Why Can't Any High-Poverty School Become High-Performing?

Submitted by guest bloggers Kathleen Budge and William Parrett ("Tough Questions for Tough Times," October 2009 EL) 

If one school can overcome the powerful and pervasive effects of poverty on student achievement, shouldn't any school be able to do the same? 

Yet the vast majority of high-poverty schools in the United States continue long traditions of underperformance. Calling for dramatic turnarounds, Secretary of Education Duncan has recently targeted some 5,000 schools for immediate attention.

Still, hundreds of other schools offer a compelling testament to success—high-poverty, high-performing schools such as Dayton's Bluff Elementary in St. Paul, Minnesota; Lapwai Elementary on the Nez Perce reservation in Northern Idaho; Port Chester Middle in West Chester County, New York; Granger High in eastern rural Washington; Taft Elementary in Boise, Idaho; and PS 124, a K-8 school in Queens, New York—each with 60-95 percent of their students receiving free or reduced-price lunch. Check them out.

These schools build and maintain their successes by creating positive relationships among staff and students and focusing their work in three primary domains: building leadership capacity; focusing on student and professional learning; and fostering safe, healthy and supportive learning environments. They have also eliminated the all-too-common practices of setting low expectations for low-income children and blaming students or their families for low performance.

More than 30 years ago, EL published an article by Ron Edmonds ("Effective Schools for the Urban Poor," October 1979), the Harvard professor who inspired the effective schools movement. Edmonds wrote,

Helping ELLs Acquire Academic Content

ASCD Express is looking for short, 600–1,000-word essays on the theme "Helping ELLs Acquire Academic Content." The theme description is below, and guidelines for submissions are here. Send us your submissions by October 14, 2009. 

Well-developed ESL programs don’t necessarily take care of the needs of English language learners (ELLs) who have transitioned into mainstream classrooms. Once out of nuts-and-bolts language programs, ELLs still need linguistic and academic support based on a detailed understanding of students’ language development. How can a teacher faced with students at different levels of language proficiency meet everyone’s needs? This issue will explore and explain strategies for content and academic language acquisition using instructional strategies aimed at language development and the broader personal engagement of ELLs.

My Back Pages: A Brief History of Differentiated Instruction (1953)

Educators have been working to differentiate instruction in mixed-ability classrooms since long before Carol Ann Tomlinson's day, although this work hasn't always been described as the familiar "DI." In December 1953, Educational Leadership devoted an issue to the theme "The Challenge of Individual Difference."

Real DI junkies can peruse the whole issue, with articles such as "Matching Ten Reading Levels in One Classroom" and "Teaching the Individual Adolescent," but the casual historian would be well-served to check out the lead article, "Adjusting the Program to the Child," by Carleton W. Washburne.

Read the article: Adjusting the Program to the Child (PDF)

Washburne takes the reader through a short history of reform efforts aimed at making education more individualized, beginning with the efforts of charismatic educator Preston Search, of Pueblo, Colo., and proceeding through the work of Frederic Burk, who "started a movement to make textbooks self-instructive and enable children, systematically, to progress according to their own ability." From the Project Method to ability grouping, Washburne's history shows how evolving understanding of learning and development shapes educators' efforts to meet the needs of all students.

H1N1 and Continuity of Learning

It’s clear the H1N1 flu pandemic will pose significant challenges for educators this school year. In this month’s “Is It Good for the Kids?” column, ASCD Executive Director Gene Carter emphasizes that in addition to prevention and monitoring efforts, schools must consider how they plan to support continuous learning, both for individual students who are home for extended periods of time with the flu and for the whole student body if the virus spreads widely and forces school closures.

“Some estimates indicate H1N1 could infect half the U.S. population this fall and winter, which translates into considerable classroom disruption and absenteeism,” Carter writes. “Students in the same class could end up in wildly different places in the curriculum. Meanwhile, entire classes could fall behind if their teachers are out sick for several days.”

He suggests educators form professional learning communities to help them work together to assess knowledge and skills when students return to school and develop plans for instructional next steps.

Along these lines, ASCD is conducting a live, one-hour Web seminar on H1N1 and continuity of learning. On Wednesday, September 30, at 4:00 p.m. EST, Ann Cunningham Morris, ASCD’s director of professional development, and John Brown, ASCD author and faculty member, will provide educators with tools and resources to address the varied learning needs and gaps students may have after their time away from school due to H1N1-related illnesses or school closures. Register for the seminar today.

The session is free and will address questions such as:

• What role does formative assessment play in determining returning students' learning needs?

• How will classroom instruction need to change to address varying student needs?

• How should teachers manage classroom instructional changes in a collaborative way so that they are supporting each other as professionals?

Do you have questions about H1N1 and continuity of learning that you'd like addressed during the Web seminar? Share them here.

EdBlog Watch: Tween Insights

Engaging, tech-savvy, and relatable, Heather Wolpert-Gawron's blog, Tween Teacher, quickly earned a spot on my RSS reader after I discovered it. A middle school English department head, Wolpert-Gawron has a knack for sharing valuable tips and insights through anecdotes that draw you into her school and life.

For example, a recent post demonstrated how the popular phenomenon of Facebook quizzes could be translated into a unique lesson plan—complete with links to online tools that can help make this happen and instructions for low-tech alternatives. She describes how this can foster student ownership of work and create differentiated assessments, but not before sharing the results of several personality quizzes she took during the commercial break of So You Think You Can Dance.

Other posts comment on iPhone apps useful to classroom teachers, the genre-mixing Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and the concern over how "sexting" could affect ed tech advancement. Read her blog at http://tweenteacher.com/.

Formative Assessments Transformed My Teaching

Formative assessments—what Popham defines as "a planned process in which teachers or students use assessment-based evidence to adjust what they're currently doing"—changed the way Deirdre Grode teaches.

Instead of one grade at the end of a project, student are evaluated, and self-evaluate, throughout an assignment so that both teacher and student can see where adjustments need to be made. As a result, Grode's instruction is more targeted, and students progress to the next lesson with the skills they need to be successful.

These planned, periodic check-ins can take many forms, and help students and teachers tune into their metacognitive processes, as Grode demonstrates with a lesson on gender stereotyping in this month's  In the Classroom with Deirdra Grode: Transforming Teaching.

How have you used formative assessments in your classroom? What worked and what didn't?

Deirdra Grode is a 7th and 8th grade social studies and language arts teacher at Hoboken Charter School in Hoboken, N.J. She is also the 2008 ASCD Outstanding Young Educator Award winner. Her monthly column appears in Education Update newsletter.

Back-to-School Becomes Back-to-Students

This week, two special back-to-school editions of ASCD SmartBrief reflect on the big education stories of this busy summer, with the infusion of federal funding and proposed national standards dominating the headlines.

This fall, we'll continue watching how federal dollars flow, how U.S. education fares under new Senate leadership, and how schools respond to H1N1, among other issues.

The real stories though, are happening in your classrooms. ASCD President Linda Mariotti notes in today's special edition of SmartBrief,

"We cannot claim to be educators by virtue of our backgrounds or our teaching, but rather by our students and their learning."

Carnegie Report Calls for a Revolution in Adolescent Literacy

A Time to Act, the final report released last week by the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s Council on Advancing Adolescent Literacy, calls on education leaders to restructure schools, particularly grades 4-12, around literacy. For example, the report advocates for hiring teachers skilled in literacy instruction across content areas, building adolescent literacy training into preservice and ongoing professional development for teachers and principals, and using and maintaining statewide data systems that inform all literacy instruction.

Capitalizing on A Time to Act requires active support from the federal government. The report suggests putting more money (via Title 1 or creation of a separate fund) toward disadvantaged middle and high school students; supporting common core standards (like these); and backing the draft reading legislation currently kicking around Congress, which proposes $1.2 billion toward literacy in grades 4-12 (currently funded at $35 million per year under the Striving Readers program).

Though adolescent literacy instruction is prime for more research and development, A Time to Act underscores the importance of teaching reading within the nuanced context of each subject area, and beyond the current concentration on decoding skills in grades K-3.

Why Creativity Now?

Why Creativity Now? A Conversation with Sir Ken Robinson

In "Why Creativity Now?" creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson dispels the myth that giving precedence to creativity in education will result in unstructured curriculum or initiatives targeted to a select content or students.

Creativity is a disciplined process that produces results: You can't be creative if you don't do something, says Robinson. And along the way, you need to evaluate how well your ideas are working—it's not just about coming up with new ideas, he adds.

A policy for creativity in education needs to be about everybody, just as education for creativity is about the whole curriculum, not just part of it, he says.

The pace of change in our world and economy coupled with the threat of the shrinking scope of curriculum and methods to accommodate standardization make now a perfect time to champion creativity in education.

Robinson says you can assess creativity—it just takes some extra thought. How have you checked progress of students' development of creativity skills?

(This interview also available in audio.)

Accountability vs. 21st Century Skills

Guest post by Terrence Clark, Superintendent, Bethpage Union Free School District, Bethpage, N.Y.

Many educators are eager to move into the post-NCLB world where tests are not the sole measure of a school or a student. The framework developed by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills offers a picture of what such schooling can look like. But particularly in states that haven't yet embraced this framework, we face a challenge: how do we implement the Partnership's goals and ideals while assuring our constituents that we will continue to do well on NCLB assessments?

In Bethpage, N.Y., we have the luxury of good assessment scores, but we felt our students needed and deserved more. We instituted an optional program of voluntary after-school, evening, weekend, and vacation activities (described in my article, "21st Century Scholars," in this month's EL). Our students and teachers were hungry for something relevant and meaningful, and we've seen a burst of creativity from both students and teachers in response to the new programming.

Have you wrestled with the challenge of giving students 21st century opportunities while meeting state accountability standards? Would our approach work in your district?

Common Core Standards Update

Today at ASCD's LEAP Legislative Institute, Gene Wilhoit, executive director of CCSSO and leader of the Common Core Standards Initiative, spoke with ASCD members about the Initiative's work to develop K-12 reading and math standards. He emphasized that the standards will be internationally benchmarked and backed by evidence that shows student mastery of them leads to preparedness for higher education and the workforce.

Wilhoit's other key points:

• Fewer, clearer, higher. According to Wilhoit, the standards will be useful to classroom teachers and accessible to students, parents, and the general public. They also will prepare students for life after K-12, which he said means focusing on key learnings, concepts, and cognitive skills instead of introducing more content.
• Content + cognitive. In addition to outlining key content that students must understand, the standards will incorporate an emphasis on cognitive skills so that students are able to apply what they learn and creatively problem solve.
• Assessment. Wilhoit referenced the U.S. Department of Education's $350 million collaborative grant that, next June, will go to states that decide to take on the work of designing assessments aligned with the common core standards. Wilhoit raised questions about how many states would have the capacity to do this work, whether the states would design one or more assessments, and which vendors the states would choose to support the work. Wilhoit also expressed an interest in turning the current assessment system upside down by beginning with local assessments that could feed into state accountability systems.

Wilhoit said the Initiative's target release date for the draft English and math college- and career-readiness standards is later this week. They'll be posted on www.corestandards.org, and there will likely be a 30-day public comment period. The reading and math K-12 standards should be issued by the end of the year.

In the meantime, ASCD formed a committee in March to help recommend an organizational position on national standards. The group's report is expected in the spring, if not earlier.

What do you think about common standards? As an educator, what will it take for the standards to be useful for you, which Wilhoit indicated is a key goal?

Believing In and Motivating Every Student

ASCD Express is looking for short, 600–1,000-word essays on the theme "Believing In and Motivating Every Student." The theme description is below, and guidelines for submissions are here. Send us your submissions by October 2, 2009. 

Motivating students starts with believing that every student in your class can be successful. Even though acting on the high expectations teachers should have for students—in the academic arena as well as social and behavioral areas—presents challenges, it's a moral imperative that all schools must strive to fulfill. This issue shares strategies, innovative efforts, and sound advice for reaching students at both the academic and personal levels to help teachers and administrators better engage and encourage students to fulfill their potential to excel. Topics will include best practices for diverse classrooms and special populations.

Staying On Message

Obama's address to U.S. schoolchildren dominated education news last week, and likewise, it was a big topic at last night's kickoff of ASCD's LEAP Legislative Institute.

Author and journalist Gwen Ifill fielded questions from educators concerned that, in the past week, a universal message about the importance of hard work and staying in school was drowned out by political ideology. The big education story quickly became the hype surrounding the speech, not the speech's message itself. Ifill shared her frustration, urging not only media to be responsible in covering important education stories but also educators to help students parse between opinion and fact.

LEAP participants are charged with bringing important education issues, like the dropout crisis, ensuring ESEA will be reauthorized with full funding, and closing the achievement gap, to their representatives during this week's scheduled Capitol Hill visits.

What are the big education stories in your district, and how do you make sure they are heard?

Whole Child Podcast Preps You for H1N1

Jerry Weast, Montgomery County (Md.) Public Schools (MCPS) superintendent, leads a district of about 142,000 students. Last spring Weast's district got an early taste of H1N1 and had to temporarily shut down a school that serves 1,600 students. MCPS's strategy going into this fall's flu season? Remain calm and connected. In this month's Whole Child podcast, hear Weast and our panel of experts discuss preparations and concerns for this year's flu season.

With about 200 nurses to those 142,000 students, there has to be a lot of interagency collaboration to monitor the sick, address the concerns of the worried well, and constantly communicate with all levels of the community. Fortunately, MCPS is well-connected to parents and its education community via e-mail and Web resources, and they've been working all summer to seal up any gaps in communication and ensure that messages make it home over multiple mediums to a community that speaks a range of 123 languages.

The advent of H1N1 has also created a unique opportunity for federal health and safety officials to collaborate with school communities, says Theresa Lewallen, ASCD's managing director of Constituent Services and the liaison to the federal government agencies handling H1N1. In addition to guiding schools on preventive measures and maintaining learning continuity, these groups also need to help schools balance high-stakes accountability mandates with the potential for lower attendance rates this flu season, Weast says.

Many questions linger, and the flu, by nature, is unpredictable, says registered nurse Linda Davis-Alldritt, president-elect of the National Association of School Nurses. We know that kids 6 months to 24 years old have been the hardest hit by this flu, and we know that schools will be dealing with H1N1 on top of regular seasonal flu illness, she says. Aside from that, schools are planning responses but are also alert to any emerging patterns.

Visit ASCD's H1N1 resource page to stay on top of developments relevant to the K-12 community.

Multiple Measures, but What Kinds?

ASCD Express is looking for short, 600–1,000-word essays on the theme "Multiple Measures, but What Kinds?" The theme description is below, and guidelines for submissions are here. Send us your submissions by September 18, 2009.

Teaching to tests rarely promotes good instruction and basing all decisions on a single test is unwise. But if many assessment measures are acceptable, how can we make sure that schools are accountable? What roles do teachers, principals, superintendents, and others have in designing and implementing balanced assessment systems? Topics in this issue will include the connection between formative and summative assessments, assessment that promotes learning as well as measures it, the value of national and international assessments, and training in assessment practice.

21st Century Skills: The Challenges Ahead

21st Century Skills: The Challenges Ahead

"The skills students need in the 21st century are not new," authors Andrew J. Rotherham and Daniel Willingham establish at the outset of their article, "21st Century Skills: The Challenges Ahead."

What's new is how central these skills have become to individual or collective success, and that's why, they say, schools must be deliberately designed for 21st century learning.

Students need to be able to practice using skills like critical thinking and information literacy in the context of content knowledge central to a particular subject. Teachers need better training and support to facilitate student-centered approaches to pedagogy. And assessments need to be fine-tuned to evaluate the development of thinking skills (the good news is this can be done, the bad news is it might not be scaleable.)

It's not about skills that are novel, it's about teaching these skills more intentionally and effectively. But without better curriculum, better teaching, and better assessments, these authors warn the 21st Century skills movement will do little to make these critical skills universally well-taught.

How is your school, district, or state approaching these challenges?

Bonus: Rotherham and other experts comment on the P21 movement at the National Journal Online.

Showing the Speech?

Fueled by talk radio characterizations and "artless" curricular suggestions from the Department of Education (DOE), Obama's speech (planned for online broadcast today at noon) to school children became quite the political football last week. Since this story broke loose of its teapot, the DOE has reworded the reflection activity accompanying the speech, and the officials have assured that the speech will focus on working hard and staying in school—it won't be a pitch to sway kids politically.

Most schools are opting to show or make the speech available to students, with parents and guardians making the call about whether their kids participate. Marc Cohen, principal of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Germantown, Md., and 2009 ASCD Outstanding Young Educator, recently wrote that he's "embarrassed to admit just how much time I've spent planning for and responding to concerns about the President's speech to our nations' children." He adds,

Newspaper headlines talk of outraged communities and stepping over the lines of power. The pundits opine about using our children for political gain. As for me, I just want my students to hear the most powerful man in the world talk about the importance of staying in school and getting a good education. I want my African American students especially to see a vision of success within their grasp if they answer the President's call to take their education seriously.

Cohen is one of the many administrators who has decided to show the speech, making clear that parents need only ask if they want their kids to opt out.

What about your school? Have you had to deal with fallout over the speech, and what was your ultimate decision? If you're showing the speech, will teachers incorporate it into lesson plans or keep it as a stand-alone activity?

The ABC's of the XYZ's

Guest post submitted by Marilee Sprenger, professional development consultant and adjunct professor at Aurora University, Aurora, Ill.

The students who were born into this era of technology have been dubbed "digital natives," and those of us who are trying to catch up and keep up are "digital immigrants." It goes beyond just a name. Baby Boomers (you know who you are!) and Generation Xer's are teaching Generation Y's and Z's. It sounds complicated, but it goes something like this:

Generations Y and Z survive and thrive by being digitally connected. They communicate globally, and most schools don’t provide the stimuli they want. On the other hand, their people skills are questionable as face-to-face communication is not a priority. Some show signs of Internet addiction, ADHD, and depression, possibly as a result of spending up to eight hours per day using some form of technology.

In my article in this month's Educational Leadership ("Focusing the Digital Brain"), I list some ways adults in digital natives' lives can honor their need to be digital and at the same time create engaging activities in which students interact face-to-face with others.

How do you connect with your digital enthusiasts?

Let Me Entertain You?

As I head back to school in a brief two weeks, Art & Science of Teaching Chapter 5 ("What Will I Do To Engage Students?") falls open and asks me to consider the basic question: How can I get students hooked on what's going on in my classroom? Marzano suggests some time-honored traditions backed up by research: using games, inconsequential competition, physical movement, pacing with a logical pattern that kids understand, providing unusual information, allowing kids to discuss themselves, and the kicker for me: teacher enthusiasm.

Stuck in My Head:

Marzano lays it out in the very first few sentences of the chapter. Engagement is "capturing students' attention in a way that enhances their knowledge of academic content"—and this becomes both the gold standard and the big prickly burr in my side for the entire conversation. It sent me scurrying back to a lively conversation I had last year with educator bloggers dy/dan and TMAO on content versus delivery:

Dy/dan: "Engaging a classroom on a daily basis requires more than just some superficial adjustment to classroom form. You've gotta bring great, diverse content daily and, unfortunately, there exists no tool, no shortcut, nothing else to do the job but the blunt application of profound creativity in the direction of challenging content standards."

TMAO: "[but] a lot of the time my content ain't that great. I'm teaching 14-year-olds short vowel sounds. That content sucks. But I can change the form to make it engaging, change the product so you don't feel like you're dumb when you're 14 and still spitting out short-e, and so on."

Dina: "If I scan a page of a vocabulary workbook into the computer, convert it to PDF, and add digital fill in the blanks, my kids may be "motivated" to work on it—but it's still the same damn workbook that has no basis in effective teaching practice, flexible problem solving, or language acquisition research."

My point: games, TPR techniques, unusual responses and so on are indeed useful for creating engagement, and especially useful when you need to teach thrilling content like "short e" vowel sounds. But they never, ever, take the place of finding and creating relevance. Relevance self-generates the student engagement we seek.

Zhao Stirs Debate Over Standards

ASCD author and Michigan State University professor Yong Zhao's opinions on global competitiveness, national standards, and accountability, among other education issues, have recently garnered coverage in the Washington Post, Education Week, and the Detroit Free Press: 

• Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews cites Zhao's book as evidence that the U.S. education system is still far ahead of the Chinese education system, especially in terms of producing creative thinkers.
  
• An Education Week article discusses a video in which Zhao argues that the current reforms in American education hamper creative and critical thinking.
  
• A blog post on Dangerously Irrelevant highlights important points Zhao made during a presentation at this year's School Administrators of Iowa Conference.
  
• In an op-ed in the Detroit Free Press, Zhao criticizes the K-12 national standards movement as potentially leading to "irreversible damage." (He also previously guest-blogged here at Inservice on the same topic.)

Zhao is the author of the ASCD book Catching Up or Leading the Way: American Education in the Age of Globalization. Zhao is critical of a U.S. education reform agenda that he says

• Limits student talents to math and reading achievement.
• Stifles creativity and diversity of talents by instilling a single view of worthwhile knowledge.
• Discourages innovations in schools by forcing educators to focus only on the standards.

Have reforms produced similar effects in you school?