The Tale of Turnaround in Three Tacoma Schools, or not

Percentages of student passing each standardized test in three Tacoma middle schools--Giaudrone, Jason Lee, and Stewart. The test years covered by the SIG were 2011, 2012 and 2013. 2009 and 2010 are included for comparison between SIG and pre-SIG performance. There are, then, at least two broad evaluations to make. First, pre-SIG and SIG scores. Second, growth during the SIG period. The score in parentheses is the percentage of 7th grade students passing the writing test. Only 8th graders take the science exam.  All data available on the OSPI report card web site.

Giaudrone Reading	2009	2010	2011	2012
6th Grade	50.3	49.2	56.4	67.3
7th Grade	39.7 (54.9-Write)	46.6 (50.8)	38.0 (55.5)	56.7 (54.1)
8th Grade	55.4	58.3	64.1	58.8

6th grade scores show what seems to be a healthy improvement. 7th grade reading scores show improvement in the second year of the SIG, though writing scores remained essentially the same.  8th grade scores showed an initial bump, but returned to essentially where they had been before the SIG.

Following a student cohort (by moving one cell to the right and one cell down) reveals another mixed pattern.  2009 6th graders drop in reading at 7th grade, while they pass writing at the same rate as they passed reading in 6th grade. As 8th graders, they show significant improvement in reading. 2010 6th graders improve some in writing but drop significantly in reading at 7th grade. As 8th graders they show healthy reading improvement over their 6th grade scores. 2011 6th graders remain essentially the same in both reading and writing in 7th grade.

Giaudrone Math	2009	2010	2011	2012
6th Grade	27.1	27.6	38.3	55.1
7th Grade	35.0	24.1	41.0	49.3
8th Grade	26.2	36.2	39.4	45.7

All 3 grades improved substantially over the 4 years. Follow the student cohort, and similar patterns of gain remain. Math, in other words, showed much more consistent improvement than did reading.

Giaudrone Science	2009	2010	2011	2012
8th Grade	31.2	37.4	38.8	51.8

Jason Lee Reading	2009	2010	2011	2012
6th Grade	51.5	37.1	40.5	63.4
7th Grade	38.8 (41.0)	36.9 (56.3)	35.8 (54.5)	51.9 (61.0)
8th Grade	60.5	44.4	49.0	50.7

6th and 7th grade showed improvement across the years, but 8th grade dropped. Following student cohorts shows little change for the 2009 6th graders. (It seems likely that their 7th grade year was more devoted to writing than reading.) 2010 6th graders showed writing improvement in 7th grade and reading improvement in 8th. 2011 6th graders showed substantial improvement in both reading and writing as 7th graders.

Jason Lee Math	2009	2010	2011	2012
6th Grade	33.3	37.1	24.4	61.5
7th Grade	28.1	30.1	43.1	36.4
8th Grade	27.4	13.3	37.7	35.3

6th grade showed a sizable gain in the second year of the SIG. 7th and 8th showed modest gains, perhaps barely more than statistical wobbles. Student cohorts also showed fairly insignificant gains, except 2011 6th graders as 7th graders. By contrast with the Giaudrone, this school likely focused more on reading than math.

Jason Lee Science	2009	2010	2011	2012
8th Grade	21.7	28.1	48.3	38.8

Stewart Reading	2009	2010	2011	2012
6th Grade	57.0	37.3	49.0	48.3
7th Grade	39.9 (56.1)	33.9 (54.2)	36.7 (37.3)	53.8 (32.4)
8th Grade	54.7	52.9	47.1	40.0

The only worthwhile gains in reading were in 7th grade in the second year of the SIG. Cohort changes were insignificant, or negative.

Stewart Math	2009	2010	2011	2012
6th Grade	33.0	19.6	30.6	34.2
7th Grade	33.7	24.3	25.9	18.7
8th Grade	29.8	27.6	25.2	11.7

By grade level and student cohort, there are no real gains here.

Stewart Science	2009	2010	2011	2012
8th Grade	23.2	25.3	35.0	39.1

An Education System is like Oakland...there is no there there.

The school year is well under way.  That means students and staff are settled in, and embarking on the long drive toward the year-end tests.  This also initiates the predictable discussions and debates about the fixes to schools that will save American education.  Whether it’s Finland or Shanghai (the international education champions), the Common Core or better standardized tests, the quest for some sort of system by which to reform schools has been practically endless.

That’s because there is, in fact, no system or program.  Rather, at the heart of good performance in education lies a commitment to teacher development (especially peer to peer collaboration and support) and parent engagement.  Further, success is achieved on a school by school basis—the only thing programmatic is a commitment to hard work, expressed by all participants in the process.  

The revelation of this “secret” has important implications for education in the United States, as what’s true of Finland and Shanghai holds true across the US.  This fact is both daunting and encouraging for education in Washington.

We should be inspired by the fact that local commitment to the hard work of building the relationships that sustain and support education is more important—much more important—than national standards, “balanced” assessments, elaborate teacher evaluation processes, or union seniority structures.

Washingtonians could just as easily be discouraged, though, because achievement gaps are politicized, teacher contracts are arranged by gubernatorial intervention, and relationships built on the shifting sands of cultural awareness trump curriculum.

Since there is no such thing as a school system in the United States--with more than 10,000 school districts, American schools are established as essentially locally governed institutions--we must build and maintain the necessary and vital relationships among school staff and families, so necessary for effective teaching and learning, locally.

The education bureaucracy (the “educracy,” if you will) seems to miss or ignore the fundamental emphasis of the local, though.  The regulatory and reform efforts, so prevalent in the national conversation about education, are to the pursuing local, specific and sometimes divergent needs of each community’s schools.

Whether No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top or the Common Core State Standards initiative at the national level, or the state level efforts to establish complicated teacher evaluations pegged to narrow measures of student achievement, the plans, programs and restructurings typically undertaken in school come from the top of the political hierarchy, and are sent downward to the local level.

In such a situation, students, parents and local school staff end up with little role in—and, consequently, shaky or variable commitment to—the reform de jour.  Moreover, as regulatory imposition grows, trust diminishes, thereby replacing the impulse to do the hard work of maintaining the educational relationships with a reliance on and resort to external institutional authorities further up the bureaucratic structure and farther away geographically.  Why bother working on a relationship when you can just invoke a state law to win your point?

With this increasing bureaucratization we can’t help but get more standardization.  That’s what bureaucracies do, after all—standardize and routinize those processes that they control.  Education is about relationships, though, so structures that create standard operating procedures out of what really are specific and even idiosyncratic relational circumstances are bound to introduce the sterile, useless and/or mundane into the learning environment. The briefest evaluation of practically any standardized test will reveal this.

Building and sustaining those local relationships is what will truly transform schools.  Unfortunately, regulatory policies handed down from state and national Departments of Education simply won’t make that happen.  Engagement in your local school will.  Now there’s a learning target at which we should all aim.