Meeting the Spirit of AYP Through School Reform: Cohesion, Coordination, and Alignment Lead to Student Achievement

by Troy V. Mariage and Linda Patriarca

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In general, Michigan’s students with special needs are served by highly competent, dedicated, and outstanding personnel. Most parents, teachers, support personnel, paraeducators, and administrators work tirelessly to serve students. However, schools where children learn and access the general education curriculum look at more than just those individual service providers. Educators must think more broadly about how programs fit together in a comprehensive manner across the general and special education systems at any given point in time (horizontal cohesion, coordination, and alignment). They must also look at the system over time and across grade levels, buildings, and programs (vertical cohesion, coordination, and alignment). If schools hope to improve student progress, especially for our most at-risk learners, they must pay more attention to how to build an achievement capacity that sees student development as occurring over time and across programs. Moreover, to develop excellence among all stakeholders, schools must become learning organizations that build the capacity of staff. When this happens, staff will increasingly come to use data to inform practice, distribute learning through formal and informal communities of practice, and see themselves in a process of continual improvement. When systems work together, schools create the conditions of a learning organization and improve outcomes for staff, teachers, and students.

This FOCUS on Results document:

• Examines current features of special education systems.
• Provides suggestions for adjusting these features in ways that would make them more cohesive, coordinated, and aligned.
• Outlines the current goals of the present system as a clear rationale for better coherence, coordination, and alignment of programs.
• Discusses five key ideas related to moving schools towards becoming “learning organizations.”
• Provides an example of how a district or building can use a guide to develop coherence as they develop, implement, and evaluate an early intervention/ response to intervention program in their building.
• Examines the real and perceived risks to developing cohesive, coordinated, and aligned programs.
• Discusses how the second principle relates to the three other key principles in this series.

In Table 1, the left column provides several features of many (not all) current special education systems. A feature of the current system is outlined and the result of that feature is briefly discussed. In the adjoining column on the right is a suggestion for addressing the current feature that would create a more cohesive, coordinated, and aligned system. The features, results, and suggestions are not meant to be exhaustive, but merely illustrate how to shift thinking to a more systemic perspective. Features of the current system are identified to look at the inner core of teaching, including: assessment, curriculum, instruction, and intervention/prevention.

Goals of the Present System: A Rationale for Coherence, Coordination, and Alignment of Key Sub-Systems

The significant shift from ensuring “access to services” in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to the present focus on accountability for learning outcomes has created a groundswell of activity in schools across the nation. Studying the achievement of various sub-groups of students, including those receiving special education services, encourages schools to pay attention to improved learning for all in order to make adequate yearly progress (AYP). In looking across three recent policy documents addressing the education of students with special needs—No Child Left Behind, the reauthorization of IDEA 2004, and the President’s Commission on Excellence in Special Education (2002)—six explicit goals emerge:

• Improved student outcomes.
• Data-driven accountability.
• Reduced identification of students with disabilities.
• Early intervention and prevention.
• Use of evidenced-based interventions.
• Highly qualified teachers for every student.

This shift in focus to improved outcomes for students has increased tensions around delivering special education services. It also offers an opportunity to pay attention to the articulation of special education programming, from birth to post-secondary transition. In looking closely at the six goals above, there is good reason to target efforts on the closely related variables of assessment, curriculum, teaching, and learning.

While few would argue the importance of these goals, there are no clear blueprints about how to reach these goals. It remains the responsibility of each building and district to develop an action plan and create a vision of how to achieve them. This requires three actions:

• A shared vision for the atmosphere a building/district wants to achieve (e.g., continuous improvement, capacity building, distributed learning).
• Careful attention to how five subsystems are necessary to support change.
• A set of principles that support the change process. (See Figure 1)
  In short, to develop a building/district that aspires to be a learning organization, it is necessary to have cohesion, coordination, and alignment (see Figure 2) of the five subsystems at two levels, including within (horizontal coherence) and across (vertical coherence) the various programs delivered."

In this new system of data-driven accountability, the expectations are being raised successively. With respect to the state assessment programs, this refers specifically to NCLB requirements for AYP. One of the NCLB expectations is that all students are to be assessed. Schools and districts must, at a minimum, assess 95 percent of their students at each of the grades assessed and for each subgroup, which students with disabilities is one of the subgroups. The second NCLB expectation related to AYP is that the percentage of student scores in each of the grades and content areas assessed (English language arts and mathematics), in a given school and district, must meet or exceed state standards on the Michigan Educational Assessment Program (MEAP) or must surpass or attain state standards on MI-Access, Michigan’s Alternate Assessment Program in order for the school or district to make AYP.

For example, in 2005 the achievement standard set in mathematics at the elementary level was 56 percent. In 2008, that standard raises to 64 percent (Michigan Department of Education, Office of Field Services, 2003).

Another type of bar refers to the range of items included on a test. At present, only CORE items in mathematics are counted toward the AYP score. In 2009, not only do CORE items count, but also those labeled extended CORE and future CORE. In essence, improved achievement outcomes translate fundamentally into “more students learning more content.”

In an era of dwindling resources and increasing costs, we must invest scarce resources wisely and know whether these investments are paying off on the educational bottom line. Below are five reasons to invest time and energy toward creating schools that are learning organizations. Doing so is a key strategy for meeting the spirit of AYP for all students in Michigan.

1. Educational systems must build achievement capacity continuously. It is not a matter of simply improving reading scores or mathematics scores. It is a matter of increasing the improvement trajectory from year to year. To document steady and sustained improvement requires focused and sustained commitment both to an overarching long-range plan as well as the annual implementation plan.
2. Vision statements should include developing schools as learning organizations. In many schools, administrators and teach- ers expend a great deal of energy drafting, circulating, and revising the school’s vision statement. These statements talk about life- long learning, teaching the whole child, and the belief that all children can learn. Most vision statements are about learners, learning, and outcomes. These are learning visions for students. They tend not to, however, address how
   schools should continually improve, build capacity of all stakeholders, use data to inform decision-making, and distribute learning in professional communities of practice. When schools shift attention to becoming learning organizations, they can reculture in ways that create condi- tions for serving students more successfully and can meet the spirit of progress for each student.
3. No single action—no matter how central—will result in the depth and breadth of systemic change needed to transform the school/district from a “teaching institution” to a “learning institution.” People can easily get excited about new interventions, curricula, technology, or professional development opportunities. Therefore, it is important that administrators/school leaders realize that change needs to happen through multiple systems. Although most change processes are thought of as linear and sequential—which is probably necessary for the purposes of teaching and making things clear—it is important to understand how entire subsystems influence and support one another. In fact, when schools focus on only one or two subsystems (e.g., adopting a new curriculum but failing to provide ongoing profes- sional development) rather than all five, the change often has a short “shelf life” in the school.
4. In designing a district’s or school’s plan of action, district leaders should recognize that closely related variables offer more impact than variables not closely related. Curriculum, instruction, and assessment are all related variables with respect to impacting student achievement. Therefore, no matter what compo- nents are included in the overall plan for change, these three should be among the first-order changes made in any given district. An educator’s teaching practices may be a more significant variable than the day’s schedule. On the other hand, the current scheduling system could be a major impediment to implementing more powerful and effective teaching practices. Therefore, even though the spotlight of intervention might be on changing teaching practices in a given school year, scheduling must be reviewed to determine whether this will need to be addressed before full implementation of the plan can occur.
   
   In sum, it is not possible to understand improvements needed within a given educational system without knowing how other internal systems support, and even determine, what counts as important to the improvement process.
5. All subsystems should be operating to some extent even though the focus of change in any given year may be on one subsystem. One central premise of institutional change is that during the change process all five subsys- tems need to be “blinking” at the same time. This is not to say that one of the subsystems is not receiving the majority of attention and energy. For example, if a school has recently adopted a new math curriculum, the school’s focus will likely shift to the professional development subsystem as the faculty team receives intensive training in how to use the new program. This does not mean that every school must move in “lock step” fashion. As long as the underlying principles, goals, and implementation plan are completely and consistently understood and articulated, different schools may— at any given time—implement the plan in differing order to accommo- date local school needs. What it does mean, though, is even though a school or district’s focus may be on one subsystem in a given year, other systems must be involved and accounted for in the change process.

An Example: Using Schools as Learning Organizations that Help Guide the Development, Implementation, and Evaluation of an Early Intervening/Response to Intervention Program in Grades K-3

At the heart of the principle “student achievement requires alignment, cohesion, and coordination of the critical subsystems” is the belief that sustained quality and responsiveness to change is best accomplished when there is constant attention to the subsystems and professional dispositions that support the implementation of educational programs within and across levels. In the simplest terms, the organizational guide in Figure 1 can serve multiple functions for a district or building, including (but not limited to):

• Helping guide design teams or school improvement teams in developing or rethinking individual programs (horizontal coherence) or the entire system of programs (vertical coherence).
• Helping ensure that programs are supported across all five subsystems.
• Helping ensure that programs are continuously learning and improving.

In this sense, the educational heuristic can guide and assist stakeholders during the development, implementation, and evaluation stages of program development. For example, an administrator might ask a team of key stakeholders (e.g., special education teacher, K-3 faculty, curriculum director, school psychologist) to develop a proposal for the implementation of an early identification and response to intervention system for their building.

The team charged with organizing the proposal addresses key questions under each of the five subsystem areas (see column 1 in Table 2). Later, as the program is implemented, the same five subsystems can be used to generate questions that allow stakeholders to collect formative measures to assess whether the program is addressing questions related to each of the subsystems. This effort would increase the likelihood that the program is producing information and continually learning from itself (see column 2 in Table 2). Finally, the subsystems can provide summative evaluation information about the effectiveness and impact of the Early Intervention/Response to Intervention across all of the subsystems. (See column 3 in Table 2.)

Over time (weeks, months, years) and across levels, the new process of identifying students in the early grades at risk for academic and/or behavioral challenges, and providing a system of tiered supports for students, the stakeholder team will continually return to the learning organization as a guide to assist their problem solving and identify any technical assistance that might be needed to sustain and improve the program on a continuous basis. Ultimately, the most important question, on both planning and evaluation, is “Is this program working?” The answer to this question is always multifaceted and must be asked at multiple levels, especially as these levels relate to achieving the professional dispositions of the district/building and to each of the five subsystems. To examine effectiveness narrowly, on only one or two subsystems, will prevent the system from generating enough information to learn from itself. When insufficient information is generated or information is generated in only one or two subsystems, the program risks overestimating its impact or underestimat- ing its potential. In both instances, the program and its consumers are not served well. More importantly, a lack of comprehensive information across sub-systems can limit a school’s ability to continually refine, tailor, and improve the program.

What are Potential Risks in Creating Cohesive, Coordinated, and Aligned Programs?

The notions of developing a cohesive, coordinated, and aligned set of subsystems and programs for serving children and youth with disabilities are not without risks. A significant risk in this era of accountability is the pressure on districts and buildings to improve student achievement in ways that may be efficient but that fail to change the underlying culture of the building. The title of this series, “Meeting the Spirit of AYP,” acknowledges the real consequences for failing to improve student outcomes.

It has been suggested throughout this series that the ultimate goal of building an achievement capacity for students will happen only when schools become learning organizations. Learning organizations, in turn, come to adopt a series of cultural norms and values that see schools as continually improving, building the capacity of all members, distributing leadership in communities of practice, and using data to inform key decisions. Improving the learning outcomes for all students can serve as the catalyst for developing the coherence, coordination, and alignment of programs that is necessary to advance learning for every child. This is the spirit of AYP.

A second risk is that people may misinterpret the terms and see systems that, once developed, are rigid and unchangeable. In developing a shared vision of how subsystems might work together, coordinate, and align to support one another, there is the risk that some may see this as creating additional layers of policy, bureaucracy, procedure, and paper work. That is, that the “system” drives the change process. Whenever policies or procedures of any kind become “conventionalized,” a building runs the risk of losing the creative, autonomous aspects of adult learning.

Individual creativity and autonomy remain vital to any school. In fact, individual interests and individual learning often drive the change process. For example, while a building might adopt a new collaborative structure for helping faculty engage in “action research” projects and encourage people to share their ideas, it is often the individual faculty who are the impetus of change in the school. Communities of practice are made up of individuals who bring their unique experiences to the group. The distributed learning that is made possible within any school improvement team is limited only by the knowledge and experience of the members of the group. Individual agency and creativity is not at odds with creating cohesive, coordinated, and aligned systems. Rather, it is the creation of cohesive, coordinated, and aligned systems that create the very “places and spaces” for communities and their stakeholders to practice the art of teaching and learning.

Indeed, without a coherent and coordinated system in place, it is virtually impossible for a building or district to take advantage of the strength of its members. The heart of building the capacity of any organization is having mechanisms for both distributing learning across its membership and providing consistent opportunities to learn.

Conclusion

In order for any program to learn from itself and best serve students, teachers, and other key stakeholders, each program (e.g., Child Find, Early On®, early intervening/prevention, remedial, accessing general education curriculum, school-to-work transition) must have ways to view itself as part of a learning system. That is, each program element must have internal or horizontal coherence, coordination, and alignment but also be vertically coherent across programs. Without vertical coherence across programs and over time, each program stage or element becomes isolated from the other programs.

For example, it is common to see students move from an elementary school resource classroom to a more fully-inclusive, team-taught model in middle school with little more than a transition individualized education program (IEP). Typically, no common assessments follow a child as she or he progresses through a district’s programs. The child experiences no common curriculum, and schools offer insufficient collaborative spaces for key stakeholders to discuss these transitions. Indeed, it is the rare school district that has identified a vision for vertical coherence among the five key subsystems. (See Figure 3.)

Fostering a coherent, coordinated, and aligned system creates the spaces and places for collaborative problem solving. It also creates the communities of practice that give rise to distributed learning and continuous improvement. Finally, it makes the procedures and policies that are the foundation of the system much more efficient and frees up more time for teaching and learning. Change can be hard (Fullan, 1992). Countless new initiatives are brought to varying levels of success, but few are sustained. More distressing, seldom do these initiatives impact the cultural values, beliefs, norms, dispositions, and behaviors of members of the organization. This article series attempts to bring more conceptual clarity to the reculturing process and to provide key stakeholders with concrete tools and ideas to engage in this important work.

Authors

Troy V. Mariage, Ph.D. is an associate professor of special education at Michigan State University. Contact him at 341 Erickson Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824-1034, (517) 355-1837, mariaget@msu.edu.

Linda Patriarca, Ph.D., is an associate dean of education at Caldwell College. Contact her at 9 Ryerson Ave., Caldwell, NJ 07006, lindap@msu.edu.

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