Improving Student Learning When Budgets Are Tight

Allan R. Odden

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781452217086
• eBook ISBN: 9781452284026
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

A how-to manual for achieving excellence despite budget cuts

How do you stay focused on increasing student learning when budget cuts threaten everything you are striving for? This book offers a comprehensive framework to enhance student achievement in good times and in bad. School reform expert Allan R. Odden outlines a school improvement action plan focused sharply on student learning and then shows how to target resources to implement each strategy in that plan. More than just a "theory" book, this text describes concrete, specific actions that can be taken immediately. Key strategies include

• Using data to support boosting student performance
• Focusing on effective instruction
• Setting goals to drive resource allocation priorities
• Establishing priorities for situations that require budget cuts
• Hiring top teachers and providing ongoing professional development
• Providing needed technology resources

Educators will find a wide range of real-life examples of schools and districts that have implemented these strategies and significantly improved student learning. Also included is research-based guidance for optimizing teacher and principal talent, teacher recruiting and hiring, online learning, and more. This book successfully communicates many years of work and offers well- grounded advice that will help educators move from financial frustration to effective action.

1

A Plan of Action

Turning Around Low-Performing and
Enhancing High-Performing Schools

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• Garden Grove (CA), Long Beach (CA), Aldine (TX), and Boston (MA) have all doubled student performance in reading or math over a four-to six-year period during the past decade. A central element of their improvement plans was a systemic view of effective instructional practices.
• Rosalia (WA), a small, rural district in Washington with high concentrations of students from non-English-speaking backgrounds, and Abbotsford (WI), a similar district in rural Wisconsin that experienced a large influx of students born in Mexico, doubled student performance in reading even as the demographics of their student body changed.
• Madison (WI), Richmond (VA), and several other urban districts have dramatically increased student performance in reading by implementing a structured reading program across the district, supported by ongoing professional development, instructional coaches in reading, and one-to-one tutoring for struggling students.

The fact is that scores of districts and schools across the country in all kinds of communities have produced large, measurable gains in student performance in reading and mathematics by using extant dollars more effectively. The issue is whether these success stories can be expanded even during these times of tight and falling budgets. The book shows how such success stories can continue.

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The fiscal context for education has changed. Whether called a new fiscal normal or the new era of austerity, the fact is that the twentieth-century pattern of continued rise in education revenues and resultant education spending is over. The fiscal crisis of 2008–2011 is shining a fiscal accountability light on public schools, and neither political leaders nor the public are happy. Fairly or unfairly, more and more people point to rising school spending and continued flat—or only modestly rising—student achievement and ask, “Why?”

In early 2011, the fiscal side of school reform created two new pressures on schools. The first pressure was the likelihood that the stimulus funds that had blunted funding cuts for the previous two years were spent and would not be replaced by state (or local) dollars, thus presenting school districts with significant new funding cuts, called the funding cliff. The second pressure involved the claims that, in general, public sector salary and benefits—more specifically those for educators—were too generous. Though the bulk of workers in the private sector had experienced various combinations of salary freezes, salary cuts, and increased contributions to benefits—to wit, compensation cuts—most public sector workers, including most educators, had experienced few of those realities. In fact, too many educators and their organizational leaders up to that time had refused to even consider a salary freeze, let alone paying more for benefits.

Regardless of one’s view on these various issues, the fact is that school budgets will be tight for several years—if not decades—to come. Compounding the above issues are two related facts: First, the public and most political leaders seem to be unwilling to raise taxes to continue expanding public services; second, demands for other services such as health care, programs for senior citizens, support for increasing numbers of persons in poverty, and other public commitments (including prisons) mean tight state and local budgets are pressured by multiple noneducational issues as well.

The bottom line is that revenues for schools, which has tracked higher and higher every decade for the past 50 years, are unlikely to continue that pattern. A rosy prediction would be for education revenues to keep pace with inflation; a more reasonable scenario would be level education funding (which has no increase in absolute dollars); the actual reality might be a decline in dollars per pupil—not just real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) numbers but actual dollar-per-pupil declines. Indeed, Texas, which in early 2011 was growing by 60,000 students each year, cut state aid in absolute terms by hundreds of millions of dollars for the next biennium; California had to both cut education funding and raise taxes to keep cuts to a minimum, and the bulk of other states simply had less in both state and local coffers, which made it difficult—if not impossible—to keep the education budget “harmless.” Indeed, the June 2011 report of the Center on Education Policy found that 70 percent of school districts across the country had budget cuts in 2010–2011, and 60 percent said they had to cut in 2011–2012 as well. Most said that such cuts were hampering progress on school reform (Center on Education Policy, 2011).

Compounding these pessimistic fiscal realities are continuing pressures to increase student performance and close achievement gaps. Indeed, as more and more educators, policymakers, and leaders recognize the demographics of schooling (falling percentages of middle-income children and rising percentages of poverty-impacted children), the resulting stagnation—if not decline—in student achievement, and the knowledge demands of the brain-based global economy, the need to boost student achievement becomes not just an equity imperative but an economic imperative as well. Simply put, despite falling school budgets, educators must boost student learning. Falling education budgets cannot slow education reform; change must continue regardless of the budget situation.

Thus, though the initial responses to the fiscal crisis that started in 2008 and shook the country in 2009 were modest (with most states, districts, and schools continuing with business as usual and administering nonstrategic budget cutbacks), the educational fiscal game needs to change in the future. Schools can’t continue to cut programs without changes in compensation levels for educators. Districts can’t continue to cut across the board—fewer counselors, no librarians, less art and music, and higher class sizes—with no plan for moving forward. States can’t continue to cut aid and maintain the rules and regulations for all categorical programs, especially with weak accountability systems for student learning.

States, districts, and schools must figure out how to set new strategic directions and align their dollars with programs, strategies, and systems that together boost student learning, whether the overall budget stays the same or must be reduced. The new era of fiscal austerity for public schools will require educators to rethink all aspects of the education system—how it recruits, compensates, and retains top teacher and educator talent; how it organizes curriculum and instructional services; how it uses technology to boost productivity (without simply raising costs); how it embraces accountability for student results; and most importantly, how it uses the education dollar more effectively and efficiently, regardless of the size of the education budget.

A Strategic Approach to Using the Education Dollar

Using the education dollar strategically is not accomplished simply by cutting budgets or increasing class sizes because it saves or frees up money or having educators pay more for their benefits while possibly taking a salary freeze or cut. Using the education dollar strategically is also not accomplished simply by decentralizing decisions about spending to schools or changing the governance of the education system. Using the education dollar strategically is not accomplished by saying that the dollars will be used only for programs and services that benefit the students, as that rationale has been used almost universally for decades.

A strategic approach to using the education dollar means aligning the use of resources to a solid, powerful, and comprehensive education-improvement strategy—a specific and delineated Plan of Action designed to boost student learning and proved as effective in doing so. For low-performing schools, this could be a turnaround strategy. For average-performing schools, this would be a strategy to move them from good to great. And for high-performing schools—of which there are too few in the United States—this would be a strategy to boost performance to world-class standards as well as to have high-performance levels exist for students from low-income backgrounds as well as minority backgrounds. Further, using the education dollar strategically would mean specific and clear links between the resource and staffing needs of the improvement strategy and the allocation of the dollars toward those resources and staffing needs.

Chapters 1 and 2 show how these resources specifications and dollar links can be accomplished. The remainder of Chapter 1 outlines a Plan of Action that has been used by scores of schools and districts across the country to successfully boost student achievement by large increments; Chapter 2 identifies the resource needs of these strategies. Much of the remainder of the book, then, anchors recommendations for changes in the use of resources—whether via resource reallocation or budget cuts—to the prescriptions for resource use that flow from these first two chapters. Put differently, this book begins with a discussion of what needs to be done to dramatically improve student learning and has these strategies and their resource needs drive most other suggestions in the book for more strategic fiscal use practices. In addition, however, the book also addresses the need to be smarter and more strategic about the 85 percent of funds spent on staff—dollars that are almost spent unconsciously. The book also points to how technology can be tapped to boost student performance. But the bulk of the book rests on the powerful education improvement strategy—Plan of Action—described here.

A Plan of Action for Dramatically Improving Student Performance

The main outlines of a comprehensive strategy to improve student learning and close the achievement gaps in schools with diverse student populations are not a secret. They have been described in countless case studies, books, articles, and now publications from school turnaround centers that have emerged during President Obama’s and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s administrations (Blankstein, 2010; Chenoweth, 2007; Education Trust, 2009; Fullan, 2010; Mass Insight Education, 2011; Odden, 2009; Odden & Archibald, 2009). The strategy includes about a dozen key elements¹:

1. analyzing the current performance situation
2. setting high goals
3. changing curriculum and defining effective instructional practices
4. being strategic about core versus elective courses
5. using data to improve instruction
6. organizing teachers into collaborative groups
7. investing in ongoing, comprehensive, and intensive professional development
8. implementing linked and tiered strategies to help struggling students meet rigorous performance standards
9. distributing leadership across all levels and all roles
10. creating a professional culture
11. taking the acquisition, development, and retention of teacher and principal talent absolutely seriously
12. embracing a culture of accountability for student achievement results

Analyzing the Current Performance Situation

At some point, all districts and school that have dramatically improved student performance take stock of their current student performance situation. Often this is the first step. It is hard to craft a strategy to improve performance if little is known about the level and characteristics of a school’s or district’s existing student performance. Most schools engage in this process by analyzing the results of state tests, many of which now include not only reading and mathematics but also writing and science, and increasingly analyzing high school end-of-course exams in subjects such as Algebra 1, Algebra 2 (the minimum math level for most career technical programs), biology, and chemistry. The student performance data are analyzed for overall patterns—the percentage of students scoring at or above a proficiency or passing level, the percentage of students scoring at or above the advanced level, and so on; how the results vary by grade level and subject and within subject by type of question—fact and knowledge versus application and problem solving; and how the results vary by student characteristics—all students, students from lower-income backgrounds, students learning English, students with disabilities¸ and majority versus minority students.

In the most successful cases, these analyzes are conducted by teachers and administrators in each school; through this analytic process, they come to know the performance situation of their students in their school. Increasingly, districts and states have facilitated access to and analyses of this student performance data—the more the actual analytic process can be driven by and involve all faculty, the more the results permeate the school and its culture and the more the faculty will take ownership of the analytic results.

Most faculty data reviews produce surprises during this analytic process. One district discovered that the overall percentage of 60 percent of students scoring at or above grade level was composed of a much higher level of performance for white and a much lower level of performance for minority students—an inequity that was professionally embarrassing and that was discovered only by disaggregating the data by student characteristics. Other schools with very low overall performance levels discovered just how low those levels were, and when below something like 15 percent of students were discovered to have scored at or above proficiency, this produced a resolve to do much, much better. In one urban district, the results showed that performance was slowly rising overall for all subgroups when just analyzing the percentage scoring at proficient levels or above, but when the percentage at advanced levels was analyzed, it showed that large and rising percentages of whites were performing at the advanced level, but that very small and stagnant percentages of African American students performed at the advanced level. This racial achievement gap had been missed until a new analysis (which analyzed both performance indicators) was conducted as part of a process to create a strategic plan.

During the process of analyzing the existing performance situation, few if any of the dramatically improving schools and districts complained about the state test. Most knew it was not perfect; most wished for more performance-oriented and problem-solving questions. But none disputed the overall findings, especially when they showed low performance levels, gaps between various groups of students, or modest improvements during the past several years. Most concluded that change was needed¸ that their students needed to do better, that they had it within their power to produce those changes, and that a “better” state test would not change the results and might even show the situation as worse.

Few places analyzed just student demographics; after all, schools cannot change the demographics of their students. They are what they are. What can be changed are curriculum and instructional practices that positively impact the students that attend the school. The noted anomaly here (Childress, Doyle, & Thomas, 2009) was Montgomery County, an affluent county in Maryland that borders our nation’s capital. The then-new superintendent, Jerry Weast, led the district in a demographic analysis to show that the district’s student characteristics were changing and that, if resource allocation and instructional practices did not change, the county would lose its reputation as a high-performing district. The analysis spurred multiple changes, including a macro-shift of resources toward schools with rising percentages of economically disadvantaged students. In short, the district responded positively to its demographic challenges, and Montgomery County now remains one of the highest-performing large districts in the country, including high performance of its low income and African American students. As one specific example, the district produces more minority students who take and pass Advanced Placement (AP) exams than any district in the country, and it is far from the largest district, so this accomplishment results from its educational initiatives and changes in the allocation of resources.

Analyzing student performance data requires few resources. It does require time for teachers and administrators to engage in the analysis, but as argued below, if the district or school has a comprehensive and ongoing professional development program, there will be time for such performance analyses.

Setting High Goals

After analyzing the current performance situation, districts and schools that make dramatic improvement—sometimes literally doubling student performance on state tests—set very high and ambitious goals. They want to be the best urban district in the country. They want to be the best high school in the state. One such large, urban high school had a reputation for being one of the top high schools for African American students; a new principals said, “Why just [be] a good high school for minority students? Why don’t we become one of the best high schools in the state (despite our demographics)?” And it did.

Others set eye-popping goals, such as doubling the number of students taking and passing AP classes (Long Beach, CA), doubling the number of minority students achieving at the advanced levels, or increasing the percentage of students performing at least at grade level to 90+ percent, regardless again of the demographics of the school.

Other goals are specific, numeric, and subject focused: increasing the percentage of students scoring at or above proficiency in reading from 55 to 90 percent, increasing the percentage scoring at the advanced level in mathematics from 25 to 50 percent, increasing the percentage of students passing Algebra 1 within three semesters from 50 to 75 percent, and so on.

I have studied schools and districts with less ambitious improvement goals, such as simply to improve student performance in reading and math...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• 1. A Plan of Action: Turning Around Low-Performing and Enhancing High-Performing Schools
• 2. The Resource Needs of the Plan of Action
• 3. Targeting Resources to Student Learning When Budgets Are Tight
• 4. Recruiting, Developing, and Compensating Top Educator Talent: Local Practices and Supporting State Policies
• 5. Computers and Technology in Education: Costs and Online Options
• 6. When Budget Cuts Are Necessary
• References
• Index