School Law

Educational Turnaround Strategies

A. Union City and the Department of Education

To facilitate school improvement in order to close the achievement gap, in 2013 the New Jersey Department of Education set up seven field-based Regional Achievement Centers (RACs) that work with failing schools. Special attention is paid to the priority school ¹ in implementing eight turnaround principles to improve student performance.² These principles were adopted largely from the experience of Union City. ³ Union City is the one Abbott district that significantly narrowed the achievement gap. HSPA proficiency went from 35-40% for the general population, excluding special education, to 75-80% for the total population, including special education. ⁴ The Union City administration worked closely with the state to help the state develop the RAC program for the priority districts. The state intends to duplicate the results in Union City, to “fundamentally alter New Jersey’s education system to make teacher effectiveness and student achievement the driving forces behind every policy and practice.”⁵

B. The Reform Curricula

The solution to the achievement gap embraces monumental reform of curricula. The “use of the reform curricula significantly narrowed the gap between whites and underrepresented minorities, while increasing the performance of both groups in all categories.” ⁶ The most important indicator of low achievement is poor curricula. Mathematics typically has the lowest pass rates in proficiency while it is the greatest avenue for success. The reform curricula involve more hands-on activities, data analysis and lab skills, and more experience with problem solving and higher thinking order skills. It relies on strong implementation teachers, those committed to the reform curriculum. Continuous professional development of teachers develops the strong implementation teacher.

The strong implementation teacher, firstly, has strong content knowledge. With strong content knowledge, the teacher is not afraid of answering questions and can engage students instead of just lecturing with a prepared speech. Secondly, a strong implementation teacher has strong generic teaching skills to organize well-structured active learning classrooms. Lastly, a strong implementation teacher needs strong pedagogical content knowledge. He or she has to know what kinds of preconceived notions students have and to dispel them, for instance, in a science class, a battery does not always put out the same current as people often assume.

Give and take engagement with students, hands-on discovery activities, concept building and development of higher order thinking typically happen less frequently in environments with black students. Minority students are general given directions and step-by-step methods for solving problems. “Compounding this gap in teaching quality is the fact that the impact of teacher expectations is three times as great for blacks as for whites and . . . for children from low-income families.”⁷ Lower expectations for children of color is what Martin Haberman calls the “pedagogy of poverty.” ⁸ The pedagogy of poverty is more important than socio-economic status, which at most accounts for only one-third of the achievement gap.⁹

C.The Pedagogy of Poverty

Accountability in the pedagogy of poverty is build upon expected roles— teachers responsible for maintaining class discipline, students are responsible for following precise directions, principals are responsible for a safe building, and parents are responsible for knowing that their kids are in school. The endless problems, dress code, school security, race relations, are viewed as obstacles to learning. The high implementation teacher makes these into teachable moments, a time to facilitate learning rather than to impose rules. The issues are “transformed into the very stuff of the curriculum.” ¹⁰ Issues concerning religious and cultural groups different from their own are discussed rather than suppressed, as they “are issues that children and youths reconsider constantly in an effort to make sense of the world its relationships, and their place in it.” ¹¹

Students under the reform curricula are driven to foundational concepts, rather than constant isolated facts and procedures. Rather than simply following directions, students are involved in selecting resources, how to present their work, and even which topics to study, to help them prepare “to make choices and to deal with the consequences of those choices.” ¹² Students often have opinions over what should be done and are encouraged to publicly defend their positions, so that they can compare “ideals with reality in their own lives and in the lives of those around them.” ¹³ Students are asked to think “about an idea in a way that questions common sense or a widely held assumption, that relates new ideas to ones learned previously, or that applies an idea to the problems of living.” ¹⁴

D. Interruptions, Vision, and Dewey

The successful school leader has vision. “In failed transformation, you often find plenty of plans and directives and programs, but no vision.”¹⁵ He or she is in the halls and classrooms. Invisibility is the most common reason why one directive or another is ignored. He or she limits loudspeaker and other classroom “[i]nterruptions, as well as inefficient transitions from one activity to another, [that] make it difficult to sustain a coherent lesson throughout the class period.”¹⁶

Dewey wrote in 1938 about collateral learning and the implicit curriculum. “The way of formation of enduring attitudes, of likes and dislikes, may be and often is much more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history this learning. For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.”¹⁷ Students who are taught history as a collection of facts, science as value neutral, and language as a conduit of communication are not likely to learn the frameworks and vocabulary that would allow them to re-conceptualize these politically and historically grounded patterns of understanding.¹⁸

Most importantly, the strong implementation leader and teacher have to understand how to use data. “Good questions must be crafted before any data is gathered. The questions should not assume the answer.” ¹⁹ Data has to be driven by constant assessment. However, we cannot use the data to harm the very students we want to protect.

“To rely on a one-time state-test snapshot, given the overwhelming evidence that the strongest predictor of standardized test scores is socioeconomic status, would relegate districts, such as the three state-operated districts, with huge concentrations of low-income students to permanent state operation. . . . Most schools with large concentrations of students from entrenched poverty will rank much lower without regard to how effectively they function.” ²⁰

Teachers have to believe in their students and themselves. “Teachers with a high sense of efficacy have high expectations for student performance.” ²¹

The more a teacher believes in his or her ability to help students, the more students will achieve.

E. The Priority School

Teachers, in general, have a tendency to pour through a curriculum and to fly through a pacing guide. The priority school will discard courses driven by covering ground in favor of a climate driven by data, collecting, disseminating and acting upon its analysis, to meet the state standards. The high implementation priority school focuses on the “big ideas” of each discipline, like the concept of ratio in mathematics. It does not just simply use test results as a cut-off for determining which students need to take a remedial course or for placement, but for continuous intervention. Each individual class is wrapped around the data, which is constantly updated. Instruction is then tiered to determine the appropriate instruction for each student. Classes are broken into groups and those groups are constantly regrouped. Instruction is differentiated among the groups in each class..

The district with immigrant students can learn from the experience of Union City with large numbers of immigrant students. It used Point of Entry, a student online program in their native language. The program identifies where students stand academically when they enter the school. Some student might have had little formal schooling in their native country. The district then determined student interests. If, for example, if a 15 year-old student found to be on a first grade reading level is interested in sports, he was given a book about sports on a lower reading level, rather than a first grade book made for little children. The district maintained a library of high interest books written on different levels in each classroom to intervene with immigrant children. The list of books is included in the curriculum.

The high implementation priority district will focus on writing and higher order thinking skills. Every class has to spend at least 40 minutes a week on having students write and express themselves under timed conditions and using a rubric. All departments collaborate with language arts. It uses a standardized assessment in every grade. It uses the data to intervene with students so that student deficiencies are made available to the teachers. Say, for instance, the annual standardized test showed that some students did poorly in number sense. The curriculum for the next year would be modified to work on that one cluster in the class with those students.

The high implementation priority district purchases the full battery offered by NJ Ask or another provider to be used in every grade, so that results include a breakdown of scores into clusters for each student. Reports are then disclosed to teachers and they are shown how to use them. The teachers analyze the patterns in the data. Coaches are hired to help teachers in the grouping and remediation. Groups are refined after the first grouping, after the teacher gives his or her first assessment.

The high implementation priority district uses district benchmarking, every 8 to 10 weeks, a multiple-choice test fed into a modern ScanTron or other devise to spew out data about which questions are missed. These assessments are aligned to the state standards to modify curriculum, which is scoped and sequenced to the standards. What is important is not the data, but what you do with it. The data tells teachers how to target instruction. The assessments include problems not yet taught in addition that that which was already taught. Students are told that some material will be covered later on but they should still try their best to correctly answer the questions. For example, at the end of January, an assessment is given based on the material that will be taught in February, and over that which was taught in January and before. Teachers are given lists of class percentages for each standard and questions answered correctly, and data on each individual student. The whole class is regrouped after data is hand delivered to teacher, emailed, and posted on a central district database. Teachers give their routine assessments and quizzes to modify the regrouping of the students.

High school subject supervisors are in-house, assigned to a single school, and meet with teachers every week to help in the process. They give mini-lessons to help teachers in presenting materials to one group of students or another depending upon what the data indicates. They modify the curriculum electronically to help implement the results of the data and help the teachers with intervention. They are instructional leaders and the link between the program and the teachers. They spend time in each classroom every day as an almost constant presence, and hold meetings with teachers to discuss how the teachers intervened and how they used the data to present material to each group in the classroom. They work with the technical staff to design electronic programs for the students to use and to make professional development in-house and weekly, planned only after the weekly analysis of the data and coordinated with the teachers.

The most important difference between the high implementation priority district and all others is the abandonment of textbook driven curriculum. Supervisors do not even look at the textbook as they write the curriculum, which is constantly updated, again driven by data. The curriculum has different strands for example, core, bilingual, special needs, and enrichment for highest achieving students. The curriculum includes sample problems for each of the components. Teachers design their lessons for the different groups in their classes. Groups include students from each strand. Students are given rubric exemplars and there is complete transparency in what is expected.

The bilingual curriculum involves teachers giving students problems while explaining the meaning of words in open-ended questions. As students get used to the kind of questions they need to answer HPSA style questions, they become more familiar with the vocabulary needed to help them pass the math section of the HSPA and need less support. Algebra I material is introduced in sixth grade and all students take pre-Algebra in seventh grade. Smart Boards have been found to be especially conducive for ELL students, as the imagery has enhanced their understanding.

The principal and senior teachers and administrators know what will be asked on the HSPA and the curriculum is designed to build those skills. Assessments give them previews of how their students will do on the NJ Ask and ultimately on the HSPA. The high implementation priority district maintains an electronic database of problems. Data, good instructional support in the building and strong instructional leadership capacity makes the school into a success. Collaboration is cultivated among the staff and faculty. Ultimately, teachers take ownership for their own students’ achievement.

The district holds distinct HSPA class periods during school and after school.²²

It uses peer tutoring by honors students who have excelled in a subject area. They are given other students to tutor. Students are placed into after school programs funded by the Supplemental Educational Services grants. They are given extra points, up to ten, on their final grade for attendance in this program. The after-school program is rigorous and is not used for an ad hoc homework help or drop-by help session. It is data driven with specific curriculum and goals.

People often dismiss the achievement gap noting that plenty of poor people in the early twentieth century achieved far and wide without special funding and help. Indeed, “for children of immigrants in particular, American public schools have served as quintessential agencies of acculturation.”²³

But the children of today cannot be compared with the immigrants of old who became successful in American society. The immigrants of today often come from countries, or regions, that place low cultural value on education, including those from Puebla, south of Mexico City. “The immigrant children most notably at risk are the Mexicans. It is the presence of a single large group, so far below the others in skills, that distinguishes today’s from yesterday’s second generation.”²⁴

Students today often remain connected to their culture. In the old days, people got off the boat and were here for good. They were cut off from their old culture. Today, the old country is just a two-hour plane ride away.