District Administration - September 2009 - (Page 60)

Turning Around Schools in Need things are in place, schools improve,” says Gorman. In each of the seven schools implementing Gorman’s method in 20072008, test scores rose for 2008-2009. The number of students who were proficient increased by as much as 23 percent. “Strategic staffing is the best approach to turn a struggling school around,” Gorman says. At the Los Angeles Unified School District, Superintendent Ramon Cortines has a similar mindset. “I’ve been a teacher and administrator probably longer than anybody in America,” he says, “and I’m still struck by the challenge. But don’t tell me it can’t be done. Of course it can be done. It’s not about the kids. They will learn what they are taught and respond to how they are treated.” Since January 2009 when he took on the job, Cortines has already removed the administration of one of his lowestperforming schools and made nearly half a dozen follow-up visits to the new staff. “I have a responsibility to help them build capacity—to ask, ‘What if … ?’ ‘Why not … ?’ ‘How come … ?’—but then also, when they do identify issues, to bring the right people to them.” Inside a growing handful of Los Angeles schools, the kind of support Cortines refers to comes from people like Marco Petruzzi, president and CEO of Green Dot Public Schools. “We should have the courage to close down and turn around all the chronically underperforming schools. Period. There is no excuse for waiting,” says Petruzzi, who comes from the charter school management and international business worlds. With Green Dot founder and chairman Steve Barr, Petruzzi was instrumental in improving attendance and student retention rates at Locke High School in Watts—one of the city’s most troubled—dividing the 1,800-student district into eight smaller academies, each with its own staff and principal. In Petruzzi’s turnaround work, everyone had to reapply for a job. “So we have no problem with Arne’s approach,” says Petruzzi. The New Orleans Factor If turnaround schools are all about confronting the lowest-performing schools in a school system, then what can be said for 60 September 2009 confronting a whole school system facing utter devastation? For the last two years, Paul Vallas has been charged with turning around a growing district of 112 lowperforming schools across Louisiana, all part of a special legislature-created Recovery School District that was put in place pre-Katrina but made all the more relevant after the storm. “You need to have a model for what constitutes a high-quality school district,” says Vallas. “Turnaround is not just taking over a failing school and then not having a clue of how to fix it. A lot of turnaround schools, they’ll just take a successful principal and stick him in a school thinking by new assistant principal position, and factor in an annual turnaround stipend of $420 per pupil ($500 for high school students) during years one through five of the school turnaround, renovations not included. Petruzzi says costs depend on many factors, the main ones being school size, real estate in the area and available state funds. “In our case, it was fairly expensive: we had over 3,000 students. We had to build two satellite facilities to be able to serve them all, and being in California, we are pretty low in terms of funding,” he says. Philanthropy picked up the extra costs, says Petruzzi, but the intention is to break even on government dollars by year four. “Turnaround is not just taking over a failing school and then not having a clue of how to fix it. You’ve got to have a turnaround plan.” —Paul Vallas, superintendent, Recovery School District, New Orleans, La. osmosis that school is going to get better. You’ve got to have a turnaround plan.” Vallas acknowledges that the basic model may vary from district to district. “But it doesn’t deviate that much,” he says. “It’s a two-year process: first year, stabilize; second year, take your reforms to scale.” By stabilizing, Vallas means inspecting schools for curriculum and instruction usage that aligns to state standards, for strong professional development programs, and for benchmarking to learn from student progress for intervention and monitoring teacher performance for purposes of support. Then each school must be adequately staffed with a strong leadership team. “Spend a week [observing] and come up with a school improvement plan you can start implementing,” he says. M-m-m-money According to Chicago’s turnaround school funding model, estimated costs for up to three turnaround planning positions (new, salaried administrative staff members that lend authentic capacity to address turnaround efforts) at a typical elementary school might be $300,000, while the same positions for a high school would run $520,000. Add in another $120,000 for a And what about the federal funds? In his charter schools speech, Duncan said something that most education leaders aren’t used to hearing: “We have a lot of money to support this work.” Combine Race to the Top funds, What Works and Innovation funds, and $3.5 billion in Title I School Improvement grants with another $1.5 billion Duncan will seek in 2010, and there is over $5 billion in federal funds specifically targeting turnaround schools. Breaking it down, this amount represents hundreds of thousands of dollars above normal funding levels for every turnaround school, according to Duncan. With congressional support, says Duncan, turnaround efforts are “likely to receive more money in subsequent years.” This is money needed for school and district commitment of staff (Atlanta, for example, allocated $1.2 million for each large school) and to enhance turnaround efforts through capital improvements such as paint, carpeting, furniture and landscaping, which could cost around $900,000, as well as technology updates, which could cost $300,000. “To fix these schools will cost a lot, but we can also look at how to reallocate existing dollars,” Corbett says. “In the long run, not fixing them will cost even more.” To receive District Administration

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