Learning from the Successes of Others in Educational Settings

I am a product of a very large public school system.  I worked for 37 years in that same system.  I care greatly about the students, parents, staff, and the system itself, but I am feeling very badly about something that I helped to bring to this large system, but is not leading to improvement.

As one of the reform leaders in Los Angeles' educational system, I fought for a variety of school types to come into our system.  I believed that we could do a better job of educating our children from kindergarten through high school.  I was given the opportunity to help lead reform of our high schools away from very large comprehensive models to smaller environments that would support both students and adults.

It has always been my belief that we must find a way to educate all of our kids.  If we cannot, we need to let others who can do it better.  For this reason, we created small learning communities and small school structures in all of our district's high schools.  At least we received and approved plans for all high schools to recreate themselves into some type of smaller structure.  Included in this work we were given the opportunity to bring some very special models to our district, New Tech and Big Picture. 

Unfortunately, the financial downturn hit and hurt badly causing changes at district and school levels that for many schools, but not all, stopped reform from progressing.  I had to stand in front of our Board of Education on several occasions and explain our restructuring plan, including the building of new small schools.  One Board member would mock this effort by calling these new small school schools, "Turbo Charged Schools" because he felt that they were expensive.  My response to him was always the same.  We have to introduce new "proof points" into our district.  We know that if we can create the right environment with well prepared staff members and gain the support of parents, that we can better educate all students.

What did I mean by "proof points"?  I believed then and still believe that we need to look and learn from models of education different from what we have historically had in our district for many years.  We need these alternative models to be learning opportunities for the district and for the educators.  I even believe that when we have successful models of learning in our neighborhood charter schools that we should learn what we can from them.  We do not have to copy exactly what any other institution is doing, but we can find what they do better than we are doing, and figure out a way to introduce something similar into our schools.

Seven years later, I am finding that there is little if any learning taking place between schools in our own districts, or from those schools that we created within or outside of our district.  Charters exist and will continue to exist.  We should not fight that, but we should accept them for what they are and use them as an opportunity for our own big system learning.

I just read an article from EdSource about the City Arts and Technology High School in San Francisco.  Not only is this school producing great student achievement results, but it is doing so with a student body very similar to the student body of most urban schools.  If they can do it, why can't we?  We can certainly improve our results, but not without learning what this Envision Charter is doing in San Francisco and what other district and charter alternative type schools are doing in our own neighborhood and around the nation. 

As educators, we hope that we are continuous learners because that is our vision for what we want for our students.  Continuous learning requires that the learner remain inquisitive and reflective, and always searching for something being done more successfully by others.

I would recommend that educators, especially in secondary schools read the article about Envision's City Arts and Technology Charter High School and think carefully about how you could bring "deeper learning" to your school.  Check out the article at:  http://edsource.org/2014/charter-school-integrates-deeper-learning/65448?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EdsourceToday+%28EdSource+Today%29&nord=1#.VBB6m018OUk

Let me know what you think about the need to learn from others, both in your own district and outside of your district.  Should we be isolationists or should we be continuous learners?

NAEP Report of Cost of Missing School on Student Achievement

EdSource reported yesterday on a NAEP analysis of student academic progress as measured by the NAEP assessment for 4th and 8th graders.  This test is often called the nations report card for reading and mathematics achievement.  I believe that this analysis is worth reading, because you do have a way in your schools to address the issue, at least when MISIS is finally up and running.

It is shocking that in the USA every year from 5 million to 7.5 million students miss close to a month of school.  Students with significant numbers of absences score significantly lower than students who are present regularly.  In fact at both 4th and 8th grade students with significant numbers of absences are at least a full grade level below the other students in their yearly growth.  We have known for some time that this data is true for middle schoolers based on Johns Hopkins University's seminal research by Robert Balfanz.  We also have always believed this to be true based on our experiences in the classroom.  I know that LAUSD has made student attendance a major priority, and for good reason as is shown by multiple studies.  I am sure that this is true of other districts in California and around the nation.

The purpose of sharing this article with you is to point out that you have a way to address the attendance issues described in the article at your school site.  Let me remind you that in My Data is a program called "Early Alert Secondary" and "Early Alert Elementary" that can give you very important information about student attendance on a monthly basis that can allow you to address student attendance in a variety of ways.  I know the value of this program because before I retired, Cynthia Lim and I worked on putting the program together for the use of schools. We worked on it for approximately nine years before we were both in a position to bring it to fruition.  It has been improved since I left, but the main issue is that it can report to you all students on a monthly basis who have had a drop in attendance for even one month.  The idea of this program is to catch students who are sliding in a variety of areas, in this case attendance, before the slide gets so far along that it is difficult for the child to recover.  (If your district does not have a way to quickly find students who are slipping in their attendance or in other significant areas, speak to your district leadership about how that can be created with the student information data that you already have in your computer system.)  Once identified it becomes very important for a school staff member, counselor or SLC advisor, to check in with the student and the parent as to why the drop has occurred.  It may be that the student was sick with the chicken pox, in which case, all that is necessary is to be sure that the child knows what is necessary to catch up.  However, it may be something much more severe such as a family divorce, or illness which is causing serious conditions at the home.  In this case, more intensive intervention is necessary.  We can give the students the intensive intervention when we identify the need.  It is great if you have sufficient and significant resources to intervene, but most schools do not have that need fulfilled.  But teachers, counselors, and administrators can give the time to intervene to be sure that the student and the parents know that someone at the school really cares about the welfare of the student.  That caring attitude may be just enough to keep a student with a spotty attendance record from becoming the drop out statistic that we frequently see from excessively absent students.

The result of research tells us that no matter how good of a job that we do at delivering instruction, if we cannot get kids turned on to school and to learning, the great delivery will matter very little.  You have the opportunity to utilize this recent research of NAEP results analysis and to utilize a powerful tool available through the LAUSD (or through your district) student information system to save the educational lives of some of our students.  The only ingredient not guaranteed is the will to save these excessively absent kids by school adults.  Encouraging our educators to build strong caring relationships with every student as well as building their own instructional practices have to go hand in hand.  

I hope that this message leads to finding ways at your school to improve the student attendance that can lead to so many lost years of learning for many students.  Relationships leading to student motivation are critical, but frequently lost in our professional development efforts.  I will share more on motivation and student learning in the next couple of weeks.

Thanks for listening.  By the way, you can find this and other educational topics on my blog at larrytash.blogspot.com.  If you have not visited it, I invite you to do so.  You may not agree with everything, but hopefully, it will get you to think about some of the topics that I have covered.

The EdSource article is available at:

http://edsource.org/2014/empty-classroom/67019?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EdsourceToday+%28EdSource+Today%29#.VAeej_ldXmA

I look forward to your comments on this topic and any others on my blog.