District Administration - September 2007 - (Page 24)

DistrictProﬁle instruction,” says Robert Atterbury, associate superintendent for high school transformation. To create that culture, APS revamped its student services, creating an academic and social safety net. Not only does the counselor proactively work with students to ensure that they stay on top of all of the necessary course and test requirements, but the school pairs each student with an internal mentor using the school’s advisory program and an external mentor, such as a graduate student or a business owner, based on the school’s theme. “Part of our design is personalization, which means we really focus on dedicating the core group of adults to intimately knowing the academic, social and emotional needs of the students,” says Charlotte Spann, program administrator for high school transformation. “We are really pushing the schools to build a culture that nurtures the child, that provides them with a rigorous instructional program and exposes them to a variety of opportunities, college campuses, internships and work experiences. All the schools have the same Georgia performance standards that drive the curriculum and the same graduation requirements.” A New Instruction Model For the academic component of the restructuring, APS changed the way in which the high school teachers deliver instruction, discarding the typical lecture-driven, isolated approach in favor of inquiry-based instruction and a collaborative, interdisciplinary model, which is common in K8 schools. To ensure that all of its educators embraced the new instructional model, APS declared all teaching positions vacant and required its teachers to reapply for their jobs, and the district searched the nation to ﬁnd principals who could serve as strong instructional leaders, guiding and supporting teaching and learning on a continuous basis. In order to increase the teachers’ comfort level with collaborative, inquirybased instruction, APS taps a wide range of professional development resources, from Project GRAD to the Southern 24 September 2007 Jim Shelton of the Gates Foundation talks with students at the Carver School of Health Sciences and Research. Regional Educational Board. Any new hires undergo a rigorous two-week induction period. The Institute for Student Achievement in New York, the district’s primary partner, provides the foundation for the district’s professional development, which includes bringing the teachers and administrators on study tours of eﬀective small schools in other states, conducting in-house professional development sessions and pairing each school with an instructional coach. It will take two more years to see results for the New School of Carver’s four main schools; however, the School of Entrepreneurship has demonstrated impressive results with the new approach. Just one year after the change, the graduation rate rose to 61.4 percent, closing in on APS’s 69 and Georgia’s 71 percent graduation rates in 2006. In fact, the approach is so successful that APS is in the process of transforming all of its high schools using either the small schools or the small learning communities model, which creates a school within a school. Using a plan created by the McKenzie Group, an education consulting ﬁrm that was acquired by the American Institutes for Research in 2004, the district will restructure its schools in waves of two or three each year until it completes the transformation in 2010. Finding the Funds Transforming all of the district’s high schools is not cheap. The McKenzie Group estimated that it will cost APS $52 million to implement the entire program. Although the district will need to reallocate its existing staﬀ and resources to cover the bulk of the cost, it uses grants to pay for one-time expenses, such as purchasing curriculum and professional development. When the Gates Foundation saw the results that APS achieved with Carver High School using a shoestring staﬀ and budget, it contributed $10.4 million to oﬀset the administrative costs involved with transforming the remaining schools. Plus, the community created a local education fund, whose board includes the mayor as well as the heads of major organizations in Atlanta, which works to secure local dollars to support the initiative. “It is a very expensive endeavor, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not,” says Kathy M. Augustine, deputy superintendent for curriculum and instruction. “If we can graduate a minimum of 90 percent of the young people who enter our ninth grade on time, who are ready then to go into postsecondary institutions or the entry-level workforce and not to prison, then this is really not as expensive as one might think.” Start-up costs aside, Atterbury, who participated in a similar high school transformation program in San Diego, asserts that it is only marginally more expensive over the long term for districts to use the small schools approach with their high schools: “Yes, you have four principals, but in the past, we had the principal and three vice principals.” “The struggle with a small school is that people want a small school to act like a big school and oﬀer the full depth and breadth of oﬀerings that a comprehensive high school has,” Atterbury continues. “That’s the compromise of a small school—it can’t be all things to all kids. But I would venture to say that the reason why our high schools have failed some of the kids is because they’ve tried to be all things to all people, and they don’t do a very good job of any of it.” DA Jennifer Maciejewski is a freelance writer based in Georgia. District Administration

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Cover Contents Editor’s Letter Letters News Update Curriculum Update Inside the Law District Profile Administrator Profile District Buying Power 2007 X-Factor Student Achievement Awards 2007 We've Got Mail Supporting New Teachers How Well Does This Web Site Work? New Products Problem Solution Computer Literature Research Corner Online Edge Supervisor’s Opinion Speaking Out Calendar of Events Understanding the Times

District Administration - September 2007

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