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Adam Ford
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Should Flint do this?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20080215/ts_csm/aturnaround;_ylt=Akdu_MxX7nDb.WL.bmHuTXoDW7oF
Chicago - It looks like a typical day at a typical American grammar school: Students proceed in single file down hallways, a class of fourth-graders listens to their teacher read aloud, and students in another class work in small groups on independent projects.
But Andre Cowling, the tall, imposing new principal of Harvard Elementary on Chicago's South Side, shakes his head in wonder at it all. Last year, he says, "this wouldn't have been possible."
Harvard is one of several public schools here to get a top-to-bottom housecleaning in recent years – including replacing the principal and most teachers – in a bid to lift student achievement out of the nation's academic basement. The drastic approach is known as "turnaround," and Chicago is embracing it more than any US city, though it's unproven and is controversial among teachers, many parents, and students.
"It's risky in that it's new and has an untested track record," says Andrew Calkins, senior vice president at Mass Insight, a nonprofit group focused on school reform, and coauthor of a report on turnaround schools. "It's logical in that the other choice is to keep on doing what's been tried before, and we know what the results of that will be. What you try to do if you're Chicago is to minimize the risk and maximize the possibility of a good outcome" by thinking through everything that's needed to improve the climate for learning at a school.
As Principal Cowling sees it, the risk paid off. Until Harvard Elementary went through turnaround, the school was like "Beirut," he says – 50 kids running through the halls at any time, holes in the floors and peeling paint on the walls, fights on or near campus, no order in the classrooms.
"Now, you can tell it's a school," Cowling says.
For an encore, the city is proposing simultaneous turnarounds at eight Chicago schools in the fall: four high schools and four elementary schools that feed into them. Even for a city that already leads the nation in school-reform ideas, the proposal is unusually bold and sweeping. Districts across the US – many with schools facing reconstitution requirements under the No Child Left Behind law – are watching with interest.
"We want to give families the opportunity to have a high-performing option in the neighborhood throughout [a student's] entire education," says Alan Anderson, director of the Office of School Turnaround for Chicago public schools. "There are a handful of schools that just aren't progressing at the rate we'd like them to," he says. "We know we need drastic change. It's not a decision we take lightly."
The eight schools slated for turnaround are among the worst performers in the district: At the high schools, an average student misses at least 35 days of school a year, dropout rates are above 10 percent, and the passing rate on state tests hovers at about 10 percent.
Still, some families wonder whether this will be just another reform that disrupts their kids' lives and replaces teachers they've grown close to, but yields no change in the quality of the education.
Teachers, of course, are upset about a reform that requires a school's entire staff to be let go, even if teachers can reapply.
"What kind of instability are you creating for children coming from environments that are challenging and already have instability?" asks Marilyn Stewart, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. "You're having to recruit and train teachers, and then have another turnover. No industry can survive that kind of turnover of personnel."
Ms. Stewart suggests a less drastic reform, already undertaken in several Chicago schools with some promising results, in which the principal is replaced, but not the teachers.
"We're not resistant to change," she says. "But we're resistant to this kind of upheaval where you're throwing out the baby with the bath water."
Administrators acknowledge the challenge of finding enough high-quality teachers willing to work with poor children in low-performing schools. But recruiting is easier if there's a dynamic principal who can get people to buy into a new mission for a school, they say. It's also one reason Chicago chose a nonprofit, the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL), to manage the turnarounds at several of the schools: the Orr High School campus, made up of three small schools, and two elementary schools that feed into them.
AUSL, which also manages the turnaround at Harvard Elementary, trains and recruits teachers for urban classrooms. Its proposal for Orr, in fact, includes setting up the new high school as a teacher training academy, where mentor teachers would be matched with those just learning.
"Effective teachers want supportive leadership, positive working conditions, adequate resources, and positive interactions with students and parents," says Donald Feinstein, AUSL's executive director. "When you embed that in a school culture and climate, you can attract more effective teachers."
That wholesale staff turnover – giving a new principal the ability to shape who's working for him or her – is the most crucial element to a turnaround's success, says Mr. Calkins of Mass Insight, but it's not the only one. Other key elements are added time for teachers to plan and collaborate, longer school days or school years, clustering turnaround schools so they can learn from one another, local authority over budget and curricula, and support for teachers and administrators from outside the school, such as the district or an outside group like AUSL.
At Harvard Elementary, Cowling had the whole school repainted, moved his office so he was more visible to the older kids, separated the seventh and eighth grades into single-gender classes, and has the teachers work together for five weeks in the summer to map out the school year and start on the same page.
He ended up rehiring just three of the school's original teachers and hired 17 AUSL-trained teachers.
"This wouldn't be possible with the same teachers," he says. "The kids would have come back with new paint, and the pedagogical insufficiencies would still be there."
Cowling, who traded a $130,000 corporate job for a $40,000 teacher's salary several years ago and who knows every child in his school by name, says his students' parents are now many of the biggest supporters of the changes at Harvard. But he acknowledges it was controversial at first.
At a hearing last week on the turnaround proposal for Orr, the district office was packed with teachers, parents, and students, many arguing against the change.
"We are not science experiments," Bianca Davis, a junior at one of the small Orr schools, told the hearing officer.
"On the television, it seemed like you slandered the teachers," added Melissa Winston, a parent, in impassioned testimony. "Society has failed these kids, not the teachers."
That plea to consider the harm to teachers carries little weight with Cowling. The real focus, he says, needs to be on students.
"I hired who I thought would be the very best for our kids," Cowling says. "We have a moral obligation. It took some drastic measures to get this building turned around the way we did."[/url] |
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Sun Feb 17, 2008 10:07 am |
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twotap
F L I N T O I D
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| They must not have a teachers union in Chicago. |
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"If you like your current healthcare you can keep it, Period"!!
Barack Hussein Obama--- multiple times. |
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Sun Feb 17, 2008 10:13 am |
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last time here
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"pedagogical" theres a new word for me 
i think milton was attempting to get to this..  |
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Sun Feb 17, 2008 10:29 am |
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Adam Ford
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| We also have an administrators union that appears to be even stronger. They appear to do an even better job of protecting their jobs and pay than Flint's teachers. |
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Sun Feb 17, 2008 10:50 am |
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last time here
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| i hear you adam. that word "tenure" does appear to have an effect. |
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Sun Feb 17, 2008 10:52 am |
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Adam
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Should the state take over Flint Schools?
Before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans residents would joke that it was hard to determine which local institution was more corrupt and dysfunctional: the Police Department or the public school system. Five years after the storm, however, the city's cash-strapped and underperforming schools are in the midst of a dramatic turnaround. (The Police Department is, well, a much more long-term reclamation project.)
As the city schools have pieced themselves back together in the wake of the storm, they've exceeded the expectations of even the most ardent optimists in the city. Indeed, education reformers are increasingly hailing the once baleful New Orleans school system as a model for other municipalities looking to turn around their own failing schools.
It's an especially remarkable achievement given the state of the Crescent City's schools before the 2005 storm. From 2000 to 2004, enrollment in the schools declined from 77,610 to 64,920. Two long-familiar trends fueled this exodus: Parents were enrolling kids in better-performing private schools; and an increasing number of kids in the New Orleans system were dropping out altogether.
[Which cities are most willing to tackle education reform?]
The state of Louisiana deemed 64 percent of the city's schools "academically unacceptable" in 2005. And their administrative body, the Orleans Parish School Board, was notoriously corrupt, so much so that the FBI initiated an investigation into allegations of fiscal improprieties in 2004.
As a result of that inquiry, the pre-Katrina school board president, Ellenese Brooks-Simms, was sentenced to prison for accepting bribes. Some other former board members have been exposed for rampant fleecing of the system, including stealing school property.
In March 2005, auditors found that the board's shoddy management had bankrupted the system, leading some officials at the state level to begin to push for a private firm to take over the system.
When Katrina hit at the end of August 2005, all of the system's teachers were forced to evacuate. In the weeks after the storm, many families who'd enrolled their kids in the New Orleans schools pulled up stakes and relocated to other cities. In November, the Legislature convened an emergency session to give the state the authority to take over school districts it deemed "academically in crisis." That description fit the post-Katrina New Orleans system to a tee.
[Anxiety still startlingly rampant among Katrina kids]
The state instituted what it called a Recovery School District , placing 107 underperforming Orleans Parish public schools under its control. The schools were, in effect, turned into charter schools, schools run by private organizations. The parish school board remained in control of the 16 schools that performed above the state average standard before Katrina.
Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas recently told Newsweek that "we used Katrina as an opportunity to build — not rebuild, but build — a new school system," a system he described as an "overwhelmingly publicly funded, predominantly privately run school system."
So far, the new system is producing impressive results. The Cowen Institute, an education think tank at Tulane University, recently reported that just 42 percent of New Orleans schools are "academically unacceptable," down from 64 percent before Katrina. Student performance on standardized tests, which once lagged far behind the state average, has increased dramatically as well (though math and reading comprehension scores still have plenty of room for improvement).
Total attendance dropped to about 38,000 students in 2009. These students can now attend any school in the district, regardless of what neighborhood they live in. And individual schools now have the autonomy to hire and fire staff without interference from the parish school board's central bureaucracy.
The new setup has become a talent magnet for professional educators: Ambitious teachers have thronged New Orleans to participate in a historic educational experiment and help rebuild one of America's most unique cities.
Cowen Institute Executive Director Shannon Jones hailed the transformation of the last five years.
"Never has a failing urban public school system experienced the near total destruction of resources and responded with such radical change," Jones wrote in the report's introduction. "While significant challenges remain, the new model of delivering education to the city's youth has begun to yield results. Today, the once academically, morally, and financially bankrupt system is nationally recognized as a potential model for urban school system transformation."
And going forward, it looks as though the system will be able to address its other chronic shortcoming: the lack of resources to attract quality teachers and maintain schools' physical plants. On Thursday, federal officials announced that New Orleans public schools would finally receive $1.8 billion from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to rebuild or renovate 85 schools damaged during Katrina. In announcing the long-awaited lump-sum settlement from the government, Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu proclaimed it "a battle worth waging." "While we would have liked to have received the money sooner," Landrieu added, "it was worth the wait." |
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Sat Aug 28, 2010 11:35 pm |
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