How Will Next Year Be Different?

Even before the final grades are in for the spring of 2010, many student schedules for the year are already set in stone.  That’s too bad.  If we expect the 2010-2011 academic year to be one of improved student performance, we must first ask, “How will next year be different?”  If we have the same schedule and use the same interventions, same assessment practices, same teaching strategies, and same leadership decisions, why should we expect student results to be different?  Here are seven decisions you can make now to improve student success for next semester:

1. Change the schedule to allocate more time to literacy.  Just today I learned of yet another high school that was bemoaning the poor literacy skills of its students, despite its claim to be implementing a reading intervention program.  Some of this school’s 9th and 10th grade students are reading on a 5th grade level, are facing multiple failures, and will likely drop out of school.  What was the school’s “reading intervention” commitment?  Forty-five minutes a day – the same amount of time spent in every other class to make one year of gains for students who are already reading on grade level.  Despite the overwhelming evidence from turnaround schools that time – two or three hours a day – and focus on literacy are essential, the administrators of this school did not believe that people would “buy into” such a radical schedule change.  I wonder what they would do if their bus drivers did not “buy into” traffic safety or their cafeteria managers did not “buy into” kitchen hygiene.  If more administrators, policymakers, and teachers would think of literacy as a health and safety issue, then they might be willing to make essential, if unpopular, decisions to change the schedule.
2. Change teacher assignments to insure that all students have an equal opportunity to learn from our best teachers.  In the Balridge Award-winning Jenks School District in Oklahoma, teachers took the lead in creating effective interventions for students in need of assistance.  These students received more time with teachers.  Additionally, experienced and expert teachers who had previously taught Advanced Placement courses were willing to take on the greatest challenges in the school system.  The result?  Their “lab class” intervention students had a lower failure rate than the “regular” classes.
3. Change assessments.  As the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results make clear, annual reading and math testing has not advanced educational progress in any significant way.  Overwhelming evidence on effective change for students, adults, and organizations confirms that feedback must be accurate, frequent, specific, and constructive.  How could you improve classroom, departmental, school, and system-level assessments next year so that they are more accurate, frequent, specific, and constructive?
4. Change toxic grading practices.  Perhaps it’s too much to hope that schools will embrace effective grading practices, but can we at least agree to stop the most discredited, most toxic, and least defensible practices?  Those toxic practices include the use of zeroes on 100-point scales, the use of averages to determine final grades, and the wildly inconsistent practices that allow five different teachers to view the same student performance and award grades ranging from A to F depending solely on the teacher’s idiosyncratic grading policies.
5. Change wasteful time allocation practices.  School leaders cannot expect teachers to do more if administrators are not first willing to stop wasting time.  Do not let this school year end without every staff member completing a “not to do” list for next year.  Items on the list might include meetings held for the purposes of announcements (lecturing doesn’t work for adults any better than it does for students); one-shot workshops; disorganized transitions; and classroom activities, projects, and lessons that did not result in improved student learning.  Don’t expect teachers to cram more into their schedule next year if you are not first willing to take collective responsibility for taking specific things off the table.
6. Change the way you look at data.  While every school is loaded (or perhaps overloaded) with data on student performance, very few view learning communities are looking at data in a way that assesses the teachers and administrator practices as carefully as they assess student test scores.
7. Change professional learning activities.  At The Leadership and Learning Center, we recommend the “Seven to One Rule,” suggesting that for every one day of professional development seminars, schools should have seven days of implementation at the classroom and school level.  That means that professional developers must be willing to get out of the auditoriums and hotel meeting rooms and into the schools.  If we cannot translate ideas from theory into action – and that means in the classroom while students are present – then we should not waste time talking about the theory in the first place.

It’s not too late . . .

There is still time to make the current semester better.  See the recent Reeves Report to learn how.

To read a fascinating article about education reform in the New York Times of May 23, 2010, click here.