Education Week - June 12, 2013 - 13

EDUCATION WEEK
Tito Castillo, a school
administrator at Shawnee,
worked under a federal School
Improvement Grant but will not be
returning next year. Ms. Cox and
Ms. Sievers are also not returning.
are in special education. The school also has a
high transience rate: Seventy-five percent of
freshmen have moved on to other schools by
senior year, Mr. Look said.
Mr. Hensley pointed to two other priority
changes the metric to some degree … yes,
that is challenging,” Mr. Hensley said. “[But]
every kid in Kentucky took the same test. Our
kids that attend Shawnee High School were
in that first percentile.” Trend data is important,
he said, but “that’s a red flag.”
“We can’t be so much about inputs,” he said.
“We have to be about outcomes for kids.” He
added, “To have a great staff, that doesn’t
necessarily translate into [higher] student
achievement unless there are things put in
place that are directly connected to that kind
of change and achievement.”
Mr. Hensley, who oversees more than
155 schools, said he has been to Shawnee
a couple of times and has not talked extensively
to its teachers. Lynne Wheat, an assistant
superintendent, keeps him apprised
of Shawnee’s progress. She declined to be
interviewed for this article.
Billie Travis, who is one of four Kentucky
Department of Education specialists in turnarounds
assigned to Shawnee, said the school
is making progress with challenging students
and new standards.
“The bottom line is that the teachers here
know how to teach. That’s something we
don’t see at all of our priority schools,” said
Ms. Travis, who spends four days a week at
another priority school and has helped conduct
close evaluations, or “audits,” of others.
“Because we’re at the bottom doesn’t mean
the teachers aren’t teaching their heart out,”
she said. “We’re teaching ACT to kids who are
at the 3rd grade level.”
Mr. Look, she added, “has found people who
have knowledge of the students and what
they bring to the table and how to move them
from point A to point B. It’s just that we don’t
have time in four years to move them from
point B to point C.”
A little over 80 percent of Shawnee’s students
qualify for free or reduced-price lunch
(compared with 63 percent across Jefferson
County) a figure Mr. Look says may be artificially
low since it could include students at
an early-childhood center housed on the site.
Twenty-seven percent of Shawnee’s students
schools in the district that he said are making
greater gains: Western High School,
which has a high-poverty population and
saw double-digit gains in the first year of
the turnaround, but remains in the bottom
3 percent in the state; and Fern Creek High
School, a larger school with a much broader
demographic mix of traditionally underserved
students and their more advantaged
peers. Other schools with student populations
similar to Shawnee’s, including Valley
High School and Iroquois High School, are
also in the bottom 1 percent.
Potential for Turnover
State support at Shawnee had been strong
at first, but has tapered off through the turnaround
period, in part because of limited
resources. Initially, the Kentucky education
department dispatched a trio of veteran educators
to work in the school full time, helping
Shawnee staff and students make better use
of data to improve instruction.
By the end of the 2012-13 school year, the
only state specialist to visit the school regularly
was Ms. Travis, who was there one day
a week. The school could gain another fulltime
state-assigned educator next year.
Compounding matters: Shawnee’s nearly
$1.5 million in federal turnaround money
is drying up. As a result, Mr. Look is losing
n
JUNE 12, 2013 www.edweek.org
n
13
MULTIMEDIA: Education Week is
chronicling progress at Shawnee
High School in Louisville, Ky., where
educators work to transform the
long-troubled campus as part of a
nationwide federal push to turn
around thousands of low-performing
schools. See past coverage:
www.edweek.org/go/turnaround
several staff members. Many of them came
out of retirement to lend a hand at Shawnee,
including a veteran English teacher, a former
principal who dealt with discipline, an
assistant principal, and a math teacher who
offered students one-on-one tutoring.
Another performance audit, which could
be conducted next school year and include
the results from 2012-13, is likely to prove
crucial to whether Mr. Look is able to remain
as principal. If he ends up leaving the
school, it is unclear how many of the staff
members he picked to fill Shawnee’s ranks
would stay on.
Mr. Holliday, the education commissioner,
said he has “good confidence” in Mr. Look.
The school’s difficulties stem from “a multitude
of things. I don’t think you can point to
Keith’s leadership as being the barrier,” Mr.
Holliday said in an April interview.
Mr. Holliday said he’s encouraged by state
and district collaboration efforts in Louisville,
and will make a determination later
this year about whether it makes sense
for the state to step in and take control of
turnaround efforts in Jefferson County. In
either case, he sees district and state officials
as critical to sustaining the success of
long-struggling schools.
“A great principal can get good results for
the first year or two,” he said. “I think the federal
models for low-performing schools will not
achieve [long-term] results without tremendous
district support and state support.”
WHAT SO
PROUDLY
WE HAIL
Mining America’s literary
treasures to create imaginative
lesson plans for history, civics
education and language arts
instruction
Fostering the development of
active reading, critical analysis
and discussion skills
Effectively reaching the goals
and objectives of the Common
Core State Standards
Download free curriculum today at www.whatsoproudlywehail.org
Literary-based curricula made simple.
History lessons made memorable.
http://www.edweek.org http://www.edweek.org/go/turnaround http://www.whatsoproudlywehail.org http://www.whatsoproudlywehail.org
Education Week - June 12, 2013

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - June 12, 2013
