What teaching the standards really means: thanks to the IIUSP process, educators at this middle school now understand and teach the standards, leading to large gains in the school's API

Leadership, Nov-Dec, 2003 by James Bushman, Greg S. Goodman

It's teacher appreciation day, and the entire staff has gathered at 7:50 a.m. in the staff lounge to hear a few words from Principal Scott McArthur. Like most teacher staff rooms, this one has a couch, several tables and the teacher mailboxes. On the tables in the center of the room rests an assortment of food designed to cater to everyone's taste.

"I just wanted to take a moment to thank all of you for the work you have done this year," said McArthur. "We have made good progress this year, and the administrative team wants you to know we appreciate what yon do."

Indeed, many schools had similar celebrations on this day, but few schools are able to claim the success Greenfield Middle School has made on the California state tests. In 1999, when Greenfield Middle School became an Immediate Intervention for Underperforming Schools Program school, its base Academic Performance Index score was 533. Three straight years of positive growth resulted in a 2002 API score of 637, with a state rank of 4 and a similar schools rank of 10.

But the tale of the tape can be deceptive when only a single API number is looked at. School success is best determined when all student groups in a school are measured, and this is where Greenfield Middle School showed its noteworthy achievement. In 1999, the base score for the Hispanic students was 494. By 2001, not only had it risen to 637, but all focus groups exhibited similar gains.

Significant achievement for all students was not always the case at Greenfield Middle School. In 1999, Greenfield Middle School met its overall target API, but it did not meet its target for any subgroup populations. As a result, the school became an IIUSP school and began planning school reform efforts.

The turnaround

Located on the outskirts of Bakersfield, Greenfield Middle School is a suburban school of 942 students (61 percent Hispanic, 16 percent African-American and 17 percent Caucasian). The school has a mobility rate of 20 percent, with 83 percent of the students in the free/reduced lunch program, and a parent education level of 2.10.

As the school looked for direction, Carol Schaefer, the assistant principal of curriculum, led the charge. During the summer of 2001 she attended the "No Excuses, We can teach all students" conference, where she learned about Pat Davenport's eight-step process for successful student achievement.

"I came back to work so challenged, so motivated, so inspired and so passionate about the many ideas. Foremost in my mind was that we had to emphasize high expectations and high standards from all our students. We must set the bar high, and we must accept no excuses for mediocrity," Schaefer said.

She came back to her school to share her vision. She met with the staff; purchased "No Excuses" buttons for teachers, hung banners in classrooms, and had the slogan "Entering the No Excuses Zone" prominently placed on the school's marquee.

Focusing on standards

The tone may have been set, but for the school the work had only begun. The IIUSP process provides a planning year that requires a school to work with an external evaluator to develop a reform plan. Greenfield selected the Kern County Superintendent of Schools office as its external evaluator. The superintendent's office then chose the educational research company DataWorks.

DataWorks looks at all student work, including assignments, tests and homework, and calibrates it to the state standards. According to John Hollingsworth, one of the founders of DataWorks, the company has looked at more than a million pieces of data and has observed 10,000 classrooms.

"What we are finding is that students enter kindergarten doing grade-level work, but each subsequent year the level drops," Hollingsworth said. "By eighth grade, only 30 percent of the work students are asked to do is on grade level, and by high school that number drops to 20 percent."

The DataWorks recommendation for Greenfield Middle School was not unique. The school needed to do a better job of covering and teaching the standards.

The Greenfield Middle School staff underwent a staff development process they refer to as "unwrapping the standards." They were instructed on how to teach the standards, calibrate the standards to each grade level, set up pacing guides in math to calendar the teaching of math standards, and set up benchmarks to determine student learning.

As one teacher said, "First we had to know what the standards were.... As a teacher I had the standards on the shelves but I was not intimately aware of them." Assistant principal Schaefer had the standards copied, enlarged to poster size and laminated so each teacher could display them in the classroom and refer to them as they taught students.

The process was not welcomed by all teachers. To encourage participation, Schaefer and her colleagues began visiting classrooms more frequently. In addition, the teachers were required to turn in lesson plans every Monday. Some teachers at first resented this process as they noticed the increased scrutiny and accountability.