Changing Lives One Child at a Time

By David Blackburn

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has recommended that K-12 and higher education begin a dialogue to throw open the doors to higher ­education. She has called on colleges and universities to lead the transformation of higher ­education “from a system primarily based on reputation to one based on ­performance,” as recommended by the bipartisan Commission of the Future of Higher Education she formed last year. In the commonwealth of Virginia, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) recently developed Institutional Performance Standards for public universities that mandate formal agreements with K-12 to improve pupil achievement and assessment, leadership and teacher quality.

Authentic Relationships
Old Dominion University actually has a three-year head start on building authentic relationships with K-12, a relationship called for in the 2005-09 university strategic plan. ODU’s Darden College of Education created the Program for Research and Evaluation in Public Schools (PREPS) in 2003. Its mission is to assist school districts in meeting the No Child Left Behind requirements for research-based education programs and evaluations. Taking cues from superintendents, I took the college’s first step in meeting ODU’s mission of changing lives by using what I call “relationship fundraising” to secure funding for school district projects. The traditional method of funding university services requires the district to pay. But with my grant-writing background and relationships with superintendents, I set about writing proposals for the districts.

The Payoff
Today, the funding secured in partnership with districts exceeds $12 million. The PREPS team believes that there is a permanent role for philanthropy, both business and foundation, not just to put money into schools, but to put money into institutional “incubators” such as the Old Dominion University Center for Teacher Quality and Educational Leadership. The center is in development by PREPS and is scheduled to open in July 2007. It will support faculty-teacher research, development and testing of new classroom instructional and assessment strategies, and dissemination of validated strategies.

A Change in Teaching and Learning
Getting assessment “right” is more important than ever for African American children as we near 2014, when all children must meet No Child Left Behind requirements, and as we later approach 2040, when there will no longer be a white majority in this country. With a growing knowledge of how people learn, it is critical to develop assessments that help teachers diagnose students’ comprehension more precisely and accurately and to link good formative assessments to high-stakes state tests. As the era of accountability approaches maturity, many have paused to ask if our use of summative data provides our K-12 educators what they need to create learning cultures that enable students to achieve at advanced levels of proficiency. As Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine pointed out at the 2006 National Governors Conference, “While the Standards of Learning (SOL) have raised the academic floor and enabled many students to reach higher, the SOLs have always been intended as minimum standards for competency.” The call for assessment literacy has been answered, and yet achieving goals beyond state accountability standards remains elusive to many schools. First-generation accountability regimes continue to routinize regular classrooms and inadvertently purge inventive young teachers from moribund schools.

The Results
Two of my colleagues in the Darden College of Education, Steve Myran and Jack Robinson, have developed and tested a teacher professional development intervention in the Northampton County and Norfolk public school systems over the past two years. At the heart of their model is a school-embedded approach to assisting teachers to use student assessment for learning. Teacher educators, teachers and staff developers work side-by-side in the context of teaching and learning to improve instructional practice. While it is still early, teachers were able to improve student performance. Teachers in Northampton County were able to narrow the gaps in student achievement between black and white children by 10.2 percent between 2003-04 and 2004-05. Standard & Poor’s selected Northampton County as one of 12 Virginia school districts for the academic “outperformer” designation. More recently, Myran and Robinson have improved their intervention and, in collaboration with teachers in Norfolk’s Willard Model School, have helped raise regular student performance by 25 percent, and special education student performance by 35 percent, on the SOLs. These results are consistent with the extensive research literature that shows significant changes in student learning as the result of using effective assessment for learning practices.

Looking Ahead
At a recent luncheon with the region’s superintendents, York County Schools superintendent Steven Staples requested assistance with envisioning and planning the “schools of the future.” A number of recent studies and reports conclude not much has changed in 150 years and that, for the most part, reform has failed in the larger urban areas. Most reports on schools of the future revolve around structural changes, such as ending high school at grade 10. Bill Gates has expended nearly $1 billion on creating smaller high schools, without success. Few if any reports delve into teaching and learning.

Old Dominion University believes that the first step to developing schools of the future is to join with schools to improve teacher and administrator capacity to deliver high-quality instruction, conduct assessment and create the conditions for success. The Virginia General Assembly has provided the funds to establish the Center for Teacher Quality and Educational Leadership on the Virginia Peninsula. The center will work with Newport News Public Schools to develop and test a model that builds teacher and administrator capacity to address students’ educational needs and general well-being.

A core group of teachers and administrators in several lead schools will be trained in three areas: 1) academic rigor; 2) balanced assessment; and 3) youth development. Improving academic performance will require a rich array of research-based strategies to help students catch up to their grade level in reading and improve their mathematics performance in areas identified by formative and summative assessment. Achieving a balanced approach to assessment is critical to engaging students. Helping students achieve their full potential is the best way to prevent them from engaging in risky behaviors. Giving youth the chance to exercise leadership, acquire skills and get involved builds the confidence, trust and practical knowledge they need to help them grow into healthy, happy, self-sufficient adults.

Once a school’s core group of teachers and administrators is trained, they will be paired with colleagues at a low-achieving school to create a lateral school development model. This process will be repeated over time such that, by the end of the first year, an estimated six to eight schools will be able to lead additional schools to high performance the following year.

As schools improve, they will be able to continue their development within a statewide network of high-performance learning communities where schools help each other. Such a lateral development model will enable educators to be part of something bigger than themselves. It will enable them to change lives.

Sustaining Community Partnerships
As agencies have pushed for greater public school performance and accountability over the past two decades, we have seen some incremental improvements. But all too often, experience reveals that these improvements are temporary. PREPS has immersed itself in the schools it is working with to size up situations quickly and intuitively. This intensive work does not pay off overnight; it is slow. Energy, not time, is the key to sustainability. Sometimes adaptive challenges require a push for more energy because things are boiling over or they are getting spent. Achieving breakthroughs in education is not easy. The goal of PREPS is to build a critical mass of schools and school leaders who are committed to changing lives, one child at a time.

David Blackburn is director of the Program for Research and Evaluation in Public Schools in ODU’s Darden College of Education.