Best Practices

Commitment
Community
Think Achievement
Family
Data
Results
Redefining Results
Promoting Purpose

Commitment/Goal to Eliminate Disproportionality

All of the school leaders - superintendent of schools, teachers, student government leaders, board members, local clergy and community leaders, president of the teachers' association, and others - must make it clear that racism in the school is unacceptable. Be sure to follow up after racist incidents. Every person in a position of influence should take a clear vocal and written stand against discriminatory behavior.

Lessons from Exceptional School Leaders, Mark Goldberg [2001]

Include Whole Community in Defeating Prejudice

Bringing community members together before an incident occurs can be the work of the Parent-Teachers Association, Board of Education, or the broader-based joint effort of several constituencies in the local community. Staff or PTA should head up this effort and should use an e-mail Listserve or some other technique for keeping people informed of meetings, problems, incidents, and helpful background material. Whatever action results, the whole group needs to be kept informed and on alert. A one- or two-page e-mail newsletter that goes out three or four times each year, at a regular time, keeps people informed of progress and incidents, as well as a resource to announce meetings, circulate articles, Web sites, or promote TV programs of special interest.

Establish a method for disseminating facts quickly to the media and others in the community.

Changing peoples' hearts and deepest beliefs can often take generations, but changing behavior and beginning deeper changes can start now.

Lessons from Exceptional School Leaders, Mark Goldberg [2001]

Think Achievement In the Schools

Begin working with disadvantaged and minority children the moment they enter school to make sure they believe they can learn. When these children are not doing well, find out as quickly as you can the reason for their performance.

One way to step out and take a risk is to place in higher-level classes every minority or disadvantaged student who can possibly succeed. Provide help and support for these students. Do what it takes, within reason, to help minority and disadvantaged students overcome any academic deficiencies that keep them from moving to upper-level classes. (Can students enter a summer program at the end of 10th grade to get them ready for 11th grade precalculus? Can they enter into after-school study groups with students who completed precalculus last year and are not doing well in calculus?)

Begin talking to youngsters and their parents as early as 5th and 6th grade about what students need to do to prepare for college. Provide opportunities for Scholastic Assessment test (SAT) practice in high school. Hold meetings to familiarize parents with the test and to show parents what they can do to help their children. Acquaint students and parents with how, exactly, to find the help they need to succeed on standardized tests.

Engage students in developing solutions. Ask children questions about their cultural background and preferences for how to learn. Become familiar with their community, and turn to their parents for additional information.

Develop strategies to motivate people from the community to educating teachers. Invite people from diverse community cultures to faculty meetings and other settings so teachers can learn about a group's background, needs, customs, holidays, fears, hopes, assets, talents, and attributes.

Teachers and administrators need access from the best possible sources to information on what hurts students and what can be done to help them. The backgrounds of everyone at school (including the teachers') are worthy of respect and honor, and people who wish to act out discriminatory feelings should feel unwanted and unsupported in the school community.

Lessons from Exceptional School Leaders, Mark Goldberg [2001]

Work With the Family

Stay in close touch with parents or guardians. Yale psychiatrist James Comer has made excellent use of parents as resources in his efforts to reform schools. In the Comer Plan parents and guardians might do anything from serving on decision-making committees, participating in fund-raisers, to tutoring children, including their own.

Lessons from Exceptional School Leaders, Mark Goldberg [2001]

Data: Make the Invisible Visible

Visible data reveals strengths and weaknesses, promotes certainty and precision.

Successes are cause for celebration. At Central Park East in New York, college attendance is an explicite priority. Students begin to discuss and make visits to prospective colleges during their junior and senior years. Data shows that 95% of the students who attend this school, which is in a predominately poor neighborhood, attend college.

Results: The Key to Continuous School Improvement, Schmoker [1999]

Results

Bessemer Elementary school in Pueblo, Colorado, has an 80 % free and reduced lunch population. Between 1997 and 1998 the percentage of students at or above grade level in reading rose from 12% to 64%. During the same year, the percentage of students writing at or above standard rose from 2% to 48%.

George Westinghouse Vocational and Technical School in Brooklyn reduced the number of students failing every class from 151 to 11 - in one semester.

Hawthorne Elementary School, located in a disadvantaged area of Seattle, had 32% of its African American students achieving in the lowest quartile (the lowest-achieving 25%) in 1989. One year later, the number was reduced to 19%. During that same period, white students in the lowest quartile went from 8% to zero (Bullard and Taylor 1993).

At Amphitheater Middle School a new intervention policy was introduced to reduce the number of disciplinary incidents. At the end of one 9-week quarter, 95 referrals were written; at the same time the previous year, 250 had been written. In each of these cases, schools established collective goals, tracked using data, and then used the data to assess or adjust efforts toward better results.

An intensive, collaborative focus on selected goals increases the chance for immediate impact. Joyce, Wolf, and Calhoun (1993) found that "where significant improvement has happened, it has happened rapidly…Innovations can be implemented and gains seen in student achievement within a year." The key is to "pay attention to already existing approaches that work and work fast" (p.52).

Students must be engaged in learning to retain and apply it. (Wolfe and Sorgen 1990, Newmann 1992)

Students perform better when we provide them with the criteria we expect them to meet and give them models, examples, and "anchor papers" that specify our expectations (Hillocks 1987, Wiggins 1994a, Stiggins 1994).

Based on his studies, Edmonds (1979) concludes that "there isn't a single educational problem that doesn't have a solution"; we can wherever and whenever we choose, successfully teach all children whose schooling is of interest to us" (p. 23).
Increase the number of students who can write.
Increase the staff development budget.
Ensure that relevant and engaging learning occurs with increasing frequency.
Create expectations and promote training and conditions that help principals focus more time and energy on helping solve the most pressing school problems - one at a time.
Increase the number of low-achieving students who can achieve at higher levels.

Can we routinely expect such swift and significant change? The answer may be a surprising "yes". The key is to regularly marshal collective intelligence and chart progress toward goals that teachers have agreed upon and that can reveal incremental progress.

Results: The Key to Continuous School Improvement, Schmoker [1999]

Redefining Results

We need to analyze not only standardized tests, but also local, teacher-generated assessments; not only annual or summative scores, but also ongoing improvement data; not only progress toward long-term objectives, but also progress toward specific short-term or ad hoc subgoals, not only progress toward academic results, but occasionally toward student behavior goals that are linked to those results.

People will not work eagerly and imaginatively toward goals they do not regard as their own.

Results: The Key to Continuous School Improvement, Schmoker [1999]

Promoting Purpose

Rubrics and criteria for targets such as the following can be easily developed my teams of teachers in a small amount of time:

• The number or percentage of students who can achieve proficiency levels in writing an effective position paper for social studies, English and science.
• The number or percentage of students who can achieve the most essential proficiencies in math, with submeasures in such areas as written demonstration, computation and application.
• The number or percentage of students who can achieve proficiency in musical and artistic performance.
• The number or percentage of students who can achieve proficiency in oral presentations (a skill increasingly acknowledged as essential to future success).

Rubrics and Traditional Assessments: Relevant and Enlightened Learning Activities

It is hard to find a school where children are receiving a quality education but where standardized test scores are low.

Results: The Key to Continuous School Improvement, Schmoker [1999]