District Administration - September 2009 - (Page 58)

Turning Around Schools in Need The History Several years before being in the spotlight under the Obama administration, Mass Insight monitored reform efforts in consistently underperforming schools across the country that were conducted on a “light touch” basis, which refers to incremental school changes, such as redirecting curriculum or providing leadership coaching, versus those where there was “dramatic, transformative change,” such as firing most or all of the staff or even closing the school. In 2005, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded a two-year study by Mass Insight that culminated in The Turnaround Challenge, a report detailing “why America’s best opportunity to dramatically improve student achievement lies in our worst-performing schools.” Reviewing intervention efforts across 10 states and four districts, over 50 organizations and individual experts contributed directly to the report and its recommendations. “Most schools in Restructuring (the federal designation for chronic underperformance) are like organisms that have built immunities, over years of attempted intervention, to the ‘medicine’ of incremental reform,” the report states. Turnaround is different from mere school improvement, according to the report, because turnaround is the kind of change that is “propelled by imperative: the school must improve or it will be redefined or closed.” The Operators Many of those early Chicago turnarounds are still district-run; however, the force Music teacher Holly Mullenix drums with her students at the National Teachers Academy in Chicago, a pre-K8 turnaround school. behind several other successes, including Dodge’s renaissance, is Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL). A nonprofit organization that partners with Chicago Public Schools, AUSL was founded in 2001 by venture capitalist Martin Koldyke and has received support in part from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, NewSchools Venture Fund, Boeing, Motorola, and other Chicago corporations and donors. “Sometimes it takes a whole-school transformation, a dramatic intervention, in order to create the kind of opportunities where children will be successful,” says Don Feinstein, AUSL’s executive director and a former Chicago schools’ principal. AUSL’s approach is to completely overhaul a school without relocating students, who return in the fall to renovated facilities, a new curriculum, a new principal, new teachers, new staff, including the janitor, and what Feinstein calls “an entirely new culture of success.” Green Dot Public Schools, another player in turnarounds, is a nonprofit school management organization that has opened 18 public charter schools in Los Angeles. Focus on Teacher Training At Chicago Public Schools, long considered one of the most challenging districts in America, then-CEO Duncan closed some 60 chronically underperforming schools and reopened about a dozen schools with new leadership and staff as turnaround schools; many of those were AUSL-managed. In Chicago and other places such as Los Angeles, many turnaround schools adhere roughly to what Green Dot calls “The Six Tenets of High-Performing Schools”: (1) small, safe and personalized schools, (2) high expectations for all students, (3) local control with extensive professional development and accountability, (4) parent participation, (5) maximized funding to the classroom, and (6) keeping schools open later. According to AUSL, teachers are 27 percent more likely to leave the profesDistrict Administration Six Essential Characteristics of Successful Turnarounds 1. Clearly defined authority to act based on what’s best for children and learning: flexibility and control over staffing, scheduling, budget and curriculum. 2. A relentless focus on hiring and staff development as part of an overall “people strategy” to ensure the best possible teaching force. 3. Highly capable, distributed school leadership—not simply the principal, but an effective leadership team. 4. Additional time in the school day and across the school year. 5. Performance-based behavioral expectations for all stakeholders, including teachers, students and (often) parents. 6. Integrated, research-based programs and related social services that are specifically designed, personalized and adjusted to address students’ academic and related psychosocial needs. Source: “What Success Requires: A ‘Zone’ for Effective Turnaround,” The Turnaround Challenge, Mass Insight 58 September 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - September 2009

District Administration - September 2009
Contents
From the Editor
Letters
News Update
Health Update
Curriculum Update
Stimulus Monitor
Conversations
Administrator Profile
District Profile
Administrator Roles Shift with the Times
Turning Around Schools in Need
Global Learning
Managing Generational Diversity
New Products
Professional Opinion
How Well Does This Web Site Work?
New Books
Tech Disruptions
Online Edge

District Administration - September 2009