District Administration - April 2011 - (Page 28)

Conversations Jerry Weast Advanced Placement tests, which is triple what we were doing in 1999. There is evidence all the way up and down the line. Of our kindergartners, 90 percent are ready, reading on the running record at a level 6 or greater, which on our trajectory, means they are on track for college readiness. Our 25 high schools are in the top 3 percent in the country, according to Newsweek. And no district has more schools in the top 100 than we do. And these are large, very diverse, comprehensive high schools with 1,800 to 2,000 students, not small or magnet schools. We’ve been visited by the last three presidents. President Obama asked a group of children who were highly impacted by poverty if they wanted to go to college when they got out of school. All of them automatically raised their hands and yelled out that they did. MCPS adopted a value chain approach to the K12 continuum to provide a logical framework for strategic choices. Weast: One of the things we discovered Weast assists students in sorting school supplies donated for less fortunate children in MCPS. The supplies were distributed during the Back to School Fair, which attracted more than 10,000 families in August. On the same day he announced that he would retire at the end of the 2010-2011 school year. along our way is that many of the textbooks, supplies and materials were not designed to work with each other and they don’t create a coherent pathway. The writing program and the reading program and the science program could actually be good programs by themselves, but if you put them all together, they’re not coherent. And they’re using multiple principles of pedagogy. So we had to fix all of those structural kinds of things. We also found that we had to offer a lot more support to our teachers and the leaders within the building. We developed programs for how to select leaders within the school system and give them the proper support and the proper training, and we developed a four-year program of training for our leadership and a two-year follow-on training. For our teachers, we found different ways to select them, put them in a pool, distribute the pool to the children whose schools were most impacted first, meaning the schools with high numbers of eco28 April 2011 nomically disadvantaged children, and also give them support in the buildings. We created the position of staff developer—coach, if you will—whose job was to help teachers within a given building so they had somebody to turn to and say, “I don’t know,” and there would be no repercussions. They had a better-trained principal who was trained to be an educational leader. We had a common language and a common database that we used throughout the entire district. We had absolute things that predicted vertically how a child would do and be prepared not only to graduate, but to go to college and get through college. We also created different ways of scheduling, with a scheduling university for all of our principals in which they learn how to schedule differently so teams of teachers will have time to talk to each other, because we found that our employees felt isolated. They didn’t have enough chance to interact with each other and teachers are the best teachers of other teachers. With awareness of teacher quality on the rise, and the bar set as high as it is at MCPS, how do administrators handle teachers who do not make the grade even with extensive support? Weast: Even after we scheduled differently some employees either improve or find another profession. Together with the unions we created consulting teacher positions. We went at it by not trying to get people or put people down, but to find out what we could do to support them, help them get more engaged, and help them gain a better understanding about teaching and learning. And if they weren’t successful, we involved the staff developer, the consulting teacher and the principal. If that was not successful, then they would go in front of a peer review and assistant panel consisting of eight principals and eight teachers. The teacher would either be given more targeted support or a choice to exit the classroom. That’s how we were able to exit nearly 500 people over the last several years, probably more people than exit many other large systems in America, without the acrimony that usually goes with the exit—and with the support of our teachers’ unions. Your reform initiatives are well known for using technology as an accelerator in realizing high expectations for student and organizational performance. How have these systems been a game changer for the district? Weast: In order to accomplish what we wanted to accomplish, and squeeze it within the six-hour-day, 184-day year that we have, we had to have a tremenDistrict Administration and put in place the embedded staff developers, we found that we needed to help

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - April 2011

District Administration - April 2011
Contents
From the Editor
Letters
News Update
Labor Relations
Administrator Profile
District Profile
Conversations
Superintendent Staying Power
Helping STEM Take Route
High-Stakes Cheating
Are Your Graduates Succeeding in College?
Problem/Solution
New Products
Product Focus
Online Edge
Going Mobile
Professional Opinion

District Administration - April 2011