Inoculating against low achievement: our job as educators is to mitigate the effects of adversity by accelerating achievements and building resiliency

Leadership, Jan-Feb, 2005 by Michelle Karns

Any discussion of the achievement gap must begin with an understanding that a "gap" typically preexists the school experience. Circumstances are not equal for all children in the United States. However, all children can learn and attain high expectations. They can meet state standards and proficiency forecasts. To help them, our job as educators is to mitigate the effects of those circumstances that have created the gap. We must create opportunities for the students to build resiliency and responses to adversity that accelerate achievement through intentional, focused instruction.

Systemic inoculations and interventions

After 10 years of coaching low-performing schools, I have found that closing the achievement gap requires both systemic inoculations and student interventions.

In this model, an inoculation is a scientifically based action implemented for a specific result for a determined period of time. I am using the term inoculation in the same way that polio vaccine was first distributed in the '50s and '60s. Everyone participates and derives the benefit of the action. For school purposes, inoculations are campaigns that affect the whole school and are implemented to impact the culture of a school, instructional delivery, how the school communicates and the management of the school.

Interventions are strategies that are used to impact a specific subgroup of students, a content area, or a problem identified as causing disruptions in learning for a defined group of students. For example, a current intervention for the elderly is the annual flu shot. Because the elderly are one of most vulnerable groups in flu season, they are targeted for services even if they show no current symptoms. Their risk makes them candidates for intervention. Operating this way is called using the medical model.

In reform, the medical model can be used to map responses to symptoms that are incongruent with the goal and mission of healthy schooling. Because schools are microcosms of the greater communities that they serve, the problems in the neighborhood come to school every day. Stress, trauma and fear dramatically impact how students learn, how they behave and their family balance. Unchecked, this has tragic consequences for some of the most at-risk students. These neighborhood problems come to school and interrupt the homeostasis of the school system. Then, students and their families are blamed for the disruptions caused at school. Blaming disenfranchises people and disconnects them from the greater system. Now we have added another problem.

Using the medical model to resolve issues of under-achievement and the achievement gap can provide a venue to assess systemic and instructional circumstances without blaming the students, teachers and families. Within the medical model, needs are defined by the symptoms and their consequences. Symptoms are merely evidence of a lack of effective functioning.

Used correctly, this approach can take the personalities out of the process and help faculties focus strictly on the principles of effective educational protocol. Managing symptoms is an important part of taking control of the school. It is usually best to take care of the most obvious symptoms that indicate the school is not well.

For example, last year a new principal at a local middle school came into a school campus that was chaotic (symptom 1), dirty (symptom 2), and students were often out of the classroom (symptom 3). He talked with every class to establish new norms. He asked every teacher to be visible at all transitions and lunch, he walked lunch and had every administrator in the quad, he engaged parents on Saturdays to plant flowers, and he made sure that every student was in class every period. In three months, the campus was clean and orderly and students were in their seats.

When working within the medical model, you respond to the obvious symptoms first to make sure that the patient gets some immediate relief of symptoms. However, you must stop to ponder why the symptoms occurred in the first place. In this circumstance, the middle school teachers felt as though past administrators did not manage the school well. The new principal instigated a sale and orderly intervention that put the administration and the teachers in charge of the school. The next step would be to engage the students in taking charge of themselves and the school.

From this point, you start to look for causes of the beginning of the problem. The medical model is a causal chain. Each problem creates symptoms that impact people, causing more problems and more symptoms. The longer the problems exist, the more difficult it is to change the system.

However, when the individuals in the school desire change, anything is possible. The better the system is at identifying the core issues, the more likely the school will be able to sustain change. The inoculations, the systemic and long-term reform actions, should resonate with what you think are the core problems that cause the achievement gaps in your school.