A Blueprint for Christina
(Wilmington News-Journal
editorial published January 16, 2005
as “Christina schools have a connected strategy”)
John Mackenzie and
Joseph Wise
Christina School
District
The Christina School District has begun a series of reform initiatives that will make our schools truly great, but the reform strategy will need public awareness and support to succeed. Some minor issues have received a lot of media coverage, while the central elements of the reform received surprisingly little attention. It is time to preview an overall reform strategy.
As a first step, the Christina School Board unanimously adopted a formal statement of beliefs that focuses on student achievement and commits us to rigorous tracking of student performance. We have set ambitious performance targets for the district as a whole, and are now developing a formal plan of action to meet these goals. The following reflects my own thoughts on an appropriate plan of action, consistent with what we are doing in Christina, but this does not necessarily represent the thinking of other Christina School Board members.
First, all our students in all our regular schools will follow the same basic curriculum sequence, which will be tightly aligned to state standards and the DSTP. In the past, students transferring between schools would often suffer serious gaps in learning because different schools would use different curricula in different sequences. A standardized curriculum lets students transfer between schools with no disruption in learning. Critics may complain that we are just “teaching to the test,” but if the standards are well designed, and the DSTP is fair and comprehensive, we have no problem with that. In just one year we doubled the number of Advanced Placement classes in our three high schools, we have double the number of students taking AP classes, and we expect all our AP students to take AP exams. An AP class is overt “teaching to the test,” but these are fair, rigorous, comprehensive tests, and nobody is complaining.
Second, we are developing a comprehensive data management system to support continuous, detailed monitoring of student learning over time. Delaware already has a statewide student ID system that lets student achievement be tracked even across districts. If we only monitor annual DSTP performances, however, struggling students will go a year or longer before getting the extra help they need. But with a standardized curriculum, frequent small tests and efficient data management, we can track each student’s learning gains on successive unit tests at three- or four-week intervals. Then we can identify problems rapidly and get students and classrooms the extra help they need so kids don’t fall behind. We will have solid data rather than pedagogical theory to identify the classroom practices that yield the best learning gains, and our professional development for teachers will be the best anywhere. If teachers are to be “accountable” for student achievement, it would be for measured learning gains rather than raw test scores. We will have hard data to evaluate our curricula and identify gaps in them by evaluating how well our student cohorts perform on specific PSAT and DSTP questions or sets of questions. We believe that the best way to alleviate student anxiety about infrequent “high-stakes” tests is to give kids frequent low-stakes tests that keep their learning securely on track.
Third, we realize that different students have different learning styles and learn at different paces. Although all our students will follow a standard curriculum sequence, we will encourage our schools to develop differentiated instruction strategies to maximize every child’s learning. Schools will offer various special-interest programs catering to particular student interests. Close monitoring of student achievement will let schools group students into classrooms by actual performance instead of some fuzzy assessment of “ability,” and students can quickly move between classrooms as their performances dictate. We can give fast learners accelerated instruction and additional curriculum content. We can give slower learners additional classroom resources, additional instruction hours, perhaps even additional school days extending into the summer. We are already allocating additional teachers for classroom size reductions in our high-poverty schools. Slower learners do not need to fall behind, and should not have to repeat grades.
Fourth, we want to decentralize some of the administrative functions of the school district, delegating more authority and responsibility to the building level. We would like each building principal to have the staff teams he or she wants, to closely monitor the performances of individual students and classrooms, and to allocate budget and other on-site resources to maximize overall school performance. Principals know a lot more about the specific challenges their schools face than administrators in the district office. Christina’s administration is already pretty lean and efficient: we are the only public school district in Delaware that does not allocate any property-tax dollars to administrative positions. We believe we can achieve even better efficiency with more autonomous site-based management.
A business without focus or standards or quality control will fail. So will a public school district. If we are going to make this school district truly successful, we need a clear focus. It’s not about buses or buildings or books; it’s about kids learning. We need to know exactly what and how much our kids are learning. That requires standardizing our curricula and conducting regular learning assessments, so that we can gauge the progress of each kid, classroom and school against the best. And we need use these data to improve our performance. We are developing a state-of-the-art data management system to provide clear, efficient, timely delivery of student performance data to guide our policies and practices. Decentralized management will let our schools make the best use of these data to keep every kid and classroom on track for success.