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Vignette 1 and 2
Vignette 1
Cuyamaca Elementary School and Crest Elementary School are located in the Cajon Valley Union School District, near San Diego, California. I visited in 1998, to consult with them on ways to work toward school improvement. One year later, nearly all 27 of Cajon Valley's K-8 schools realized gains on the Stanford 9 assessment, with especially significant advances in the early elementary grades.
Alice Rodriguez, former principal of Cuyamaca Elementary School and now coordinator of English language programs at the El Cajon Valley Union School District, reported on the progress made at Cuyamaca Elementary School. At Cuyamaca, 75 percent of the students are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch.
Between 1998 and 1999, Cuyamaca's students made gains in every area of the Stanford 9, with especially significant gains in their focus areas, reading, and writing. Their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades averaged a 12-point national percentile gain in reading. The increase in the percentage of students scoring at or above the 50th percentile in writing between 1998 and 1999 can be seen in the following table:
Students improved their writing at each grade level. Third-grade writing gains brought them to first place among 22 elementary schoolsāhigher than 11 non-Title I schools!
Alice Rodriguez reports:
Last year, Mike Schmoker came to Cajon Valley and discussed his book, Results (1999) with school teams. At Cuyamaca, we decided to follow up on his ideas. Each grade-level team chose a "rapid results" goal to improve in reading or writing. We reviewed Results in staff meetings and then began to use the processes we had learned to achieve rapid results.
Grade-level teams met monthly and used the 30-minute meeting agenda suggested by the book. At these sessions, teachers brainstormed for ideas to improve reading and writing for their grade level. We then chose the top three or four strategies to implement. After one month of implementing these strategies, teachers attended grade-level meetings with their students' scored reading and writing work. The grade-level teams reviewed the work and brainstormed for the next set of strategies to implement. We shared the data on progress at each team meeting.
Grades 3ā5 made gains in writing. Grades 2ā4 improved in reading and language on the Stanford 9. Along with these gains, our score on the Academic Performance Index (API) increased significantly from 1998 to 1999. We made 85 points of growth. [Note: California's API reflects academic gain against socioeconomic factors. Cuyamaca's progress is a remarkable achievement.]
We celebrated our success by sharing the data from the Stanford 9 and the writing assessment with all staff and parents. We plan to continue the grade-level team process to show more growth in Spring 2000. We believe these processes made the difference. As you can see, Cuyamaca teachers were able to achieve some surprisingly rapid results!
As principal of Cuyamaca for eight years, and, now as a district office administrator, I agree with Mike Schmoker's findings in Results. One of our primary roles as administrators should be "the collection, dissemination, analysis, and discussion of success stories from within and outside our district."
Now that I am at the district office, I am recognizing and disseminating success stories in a number of ways. I'm sending e-mails to applaud successes and great ideas, to say "Hey, this is happening over here." I have an "Applause" column for good teaching in the bulletin that goes out to the bilingual facilitators, so that they can use these great ideas. We are discriminating in our recognition; we focus the applause on collegiality, results, and the use of best practices.
For further information, contact Alice Rodriguez, Coordinator of English Language Programs, Cajon Valley Union School District, 189 Roanoke Rd., P.O. Box 1007, El Cajon, CA 92022-1007; phone: 619-588-3278.
Vignette 2
Sue Geller is the principal at Crest Elementary School, a middle-class school in the Cajon Valley School District in California. Second-grade teachers Becky Harless, Claudia Garber, and Connie Pappa piloted a continuous improvement effort at the school. Their success is shown by the national percentile gains in 2nd grade in the following Stanford 9 results:
Sue Geller reports:
At the beginning of the year, the 2nd grade team reviewed 2nd grade Stanford 9 data to look for focus areas to zero in on and to improve. Since the Stanford 9 is not administered until the 2nd grade, we reviewed the data from our school's 1st grade end-of-year assessment results, which includes Cajon Valley's reading and math performance assessments.
The 2nd grade team at Crest Elementary met on a frequent basis to discuss the curriculum and instructional strategies being used in the classroom and to select appropriate tools for student assessment. During these meetings, the teachers analyzed student work samples and identified intervention strategies when needed.
These grade-level team meetings enabled the teachers to continually review their instructional pacing to make sure that students were reaching their target benchmarks for each reporting period. We conducted individualized running record and performance assessments. We gauged student progress with developmental benchmark levels set forth by our district and with levels from the Wright Group reading series.
The data also helped us to group students in the appropriate instructional reading groups and to identify students needing more teachingāa double dose of what they did not learn initially.
Data from additional classroom assessments, such as the Silver-Burdett Ginn Language Arts and Scott Foresman/Addison-Wesley Math theme/chapter tests, were also used. This gave us a basis for ongoing dialogue to help us determine areas of weakness and to inform us of areas to modify in our instructional program.
Time is always the critical challenge for most elementary teachers who have no "official" prep period. In addition, because Crest is a small school, the teachers have many adjunct duties; there just aren't as many teachers among whom to spread the duties around. Nonetheless, the 2nd grade team scheduled meetings every other week. For the future, creating release time for grade-level planning will be a priority for Crest.
Collaboration and ongoing dialogue was and continues to be a powerful tool for the 2nd grade team at Crest. It's critical for teachers to feel supported by their administrator and each other and to have the opportunity to learn from each other as we move our students toward academic success.
For further information, contact Sue Geller, Principal, Crest Elementary School, and 2nd grade teachers, Becky Harless, Claudia Garber, and Connie Pappa, at Cajon Valley Union School District, 189 Roanoke Rd., P.O. Box 1007, El Cajon, CA 92022-1007; phone: 619-588-3128.
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Chapter 1
Adlai Stevenson High School District: Reward and Recognition in a "Learning Community"
The relevant question for the learning organization is not "Who is in charge?" but rather, "How can we best get results?" (DuFour & Eaker, 1998, p. 153).
Adlai Stevenson High School District is, by choice, a large (4,000 students), single-building high school district in Lincolnshire, Illinois, just north of Chicago. It is not only an exceedingly successful system; it is also a model of how alignment, efficiency, and humane leadership, combined with simple structures and practices, can produce astounding results.
Once again, as impressive as this system and its accomplishments are, its bedrock is simplicity. Adlai Stevenson's key features are disarmingly and eminently replicable, exhibiting a reverence for
- Frequent, focused, data-driven teamwork.
- High-quality, carefully-aligned lessons, instructional units, and end-of-course assessmentsāall the product of teamwork.
- Recognition and praise for the individuals and teams whose contributions have helped them to achieve their vision: that of an indisputably world-class school and district.
Superintendent Richard DuFour has received an exceptional number of accolades. He is the only school administrator in Illinois to have received his state's highest award as both principal and superintendent, the only high school principal in Illinois designated as an "Instructional Leader," the first high school principal in Illinois to be presented the Distinguished Educator Award; and the nation's first principal to be designated as a "Fellow" of the National Center for Effective Schools. He was named one of the "Top 100" school administrators in the nation by Executive Educator magazine. Adlai Stevenson High School District was named one of the top high schools in the United States by Redbook magazine on three occasions, by Newsweek in 1998, and by U.S. News and World Report in 1999.
And not for nothing. Stevenson's results are a tribute to the power of vision, focus, organized intelligence, persistenceāand courage. There is much to learn here.
"But We're Already Good": Creative Comparison as a Lever
The first of Stevenson's simple, but profound achievements has been its ability to effectively address a problem that regularly besets affluent, high-achieving schools and districtsācomplacency.
How do you create that essential sense of urgency and purpose when a school already enjoys scores that are well above state or national averages? This is not only a problem for high-achieving schools. It is a problem we encounter wherever schools compare their performance only to their inferior counterparts: "We're already good, just look at our neighbors [or the state and county averages, and so forth]." Respectable scores can easily mask certain realities, such as the following:
- Many students, often disadvantaged or minority, are still well below proficiency levels.
- Teaching is, in fact, mediocre or could be much better.
- Smart, adequately achieving kids are never given the additional challenges they need to reach higher.
As they say in baseball, being born on third base doesn't mean you've hit a triple.
Such districtsāthey are legionāare usually not data driven or goal oriented or self-improving; they can be as insular and provincial and as apt to engage in ineffective teaching practices as their lower-achieving peers.
Data can shake up such a system. Already high-performing Stevenson found the purpose and urgency it needed through data to profoundly raise achievement. How profoundly?
Results
When DuFour began as principal in 1983, Stevenson didn't even rank in the top 50 schools in the Midwest. By 1995, they were ranked by the College Board as the top high school in the Midwest and the sixth in the world, based on student success on Advance Placement (AP) exams. They raised achievement in every measurable category, as can be seen in the following tables:
Results
Grade inflation? No, as a review of the following data reveals:
ACT Composite Scores
In a 10-year period, Stevenson increased the number of students taking highly challenging AP exams more than eightfold while increasing the percentage of students passing.
They also increased the number of merit scholars from 4 to 27. Additionally, Stevenson did it on 30 percent less funding per student than three surrounding districts.
Translating Data: Lessons from the Business World
DuFour likes to point out that all schools have mission statementsāthe usual boilerplate that no decent person could argue with, but which has nothing to do with improvement. He emphasizes, instead, the importance of a clear, concrete academic visionāone that exacts a challenging requirement from the organization. For Stevenson, that simple vision is an unambiguous commitment to getting every kid over that bar. Moreover, the bar, in this case, is emphatically measurable.
Earlier than most, DuFour had the prescience to embrace rather than to eschew the lessons of leadership research from the business world. He saw that the use of data is indispensable to improvement. As one of DuFour's teachers told me, "Rick was very influenced by books like In Search of Excellence by Peters and Waterman (1982). He saw the applications of that kind of work for school improvement." I also strongly recommend Peters's (1987) Thriving on Chaos to anyone interested in school improvement, although schools are never mentioned in the book.
A set of data, by itself, is neutral. DuFour's creative, comparative use of dataābenchmarking, as it is called in industryāwas a brilliant stroke. Like nothing else could, it made both the need and the opportunity for improvement urgent and compelling to his staff. Citing Peters and Waterman, DuFour points out:
There is a difference between data and informationāthere's a need to translate. "The school scored 305" means nothing without comparing it to something. We have to come around to comparing a score to other schools in the [same] area. . . . School administrators have an obligation to translate. We might be the best in the state, or above the national average, and so we're patting each other on the back. But at one point we decided to pick benchmarks for the highest scoring schools in the state. The one area that kept us out of the top schools in the state was reading. Even though we were doing very well in science and social studies, but we were taking a beating in reading. We couldn't have known and acted on this without a basis of comparisonāin our case, a comparison with the highest achieving schools in the state. Providing this basis of comparison is the administrator's responsibility.
"The administrator's responsibility." We will later examine how Stevenson exemplifies shared, collaborative leadership. But it is significant to state at the start that what leaders do has a pronounced effect on how an organization faresāon its focus, its aspirations. The administratorāthe leaderāhas to concretely orchestrate urgency, direction, and vision. The leader has to demonstrate the need and the opportunity for improvement. It rarely emerges spontaneously. Creating such a sense of direction and impetus is the leader's job. DuFour's use of benchmarking proved to be a vital strategy for promoting urgency and focus.
For all our required leadership and statistics courses, strategies like benchmarking have yet to earn a place in administrative preparation courses and academies. Such comparative uses of data put achievement into perspectiveāand augur for action. Because DuFour bothered to compare his district's achievement with that of similar districts, he and his staff no longer were innocent. They learned there were schools with the same advantages manifestly outperforming them.
Stevenson now uses this same process to examine other crucial areas. The practical strategies that are generated reveal Stevenson's refusal to leave improvement and instructional focus to chance. At the core of this process is focused, professional collaboration. DuFour's ability to translate data and to provide stewardship to his staff is practical, common sense leadership.
The True Learning Community: Teamwork in a High-Maintenance Culture
We're pretty happy campers here. We're heavily into the team thing.
āSteve Armstrong, Social Studies Teache...
