Meeting the Spirit of AYP Through School Reform: Accountability Is Outcomes Based, But Input and Process Driven

by Troy V. Mariage and Linda Patriarca

This is the second article in a five-part series that addresses the question, “What can local buildings/districts do to ensure that the spirit of No Child Left Behind is realized?” The first article, “Meeting the Challenge of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)”, published in FOCUS on Results GATA 04-03 (Mariage & Patriarca), September 2004, identified and briefly described five overarching principles of successful school improvement:

1. Accountability is outcome based but input and process driven.
2. Student achievement requires alignment, cohesion, and coordination of curricula.
3. Schools facilitate student achievement when they develop and adopt a system of individuation and differentiation to meet all stakeholders’ needs.
4. Schools sustain improved student outcomes when they have a collaborative infrastructure that supports improvements in curricula and teaching.
5. Leadership is vital for creating and sustaining a schoolwide focus on continous improvement.

This FOCUS on Results document addresses the first overarching principle— Accountability is outcome based but input and process driven.

The authors relate this principle to each of the five sub-systems below that operate within a building/district:

1. Leadership
2. Curriculum
3. Teaching
4. Data Collection
5. Organizational

(See Figure 1).

This article focuses on how to change inputs and processes while creating coherence in each of the five sub-systems identified above.

Click on image for larger version

Leadership System

Research on school restructuring reveals that strong leadership is vital to successful school reform. The definition of effective leadership has changed over time. Some of the common metaphors that have been used in the past to define effective leaders include manager, facilitator, and instructional leader. More recently, these metaphors have been challenged. Fullan (2002) and others (Barth, 2002; Fullan, 2003) use the term “cultural change agent” to recognize the kind of leadership needed to transform schools into learning organizations. These leaders strive to create environments where individuals feel more connected, effective, powerful, and involved. They subscribe to a distributed leadership model rather than viewing leadership as residing in a single individual. They invest the time and effort required to develop not only a shared vision of goals and needs, but an accompanying action plan that they communicate to stakeholders inside and outside the building. They understand that building core values and norms of continuous improvement are vital to the success of their efforts. They recognize that no building or district will have all of the expert knowledge and personnel needed to initiate and guide the change process from inception to implementation. They identify expertise and resources and use these strategically to accomplish fundamental goals.

In essence, today’s leaders need to be cultural change agents who ensure accountability in several areas: coordinating all five sub-systems for any change initiative, cultivating a set of principles to guide the change process, and enabling all stakeholders to access a set of professional dispositions that guide the work of the organization. (See Figure 2).

Curriculum System

Aligning district curriculum to the Michigan Core Curriculum framework and, most recently, to the Grade Level Content Expectations (GLCEs) has been one of the most important and consistent tasks of school improvement teams over the past decade. Although important, alignment alone is insufficient to advance positive learning outcomes for all students—especially those most at-risk. School improvement teams must also pay careful attention to curriculum development and coherence. For example, to serve all children effectively, schools must institute what we have come to call systems of individuation. Systems of individuation allow a school to organize resources to create multiple levels or tiers of differentiated instruction and curricula. This differentiation ensures that students spend enough time learning core academic content at their instructional levels. School improvement teams need systems that provide both horizontal coherence (within a grade level team) and vertical coherence (across years and buildings).

This coherence is particularly critical for students in special education, whose educational experience is all too often fragmented and incoherent. Special education students often have individualized education program (IEP) goals that are not linked directly to any curriculum or state standards. Moreover, these students are often taught by multiple professionals using different curricula, strategies, and materials from year to year. To address this, districts should develop a coherent curricular and assessment system for K-12 special education students. This system should effectively communicate a student’s progress from year to year in core academic areas (e.g., reading, writing, and mathematics). The system should be linked to state standards and benchmarks, which, in turn, are linked to IEP goals and objectives. Alignment, coherence, and cohesion must occur across and within both the general education system (e.g., access to general education grade-level standards) and special education system (e.g., individualized instruction in basic skills at the student’s developmental level). (See Figure 3).

School Improvement System

Effective teaching is the key to improving learning. For this reason, schools must focus professional development on specific content and skills teachers need. All too often, schools fail to build the skills teachers already have so they can implement curricular goals that allow teachers better understanding and avenues to integrate the goals into their existing teaching repertoire.

Teaching improvement occurs on two levels. The first level involves improving teachers’ abilities to teach the content meaningfully to students (e.g., measurement, fractions, writing process, photosynthesis, civil war) using the most appropriate research-based teaching skills (e.g., modeling, questioning, elaboration, explanation, providing advanced organizers, cooperative learning, and meta-cognitive training). The second level involves providing a variety of formal and informal professional activities that allow teachers to choose how to improve their work. While the first level of improvement aims to standardize the fundamentals of good teaching practice, the third level of professional development strives to individualize teaching improvement based on student needs.

The term “voluntary collaborative structures” identifies professional activities that have the potential to improve individual or small groups of teachers’ teaching performance. Examples of voluntary collaborative structures are action-research teams, teacher/researcher study groups, school improvement teams, mentor/mentee programs (for working with new teachers), online teacher networked communities, book clubs, and the like.

Finally, one of the most daunting challenges of professional development is to create and maintain a system of bringing newly hired staff up to speed quickly to match the rich training and experiences that experienced faculty have already received. A coherent improvement system must develop ways to provide new members of its teaching force (e.g., teachers, paraprofessionals) with the highest quality professional development possible in the core curriculum that they are being asked to teach. School leaders foster continuous improvement when they help teachers gain the understanding and skills they need to teach curriculum in the most effective way. (See Figure 4).

Data Collection Systems

Meeting all students’ instructional needs begins with understanding the students we teach. This requires a comprehensive and efficient system of data collection in, at minimum, the basic skills (reading, writing, and mathematics) and core content areas (language arts, social studies, science, and mathematics). Having these data, though, will not help unless we have the expertise and resources available to make sense of the data, connect the data to instructional decisions and professional development needs, develop local norms, and track achievement patterns over time.

We can apply two tests to any school improvement effort. First, we want to know whether the percentage of at-risk students failing to reach minimum proficiency levels is decreasing and why. Second, we want to know whether the percentage of proficient learners reaching higher levels of academic achievement is increasing and why. In essence, we want to know whether the system we have created is responsive to both types of learners. To find this out may seem, at first blush, like a relatively straightforward and simple undertaking. Nothing could be further from the truth. What is needed is a system—in this case a performance-monitoring system—that examines the effectiveness of the efforts over time. The system should be complete and flexible enough to tell us four things: how well a given student is doing and why they’re performing as they are, how well students at a particular grade level are doing, how well the student body in a particular school within a particular district is doing, and how well the district’s students enrolled at a particular level (elementary, middle, high school) are achieving. The system should be multi-tiered and provide data on student learning at the unit level, (e.g., fractions), the strand level (numeration /operations), and the year-long curricular level (mathematics). Most importantly, the system should be used diagnostically rather than punitively. Data should be used to inform us of future goals and activities, not used to single out and ostracize “failures.”

This data collection and management system should include an early identification assessment package so that at-risk students can get the assistance they need to prevent school failure in basic skill development as soon as possible.

Finally, the data collection/management system should allow us to answer a number of questions: How, and in what ways, do these data inform the decision(s) we are about to make? How confident are we that the data we are using are both valid and reliable? What does the information gathered over time tell us about the likelihood of being successful if we implement this decision? What data will we use to measure improvement in the near and long term? and (5) Who is responsible for collecting, analyzing, interpreting, and communicating the outcome data on this decision? (See Figure 5).

Organizational Systems

Historically, schools have not been well organized for building the capacity of their direct service stakeholders (teachers, paraprofessionals, reading specialists, ancillary support personnel) to provide effective instruction to students. If schools are to become “learning organizations,” they will have to rethink how they organize the use of personnel, resources, and structures available for learning to occur. Changes in organizational structures refer to physical changes, like creating a common planning period, using Title 1 funds to hire paraprofessionals to support reading instruction, or initiating a summer school program to increase opportunities to learn. These changes also refer to changes in the dispositional values, beliefs, and practices that are invoked through the structural changes. Changing structures does not necessarily lead to a change in the culture of the organization, but changing core values does. Changes in culture are needed to ensure that the changes in assessment, curriculum, and pedagogy will be sustained.

One important indicator of high quality change in the organizational system is the impact of the change on stakeholders who participate in the organization. The impact of the change can be measured by the degree to which members from all stakeholder groups feel more effective, more empowered, more supported, and more connected to others and the goals of the organization. (See Figure 6).

Conclusion

When beginning the process of school reform or “reculturing,” administrators and teachers often become overwhelmed when faced with decisions of not only what to change, but what to change first. Where should the change process start?

This article has presented an explanation for understanding five key sub-systems and their role in providing conceptual clarity to the educational change process. This article sought to raise to conscious realization the importance of each individual sub-system and how each system is necessary to institute and sustain improvements over time so that leaders have a tool that can guide the reculturing process. The systems’ learning tools provide stakeholders with a way to better articulate why particular choices are made in the change process, to attend to allied systems that are necessary for a change to succeed, and to communicate the vision of the organization to others.

A careful and thorough examination of the five sub-systems described above provides stakeholders with valuable baseline information on the systemic health of their school. It also guides school officials on using data to decide which subsystems to address first.

A unique challenge facing schools that engage in reform is how to best articulate the five sub-systems to increase the chances that change is successful (both structurally and normatively). In nearly every instance of failed educational change, it is possible to point not only to a breakdown in one or several of the sub-systems identified in this article, but also to a failure of these systems to work together in ways that impact the norms, values, beliefs, and behaviors of stakeholders.