School Improvement: Ideal Versus Reality

There is always an inordinately long gap between when students take the state assessment at the end of the school year and when state assessment results are reported. After a year of hard work, both teachers and students are anxious to know if that hard work has paid off. Sometimes teachers feel an overwhelming sense of accomplishment and pride when their students’ scores are high. Other times teachers are crushed by low scores that belie their hard work and dedication. But no matter what the scores may be—even if they are among the top for the district or even state—school administrators always want teachers to improve. If only there were some magical formula! Improvement undoubtedly requires every member of the school community to work hard each and every day. At our school, we have been told time and time again to focus on the standards. However, sometimes improvement can seem random, and it is difficult to know what particular strategies actually lead to growth in student learning. In an attempt to bring order to school improvement initiatives, Boudett, City, and Murnane (2013) have outlined an eight-step process. The rest of this blog will provide a detailed description of this eight-step process and then contrast it with the school improvement process mandated by the Miami-Dade County Public Schools. In writing this blog, I hope to highlight the contrast between an idealized version of the school improvement process and the reality that many educators are experiencing.

The Ideal: Boudett, City, and Murnane’s School Improvement Process

The school improvement process outlined by Boudett, City and Murnane (2013) is comprised of the following eight steps (p. 11):

1) Organize for Collaborative Work

2) Build Assessment Literacy

3) Create Data Overview

4) Dig into Student Data

5) Examine Instruction

6) Develop Action Plan

7) Plan to Assess Progress

8) Act and Assess

Their first step, “Organizing for Collaborative Work,” (p. 13) requires schools to build the foundation for school-wide collaboration by making sure that certain structures are in place. This means, first and foremost, that a leadership team should exist to initiate the process. It also means that the school must commit to an improvement process with specific steps. This process will then serve as a roadmap and will help to ensure that everyone stays on track. Boudett et al. argue, “By breaking the work into discrete steps, the process makes an overwhelming prospect feel manageable” (p. 15).  Of course, Boudett et al. undoubtedly think their own eight-step process will lead to improvement, but they say that simply committing to a structured process—whether or not it is theirs—is essential. Moreover, it is important that the school sets aside time for teams of teachers to meet to undertake essential school-improvement tasks, such as analyzing data or devising strategies to improve teaching and learning. Without such time, the school improvement process will never get off the ground. Even if it does, there will be no follow-through. For this very reason, many schools now have common planning time. Whether schools carve out time for common planning, faculty meetings, or some other format (such as professional learning communities), Boudett et al. “have found that meeting at least twice a month for collaborative planning seems to work well for schools” (p. 19). However, even if schools meet on a consistent basis, there is no guarantee that anything productive will happen. As anyone who has ever attended a faculty meeting at the end of a long work day can verify, naysayers will quickly derail any true chance of improvement if some ground rules are not set up beforehand. Having an agenda with clear objectives and even following protocols with specific steps and roles for participants can ensure that time spent working together is truly productive.

           

Once the foundation is set, it is important to build the school staff’s assessment literacy (Boudett et al.’s second step). After all, much of the work of school improvement will center around interpreting test results, and if the staff does not know how to do this—or how different types of tests yield different information—then the school may be making decisions based on a faulty or incomplete understanding of the data.

After the staff has a basic assessment literacy, it is time for step three, which involves taking a closer look at all of the data collected in the building and creating a data inventory. After all, every school collects mountains of data, and this data can be extremely useful if you know where to look and what to look for. But rather than looking at the data in a haphazard way, it is very important to identify a focus area. Boudett et al. advise, “The [focus] area should be directly related to instruction and broad enough so that all staff members engaged in the conversation see themselves playing a role in addressing it” (p. 68). Once a focus area has been identified, the school will be able to look at the data they have in a more targeted way. They can also begin to ask questions about the data they are examining. Boudett et al. write, “The underlying questions should also drive every aspect of the presentation of the assessment data and provide a rationale for why it is important to present the data one way or another” (p. 71). For example, the following questions may all be valid depending on the school’s needs:

Do you want to emphasize time trends? Are you interested in cohort comparisons? Is it important to analyze student performance by group? Do you want to focus the discussion on the students who fall into the lowest proficiencies or those who occupy the highest? (p. 71).  

After deciding on a focus area and creating some type of data display that highlights the focus in a meaningful way, it is important to “allow staff members to make sense of the data” (p. 83). It is not enough to just explain the data to them. Rather, the staff must take ownership of the data, and the only way to do this is to have them actively working with it. After looking at data, the staff should come up with a priority question that “is focused on educational matters, not on other student-related issues that might be outside your school’s control” (pp. 84-85). After all, if an issue is outside of the school’s control, then there is no chance any effort on the part of the school will improve the issue. In crafting a priority question it is helpful to center the question around “a single learning standard, subgroup of students, or type of work” (pp. 84-85).

After looking at data and coming up with a priority question, educators proceed to step four, digging into the data. This step requires teachers to ponder the “learner-centered problem.” What this means is that it is not enough to know that students are not performing well. Rather, it is important to understand—or to at least attempt to understand—what led to this lackluster performance. No rash steps to improve a student’s performance should be implemented until this problem is thoroughly analyzed. Although you cannot fully get into a student’s head, looking at appropriate data and triangulating the story that different data provide should give teachers insight into why students are struggling.

Once you have looked at data and have gained insight into what might be leading to problems, you now need to examine instruction (step five) because it is instruction that has the power to change outcomes. Boudett et al. write, “The primary focus has to be on what we have control over—what happens at school. This is not an easy task. Despite their hard work, teachers don’t often see great improvements on state tests, and they don’t think it’s possible to work any harder” (p. 112). Part of examining instruction means developing a vision of what “effective teaching looks like so you can assess whether what you’re doing now fits or doesn’t fit that vision” (p. 118).  However, one must not label teaching “effective” at random. Boudett et al. warn, “When looking internally to develop ideas of effective practice, the key is to ground the discussion in evidence” (p. 119). If there is no evidence that anything happening at your school site is effective, it may be time to turn outward by “visiting another school or attending a professional conference, or you can bring it in, by learning from consultants or reviewing research” (p. 120).

Once the school has a picture of effective instruction in mind—whether that picture came from within the school, outside the school, or a combination of both—it is absolutely essential to developing an action plan (step six), which means “explicitly committing to a particular strategy or set of strategies for instructional improvement and writing up a formal action plan is important” (p. 134). Educators must “agree on what your plan will look like in classrooms” (p. 141), “put the plan in writing” (p. 144), and “assign responsibilities and time frames” (p. 144).

In order to track how the action plan is affecting student learning, the school must implement Boudett et al.’s step seven, which is deciding on a series of assessments to administer over the course of the action plan. Boudett et al. explain, “It is important to establish short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals so teachers have targets to aim for and benchmarks by which to assess their students’ progress” (p. 162). After all, without these assessments, it will be impossible to determine if the strategies implemented as part of the action plan are working.

After all of this planning, the school must then embark on step number eight, which entails actually following through with the plan and then evaluating whether or not the action plan has been effective. Sometimes educators must face the harsh reality that their plan of action was not effective. However, in most cases, students will have benefited to some extent. In any case, Boudett et al. encourage schools to “celebrate success, revisit your criteria and raise the bar, and plan how to keep the work fresh and ongoing” (p. 185). The process is cyclical, so working through all eight steps does not mean that the process is over; it just means that it is time to review what has happened and to start a new phase of the process. The task of school improvement is never really over.

The Reality: School Improvement in the Miami-Dade County Public Schools (MDCPS)

Each year, schools in MDCPS are required to create a formal School Improvement Plan (SIP). This year, the SIP was due at the end of September. In theory, this would have given teachers about a month to approach school improvement in a structured way. In theory, teachers should have had some time to look at student data, determine an area of focus, and begin analyzing this focus area in a meaningful way. Perhaps schools could have had two or three faculty meetings to undertake this work collectively. However, in reality, the school, as one unified group, did not discuss school improvement at all. Instead, department chairs were given less than a week to set goals and commit to strategies for their respective departments.

As the reading coach for my school, I was tasked with leading the Reading/Language Arts Department in selecting goals for school improvement and identifying strategies that would help us meet those goals. I was also required to pinpoint a series of steps we would take and identify individuals who would be responsible for monitoring those steps. Finding an hour to meet with all members of a department was a challenge. Meeting as a school was a sheer impossibility that did not even cross anyone’s mind. In terms of meeting as a department, it came down to one teacher-planning day the very day before the SIP was due. Unfortunately, many of the teachers had taken the day off, so many members within my department had no input at all over what went into the SIP. Furthermore, many teachers were angry that they had to “waste” their teacher-planning day on doing “paperwork,” which generated negative energy and blocked real discussion of what would truly benefit students. The task shifted from what do our students need and how can we help them to what will our administrators count as acceptable completion of this task. After about half an hour, something was hastily created and agreed upon. The paperwork was mailed to the principal, at which point she cut and pasted all the goals and strategies of the respective departments into one document and sent it off to the district office.

We did not look at any data to complete our component of the SIP.[1]

We did not share our goals and strategies with anyone outside of our department.

We have not revisited, discussed, or even so much as mentioned the SIP since that one half-hour meeting that took place at the end of September.

The Bottom Line

School improvement is clearly not happening the way it is supposed to in MDCPS. At a superficial level, the School Improvement Plan required by MDCPS bears some resemblance to Boudett et al.’s eight-step process. However, upon deeper inspection and reflection, there is very little chance that MDCPS’s SIP will lead to genuine improvement. If districts are serious about school improvement they cannot require schools to rush through a mandated school improvement process. What is needed is time. We need time to analyze data, time to reflect, time to discuss strategies, time to observe each other, time to research strategies that are supported by research and time to assess our students and evaluate whether or not they are making progress. Given how busy teachers are, I do not see how a school-improvement process such as the one recommended by Boudett et al. could ever get off the ground unless it is given absolute priority status by the school administrators. And this means that the school should—as recommended by Boudett et al.—commit to one improvement goal and not require different departments to select different goals, find their own strategies and develop their own action plans. It also means that the goals and strategies must be the focus of ongoing discussion at the school level. Again, this means that administrators must make the goal and strategies a priority and make sure that time is spent at faculty meetings working on these goals, revisiting these goals, and evaluating progress toward these goals.

If administrators commit to working on a school goal as an absolute priority, then I do believe school improvement is possible. However, the district as well as school administrators must do its best to make sure its initiatives do not supersede the goal of school improvement. Something always seems to get in the way of actual school improvement. Even if we genuinely wanted to embark on Boudett et al.’s process or something like it, our chances of success would be thwarted. For example, two of this month’s faculty meetings were canceled because our school—just like every other school in MDCPS—was required to train teachers on a new component of their evaluation, the Deliberate Practice Growth Target (DPGT). Common planning meetings within the Reading/Language Arts department are now wholly dedicated to disseminating information learned at monthly coach meetings (which I attend) or district-led professional development sessions (that selected teachers within my department attend). There is simply no time left to do the work of school improvement in a systematic and meaningful way. The district requires schools to create an improvement plan but then requires them to do so many other things that no time is left to actually implement the plan.

Until the district actually grants schools the time to do school improvement work, and until administrators make it a priority, school improvement will remain an unattainable ideal for MDCPS and any district that functions in a similar manner.

References

Boudett, K. P., City, E. A., & Murnane, R. J. (2013). Data wise: A step-by-step guide to using assessment results to improve teaching and learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press

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[1] I am tempted to say that no data was available for us to work with, for FSA data had not been released at that point in the school year. I must admit, however, that we could have used i-Ready data from the previous school year to make data-based decisions. However, to analyze i-Ready in a meaningful would have required time that we were not given.

Why Students Struggle to Read and What We Can Do to Help

Many students struggle with reading. However, there are many different reasons why this might be the case. For some students, the texts they read in school are simply too difficult. In fact, even students who read at grade level may struggle with content area texts. Disturbingly, “research shows that many classrooms use textbooks written two or more years above the average grade level of their students” (Allington, 2002, p. 17). The problem is exacerbated by the fact that many content area teachers follow an “‘assign and assess’” method of teaching, leaving students largely to their own devices to make meaning of texts that are far too difficult for them (Allington, 2002, p. 18). This is especially the case with older students, for whom little in the way of reading support is offered. Allington (2002) notes, “Policymakers have targeted almost no attention or funding on efforts to improve the reading proficiencies of students in grades 5-12—the very grades that need improvement, according to recent international comparisons” (p. 16).

However, content area reading is not the only problem. Some students struggle to read in every class. And many students receive failing scores on state reading assessments. In the name of helping these students (and improving test scores), many schools lump such students into one homogeneous group of underperforming students and assign them a one-size-fits-all intervention program, usually a program that focuses on phonemic awareness and decoding. Unfortunately, not all students who struggle to read need help with these foundational skills, so structuring intervention around these areas will not help every student. It may not even help most of the students included. Dennis (2009) warns, “When students are not taught according to their individual abilities and needs, but instead are taught based on the premise of a one-size-fits-all instructional program, we are not providing them with opportunities to climb the literacy ladder” (p. 288). In this lose-lose situation, students get stuck, teachers become frustrated, and test scores stagnate.

In exploring why students struggle, Caldwell and Leslie (2009) delineate three different areas of potential reading difficulty: word identification, fluency, and comprehension. But even within these categories, great variation exists. For example, a student struggling with word identification may not recognize that “letters represent sounds in a systematic way” (Caldwell & Leslie, 2009, p. 16). Even if a student does understand the letter/sound correspondence, the student’s rate of decoding may be “very slow and effortful” (Caldwell & Leslie, 2009, p. 16). Or the child might be a skillful decoder of short words but struggle with longer, multisyllabic words. Thus, a one-size-fits-all model does not make sense even if all children in a particular class are struggling with word identification. Comprehension, another potential area of difficulty outlined by Caldwell and Leslie (2009), seems particularly complex. Applegate (2006) presents eight different “comprehension profiles” to explain common patterns of comprehension difficulty. For example, some students may be what Applegate (2006) calls “literalists” (p. 50). These students run into problems because they think that any and every answer can be found in the text. They look for answers to be explicitly stated and resist using their own background knowledge and/or common sense. Higher-order questions that require students to make inferences are extremely troublesome for these types of students. Nearly the polar opposite of literalists, Applegate’s “quiz contestants” provide extremely logical answers to questions teachers ask. Unfortunately, their answers usually have little if anything to do with the text in front of them. Obviously, the same intervention will not work for literalists and quiz contestants. As Dennis (2009) states, ““Struggling young adolescents demonstrate complex, heterogeneous reading abilities requiring significantly different instructional interventions” (p. 290). Literalists must be taught that some answers require them to use their own background information and logic whereas quiz contestants must learn to understand and reference the text in front of them.

Regardless of the particular reasons students struggle, teachers can do something to help. Allington (2013) writes, “We now have an essential research base demonstrating that virtually every child could be reading grade level by the end of first grade” (p. 520). Does this sound too good to be true? Allington continues by saying that “almost no schools in the United States have anything in place that much looks like what the research says young children need to become engaged readers” (p. 520). Schools continue to waste time, money, and energy on teaching material and methodologies that don’t work. For example, as mentioned earlier, many intervention programs emphasize decoding although “no significant positive effects for decoding emphasis lessons were found for students, including struggling readers, beyond first grade” (p. 521). Other problems involve pushing teachers to follow reading programs that have not been shown to help students or to have paraprofessionals work with struggling students instead of trained reading specialists. Allington suggests getting rid of workbooks, worksheets, and computer-based reading programs so that money can be invested in research-based strategies led by skilled teachers. However, these recommendations run counter to what is authorized by many school districts and would therefore be difficult to implement.

If we really want to help our struggling students, it is imperative that we respect our students and existing research. Continuing to use programs, materials, and other resources that are not aligned to our students’ needs or research is a waste of time, money, and effort. It is time for schools to make smart decisions that can actually make a difference in students’ lives. Schools could be making these decisions—and even saving money in the process.[1] The question is: why aren’t they?

References

Allington, R. L. (2002). You can't learn much from books you can't read. Educational Leadership, 60(3), 16-19.

Allington, R. L. (2013). What really matters when working with struggling readers. The Reading Teacher, 66(7), 520-530.

Applegate, M. D., Quinn, K. B., & Applegate, A. J. (2006). Profiles in comprehension. The Reading Teacher, 60(1), 48-57.

Caldwell, J.S. & Leslie, L. (2009). Intervention strategies to follow informal reading inventory assessment: So what do I do now? Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Dennis, D. V. (2009). “I'm not stupid”: How assessment drives (in) appropriate reading instruction. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 53(4), 283-290.

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[1] Allington (2013) estimates that schools could save between $250,000 and $500,000 per year if they put his advice into practice (p. 527).