Handout 4

Focus 1: Academic Expectations, Resources, and Accountability

Examples

Philadelphia: Top to Bottom Reform.

The Philadelphia Board of Education has contributed to keeping a sweeping school improvement initiative on track long enough for test scores to rise. School board members joined with the mayor, city council, and the teachers' union president in publicly supporting Superintendent David Hornbeck's sometimes controversial agenda, known as Children Achieving.

Since 1995, the school district has set high academic standards, tested students with the rigorous Stanford Achievement Test, Ninth Edition (SAT-9), and implemented accountability measures for schools whose students aren't improving. The school district also is working with teachers to improve curriculum, instructional practices, and community and business involvement.

Along the way, the district has faced serious challenges from local naysayers and state officials. The united stance of the school board and local officials has enabled the district to move forward with its changes. Now, with two years of rising test scores, attendance, student supports, and volunteerism under its belt, the reform measures have a greater chance of sticking. Test scores on the SAT-9 rose in the three tested subject areas (reading, math, and science) in the three grades tested (fourth, eighth, and eleventh) over two years.

"Through the Children Achieving agenda, board members over the last few years have had a more regular framework for addressing student issues," says Board Member Pedro Ramos. "There is a lot more focus on results in student achievement and less on the inputs. Data has become an increasing part of decision making. If we didn't have data at this juncture, there wouldn't be any reason to proceed."

In making decisions, the board is much more focused on improvements that will make a difference for all students. "Now the board is focused on systemic improvement, not just good programs," Ramos says. "We want to know, 'Is it something that will make a difference for 213,000 students?'"

Part of the early controversy about the Children Achieving agenda was poor communications and community involvement. When board members and district leaders talked about the ten-point agenda, "people's eyes would glaze over at the fourth or fifth point," Ramos admits. "If you don't get your message out clearly, you let other people frame your message. Now we're a lot more assertive and strategic about communicating."

San Francisco: Focused Priorities.

School board members in San Francisco, California, have been instrumental in pushing a number of academic improvements that are contributing to steadily rising test scores in the 64,000-student district.

For example, board members directed the administration to reduce class sizes (long before California mandated it statewide), institute full-day kindergarten, lengthen the school day for middle school and ninth-grade students, implement an arts program for elementary schools, and invest in gifted and talented education. "The board has said, 'These are our priorities. Find the money,'" says Board Member Jill Wynns. As a result of these measures, test scores on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills were up for the sixth year in a row in 1998.

The board has supported a series of forward-thinking measures, including local school control that evolved into systemic changes for entire schools. The board also supported reconstitution, or widescale staff replacement, for failing schools for several years. Now, the school district is working collaboratively with the teachers' union to continue to improve the schools.

A school board member also was instrumental in gaining public support for a new initiative aimed at improving student achievement among African- Americans. This initiative features school and community supports for black students, such as tutoring centers based in churches and public housing complexes.

Still, despite the good things happening in San Francisco, "There is not a coherent planning process," Wynns says. "San Francisco has sustained a reform mode for a long time. But it's hit or miss. That's not all bad, but I'd like to see a more broad-based plan."

Pinellas County: Continuous Quality Improvement

The 115,000-student school district in Pinellas County, Florida, has taken an unconventional route to school improvement: the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award process. The Baldridge philosophy of continuous improvement has its roots in business, but education organizations are beginning to use it as a tool to improve schools.

In Pinellas County, schools are using quality principles to raise student achievement—the ultimate goal of the quality process—by as much as 30 percentile points on standardized tests in a year’s time. With help from business partners, educators at every school have learned about developing a mission, benchmarking, setting goals, using data to evaluate progress, satisfying customers, and continuing to improve. Even elementary students in classrooms define their mission, identify individual goals in reading and other subjects, benchmark their progress using performance data, and draw flowcharts to analyze problems and identify solutions.

The school board and district are collaborating on the quality initiative with the district’s two bargaining units, the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association and the Pinellas County Quality Academy, which trains board members, teachers, and administrators in the district and elsewhere.

The president of the Pinellas teachers’ union asserts that the quality process has helped turn "random innovation" into a coherent, systemic approach to school improvement.

School board member Jane Galluci agrees. With quality training in leadership, the board now operates as a leadership team that focuses on making decisions to improve student achievement. "The dog and pony shows are gone," she says. "When people come before the board now, they come with hard data about how their request affects student achievement, high performance, or any of our strategic directions."

"Dealing with research and data makes decisions easier and more clear-cut," Galluci adds. "Now we are complaining about the time we spend on things that aren’t related to our strategic directions. We need to spend our time on student achievement."

The board now works hard to keep public meetings focused on student achievement issues and free of personal bickering, using skills they learned at the quality academy. Board members attend twice-monthly "affinity workshops" to deal with issues in a more informal setting. No decisions are made at these meetings, of course, but board members discuss their differences and seek common ground around their goal of student achievement. In public, they rate their performance after every school board meeting with "pluses" for good work and "deltas" for negative incidents.

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