were
charters and the remaining three on each were St. Paul public schools. Five
schools made both lists. At seven of the schools, most students are learning
English.
So, how'd they do it?
From longer school days to
providing social services to families, each of the odds-beaters listed combines
several approaches to drive student achievement. All tout the quality of their
teachers and leaders, noting that they are all aligned with the particular
school's mission.
And all offer something extra, too.
Cedar Riverside Community
School, for instance, is located inside the Minneapolis public housing
complex of the same name and has strong relationships with the East African
immigrant families who live there. St. Paul's Dayton's Bluff
Elementary provides medical and other services to families in its East Side
neighborhood, while north Minneapolis' Harvest Prep has an extended school day.
"High-performing schools tend to look different from other American
schools," said Jon Bacal, head of Minneapolis
Public Schools' Office of New Schools. "There's usually a sense of
urgency."
Beyond that, if there's anything resembling secret sauce to be
gleaned from the list, it's that many of the schools engage in near-continual
assessment of student performance using so-called growth-model tests, which track the progress of
individual students as opposed to schools.
Test info helps tailor
individual lesson plans
Instead of using the resulting information
to grade teachers or schools, the high-performing schools hand the data to teams
of teachers who use it to tailor lessons to individual kids.
This, in a
roundabout way, explains why charters are disproportionately represented on the
lists, several policymakers familiar with the schools in question
said.
It's not so much because they represent a superior model but
because as independent schools, they can pick and choose approaches depending on
the needs of a given student body — or even a single student.
Case in
point: the Hiawatha Leadership Academy, which Bacal helped found in 2007
and which earned spots on both beat-the-odds lists. Not to be confused with
Minneapolis' nearby Hiawatha Elementary, the academy serves 310 impoverished,
mostly minority children in the city's Nokomis neighborhood.
Hiawatha
started out serving kindergarteners and first-graders and added a grade each
year. This was the first year it had third-graders, the youngest students
required to take the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments.
More than 70
percent were rated proficient in math, 4 percent more than the statewide average
for all grades. Some 68 percent read proficiently, compared with 72 percent
statewide.
Hiawatha's leaders weren't surprised. In years past, the number of students
performing at or above grade-level on their own internal tests has more than
doubled — even including special-education students.
One reason:
Hiawatha's pupils spend 40 percent more hours in school than other kids. "It's a
key part of the formula," said Bacal. "It's adding the equivalent of a number of
additional years."
No one 'magic bullet'
But more
time isn't a magic bullet, he cautioned.
More instructive in his view,
Hiawatha shares a number of traits researchers have identified in other
high-performing schools. At the top of that list are teachers and leaders who
are effective, cohesive and in alignment with the school's mission, he said.
Hiawatha's teachers start work at 7:15, leave at 5 p.m. and remain
accessible by phone until 8:30 in case there are homework struggles. Their pay
is partially based on student performance, and teachers work together to mine
test data to determine what is and isn't working for each child.
According to Director Randal Eckart, testing data also are crucial to
the success of Twin Cities International Elementary School. Its 600 East
African students this year outpaced state averages in math. Almost all are
English-language learners.
"They all have to pass their tests in English,
even though they speak another language at home," said Eckart. "They have to
work doubly, triply hard."
Each Twin Cities International pupil has an
individual learning plan, and progress is measured frequently throughout the
year. When goals aren't being met, the school's teaching team is quick to
intervene.
"We group and regroup kids based on their reading scores,"
said Eckart. "We measure the effectiveness of what we teach and try new
strategies until we find what works. We're constantly in motion, changing the
way we teach."
(An interesting aside: Because family income usually is
an indicator of parental education levels, it might seem paradoxical to find so
many schools catering to East African immigrants on a beat-the-odds list. But
Somali and Oromo parents are often highly educated and poor.)
Al Fan is
executive director of Charter School Partners, a local nonprofit working to create
high-quality charter schools. Data-driven decision-making is one of the three
pillars of the organization's "Good to Great" campaign, he said.
"There's a widely held saying in the education community that schools are
data-rich and information-poor," he said. "We want more than one year's growth.
The only way for every kid to grow more than one year is to know where those
kids are at."
Using data to fine-tune instruction in this way has been
under discussion in Minnesota for about three years, according to Charlie Kyte,
executive director of the Minnesota Association of School Administrators. Educators have
long known that conventional instruction may reach only 70 percent of students
but have had little to guide them when it comes to reaching the rest.
Even in the last couple of years, tests have grown much more
sophisticated, Kyte explained. Working in small groups known as professional
learning communities, teachers can figure out what is and isn't working for
particular students.
"The fourth-grade teachers at XYZ Academy are
combing the data from the third-graders to see where they are, what they're
missing," he said. "It's part of a national effort to be more scientific about
how kids are learning."
Charters aren't unique in using data this way, he
added. Both the state and federal departments of education have been pushing all
schools to gather more information and make better use of it. "The smaller the
school, the smaller the number of students in a class, the higher the
flexibility," Kyte said.
Do the numbers vindicate charters?
Not
necessarily, in Fan's opinion. "The beating-the-odds list shows the potential of
the charter model to deliver better results," he said. "But we're not satisfied
with these results. We know better is possible. Sixty-five percent is good, but
the best of the best are reaching 80-plus."
Beating the odds isn't
enough, he added. "It's not enough anymore to provide an option," Fan said. "My
new definition of choice is when the child truly has the skills to decide what
they want to do in life. … We want to raise the bar on what success looks
like."
Beth Hawkins writes about schools, criminal justice and other
topics.