What top performing schools have in common

Secrets to Success
What top-performing schools have in common

By Karin Chenoweth



There is never one single factor that is at the core of a successful school: no one structure, or one curriculum, or one set of policies and procedures that, if every school in the country were to adopt it, would transform them into high-achieving schools. Schools are complex organisms that can’t be changed that easily.

But there are some characteristics that they all share. I call them, for want of a better term, “it’s being done” schools to distinguish them from the “run-of-the- mill schools” and the all-too-common “crummy poor-kid schools” that I describe in the book. Here are a few.

1) They teach their students. This seems like a flip thing to say, but it is at the heart of high performance and improvement. In “it’s being done” schools, educators think deeply about what their students need to learn and how to make sure they learn it. They begin with their state’s standards, but in most cases they are not limited by them. Teachers in these schools teach increasingly complex and sophisticated material, aiming for their students to exceed standards—which helps ensure that they meet them.

They use the verb “to teach” properly. That is, they do not say what many teachers around the country say: “I taught it, but the kids didn’t get it.” Although common, this formulation actually makes no sense.

2) They don’t teach to the state tests. All these schools make sure their students know what their state’s tests look like in terms of the format, and they try to ensure that their students aren’t surprised by the material or the kinds of questions asked. Some of them make a big deal of state testing day with pep rallies, and some do a bit of test prep in the form of giving practice tests. But none of them spends a huge amount of time teaching their students what will be on the state tests or teaching them how to “bubble in” a scoring sheet. They teach a rich, coherent curriculum tied to state standards. For the state tests that are a bit more sophisticated and high-level, such as the Massachusetts MCAS and the New York Regents, the schools might spend more time teaching directly to what will be tested, but that is because those tests are more closely tied to a set of high standards.

3) They have high expectations for their students. They assume that their students are able to meet high standards, and believe their job is to help their students get there. They do not assume that their students are so crippled by poverty and discrimination that they will never be able to meet high standards. They talk with their students about going to college or into high-level technical training.

4) They embrace and use all the data they can get their hands on. They want to know how their students are doing, and they know that classroom observation by teachers, though important, is fragmentary and doesn’t allow overall patterns to be observed. State test data, district data, classroom test data, and any formative-assessment data they can find are all eagerly studied.

When they are lucky, they are able to use their district’s or state’s data systems to give them the tools they need to analyze the data. But if the district doesn’t provide the data in the form they need, they come up with their own ways of charting and displaying data, because they consider it so important.

5) They constantly reexamine what they do. Tradition is never invoked as the only reason something is done, the way it is in crummy schools. If the data show that the way they teach reading isn’t getting all kids learning to read, teachers research and incorporate new methods of reading instruction. And that same willingness to examine what’s not working and make changes extends to every area of school life. The discomfort this causes teachers cannot be underestimated. It can be very difficult for teachers to change long-established patterns or to diverge from what they learned in their university teaching programs, but these are the logical consequences of putting student achievement ahead of everything else.

6) They are accountable. They know they have an obligation not only to their students but to their communities to demonstrate that they are doing the job that has been entrusted to them—to educate future citizens. And, in a kind of extension of that obligation, they are competitive in a way that many educators have traditionally not been, at least outside of sports. If another school nearby outperforms them, they are the first ones to try to figure out what that school did and try to incorporate that new information into their own practice, so they can beat that school the next year. And most are quite open about sharing the data with the students themselves, explicitly teaching students that poor performance on an assessment simply means that the students and teachers need to work harder and more effectively, not that the students are in some way deficient.

7) They use school time wisely. They establish classroom and school routines to ensure that endless amounts of time are not spent going to the bathroom, getting out and putting away books and materials, and going from one activity or class to another. School time is time for instruction, and instruction is treated as something almost sacred.

Most of the schools establish uninterrupted blocks of time for instruction so that classes aren’t disrupted by bus announcements or by students being pulled out for speech therapy or counseling. Using time wisely doesn’t mean, by the way, that the kids don’t ever have fun or move around or have recess. But it does mean that students are engaged in productive activities just about all the time.

8) They use the community. They organize outside mentors and volunteers, ask local organizations and companies for specific help, link with outside social-service agencies, and welcome outside scrutiny as a way of helping them see themselves more clearly. This is in direct contrast to many crummy schools, where outsiders are viewed with suspicion and are often explicitly kept out on the assumption that they would be disruptive. Schools work with local colleges that help train teachers and direct research projects, retired neighbors who read to children, and service organizations like the American Legion and the Kiwanis Club that donate money for school clothing.

9) They expand the time that students—particularly struggling students—have in school. Different schools do this in different ways. Some have before- and after-school classes during the school year, as well as summer school. Some have year-round calendars with intensive tutoring done during the intersessions for children who haven’t yet learned what they need to learn. Some use their federal Title I funds to pay for the extra time; some get grants from other sources, such as the federal 21st Century Community Learning Center program or local foundations or organizations. But they all figure out ways to get their children more time for instruction, and they do so with the same kinds of resources (often involving federal funds) that are available to most schools in poverty and within the parameters of teachers’ union contracts. Many also see that extra time as an opportunity for enrichment for students, and they offer all kinds of interesting classes, such as music, drama, and sign language.

10) They like kids. This characteristic seems almost too simple to include in a list, but the fact is that in too many schools, and not just crummy poor-kid schools, the dominant emotion among teachers and administrators seems to be a kind of contempt for students—and their parents—that can only grow out of dislike. At “it’s being done” schools, students are brought into conversations, student work is highlighted and proudly displayed, and older students are explicitly taught to be the role models for younger students. Teachers tell affectionate stories about their students and boast about the work their students have done. Principals know many of the students by name, and often something about them. The struggles that students have outside school only increase the regard teachers and principals have for what they are able to achieve in school. Such respect never translates into expecting less from students, but into appreciating the effort.

11) Principals are a constant presence. Although all principals are called out for meetings to the central office or other places, the expectation in “it’s being done” schools is that, for the most part, principals are in the building and walking the halls, conferring with teachers, looking at student work, and interacting with students and parents. They do not hide in their offices. Many of them
say that they do their paperwork when children are not in the building. Depending on how big the school is, some principals even stop in on every class at the beginning of the day. It is the principals’ version of the medical practice of “doing rounds.” They are gauging the pulse of their buildings. And when they quietly slip in to observe instruction, teachers and students hardly even notice, because the principals are not hostile intruders but nearly constant presences.

Although the principals are important leaders, they are not the only leaders. Other administrators and teachers, and sometimes parents and community members as well, sit on committees that make important decisions for the school, decisions such as hiring, curriculum, school policies and procedures, Title I spending, and much more. The academic term for this is distributed leadership. In most cases, this is part of an explicit practice to institutionalize improvement so that it is not reliant on a single individual. The principals in “it’s being done” schools are well aware that many schools have improved only to fall back again when their principals left. These principals are consciously trying to build the kinds of enduring structures that will outlast them.

12) They pay careful attention to the quality of the teaching staff. In many of the schools, teachers and sometimes parents sit in with administrators on interviews with potential new teachers. Sometimes the interview panel asks potential teachers to teach a lesson so it can gauge the quality of instruction the teacher offers. Often the schools will test out teachers before hiring them by allowing them to student teach, substitute teach, or teach summer school. Principals and other administrators regularly sit in on classes to evaluate and recommend improvements. “I taught . . . for four years and thought I was a pretty good teacher, but until I came here I felt I had never taught a lesson,” says teacher Wendy Tague, of Elmont High School, in Elmont, New York, about the help she received from administrators and fellow teachers. And teachers do not just drift into having tenure protections—they must demonstrate their knowledge and skill and take recommended steps to improve before they get that third- or fourth-year contract that guarantees them tenure protections under most union contracts.

13) They provide teachers with the time to plan and work collaboratively. The principal or an assistant principal spends a great deal of time building a schedule so that teachers have time to work together. The most common strategy in elementary and middle school is to schedule an entire grade to have “specials” (usually art, music, or physical education) at the same time so the teachers can meet. And those meetings are carefully structured, often by the principal in early days, but later by the teachers themselves. Teachers review data, go over student work, develop lesson plans, and map curricula. These are working meetings, not gripe sessions, and even though initially they require a great deal of effort, eventually they lighten the workload of teachers by allowing them to share responsibility for instruction.

14) They provide teachers time to observe each other. In crummy schools, teachers will hardly know what another teacher across the hall is doing, much less a teacher on the other side of the building. Good teachers learn to close their doors and keep their heads down so they won’t be noticed and interfered with. But in “it’s being done” schools, teachers are encouraged to seek out and observe colleagues who have perfected a particular lesson or are trying something new and want feedback about whether it is clear and coherent. This helps all teachers become better teachers. Gary Brittingham, principal of East Millsboro Elementary School, in Delaware, says that he “rarely walk[s] into a classroom without seeing a model lesson” anymore. At the elementary level, providing such time takes careful planning and sometimes requires principals and assistant principals to take over teaching responsibilities. At the secondary level, it often involves teachers using their planning time to observe their colleagues.

15) They think seriously about professional development. The general theory among these schools is that if students are weak in a particular area, the teachers need to learn more about it. Teachers and administrators seek out the best sources of information and training they can find, so that the teachers become better teachers. “I was not as good a teacher with four other principals” is what 75-year-old fourth-grade teacher Mary Anderson says at Lincoln Elementary School in New York. It should be noted that the emphasis on the quality of professional development is what distinguishes the “it’s being done” schools, because just about all teachers have been subjected to professional development in some form or another. Nearly all veteran teachers in the country have a professional-development horror story about sessions that wasted time and money and did nothing to deepen their content knowledge, understanding, or pedagogical skill. The professional-development session that stands out in my mind as emblematic of all waste-of-time sessions is the one in which I saw a big ball of yarn tossed from teacher to teacher, with about half an hour taken up to demonstrate that people and topics are woven together in an elaborate web. That kind of professional development isn’t typical in “it’s being done” schools.


They assume that they will have to train new teachers more or less from scratch and carefully acculturate all newly hired teachers. They’re aware that new teachers often don’t know the first thing about classroom management, standards, curriculum, assessment, reading instruction, or even how to physically set up a classroom. To noneducators, this might seem remarkable, because most teachers enter the profession with degrees in education. But teachers and principals in the “it’s being done” schools widely agree that, for the most part, university education programs do not even begin to prepare teachers for teaching.

In many cases, schools assign consulting teachers or new-teacher mentors to help induct new teachers into the profession. But they also must carefully retrain experienced teachers who have come from other schools, where they may not have been exposed to effective instruction. Principals in “it’s being done” schools talk about liking to have a mixture of veteran experience and new enthusiasm, but they know that they have to work hard to make sure enthusiastic newcomers are channeled into being productive professionals.

16) They have high-quality, dedicated, and competent office and building staff who feel themselves part of the educational mission of the school. This isn’t something that is highlighted in any of the previous chapters of my book, but in my thinking about all the schools I visited, it stands out as a feature they share. The reason this is important is that it means the principals and assistant principals are able to focus on the core of their job—academics—and don’t have to spend huge amounts of time on the logistics of running a building. In crummy schools, visitors’ first impressions often consist of buildings that are dirty and offices that are dominated by barely civil school secretaries who seem to spend a lot of time on personal phone calls. This phenomenon stems, at least in part, from the fact that, in too many places, schools are seen as jobs programs, not as places where important work demands competence from everyone in the building. A new superintendent of my acquaintance found that when he arrived in his poor rural district, seven of his eight principals were first cousins, and many of the teachers, teacher aides, building service workers, and secretaries were related to each other. He says his district is on the “friends and family plan.” Being related doesn’t mean that none of them were competent—in fact, the superintendent said he was surprised how many of them were—but it does mean that competence might not always be the deciding factor in who gets hired.

17) They are nice places to work. This was the biggest surprise. After all, these schools are achieving at higher levels and improving at faster rates than many people in the education world think is possible. It would be reasonable to wonder if the teachers and principals are nearing nervous-breakdown level. But, overwhelmingly, that’s not what I found. Mind you, the schools are not easy places to work. “We work really hard” is the most common thing teachers in these schools say. “It’s being done” schools have high and constantly rising expectations for teachers, who are expected to learn more every year to improve their skills and knowledge, and to work collaboratively with their fellow teachers. They also have students whose lives outside of school sometimes break teachers’ hearts. But because teachers’ work is organized in a way that allows them to be successful and take leadership roles, and because the atmosphere in these schools is one of respect, they are nice places to work.

Another quality comes through as well. These schools have the kind of camaraderie that comes from teams of people facing difficult challenges together, not unlike the camaraderie that is built in military units, sports teams, theatrical groups, and any other group that goes through an arduous process to achieve a common goal. As a result, they do not have the kind of turnover that many schools with similar demographics have.

When people leave, for the most part it is because they retire, or their spouses are transferred, or they are promoted to new positions of leadership, not because they are fleeing to teach in easier schools. Those schools with the longest and best track records have built a reputation of being good places to work, and have little trouble filling vacancies.

This fact points out that many teachers want to work with children of poverty and children of color if they can work in an environment where they will be helped to be better teachers. In other words, the huge attrition rates of new teachers in crummy poor-kid schools don’t mean that teachers do not want to work in schools with large populations of poor children and children of color, but that they do not want to work where they have to succeed or fail totally on their own.

Adapted from:

"IT'S BEING DONE":

ACADEMIC SUCCESS IN UNEXPECTED SCHOOLS

by Karin Chenoweth

WWW.HARVARDEDUCATIONPRESS.ORG

COPYRIGHT 2007 BY PERMISSION OF HARVARD EDUCATION PRESS

Success Stories: Helping Struggling Readers from New York to West Virginia

By Caralee Ada

How Administrators Can Help Rescue Failing Readers

• Create a school wide consensus that helping low-achieving readers is a top priority.
• Thoughtfully examine test data to find ways to deliver language and content instruction simultaneously.
• Provide common planning time for teachers to communicate and work together to serve students.
• Weave reading instruction across the content areas, in addition to providing extra intensive instruction.
• Offer professional development to teachers on instruction for ELLs and the intervention approach in your school.
• Consider having the entire school screened and use the intervention strategies for all students, not just for those identified as needing reading help.
• Avoid labels for poor readers or placement in special education classes. Instead, encourage everyone to seek out reading support services, as needed.
• Form a team within the school to collaborate on reading intervention efforts.

Principal Yvonne Leimsider has supportive parents and a grant program that provides a computer for each of her 750 students at I.S. 204 Oliver Wendell Holmes Middle School in Long Island City, New York. But when she looked at the group of struggling readers who were sliding farther away from grade-level achievements, she knew she needed more.

Like many schools across the country, I.S. 204 has a growing population of English-language learners (one in five students) and an even higher proportion of students who read below grade level (one in three). After eight years at the school, the last three of which she's been principal, the achievement gap wasn't shrinking fast enough to satisfy her. The challenge Leimsider faces may not be unique, but her solution certainly is different.

Leimsider used two dramatic decisions to try to affect change. First, she put two teachers in every language arts class at Holmes. This allows the students to be split by ability and receive more personalized instruction. It also presents a serious budget and programming concern, but Leimsider is committed. "It's important enough that I'm willing to spend the money to hire extra personnel to reduce the ratio of teachers [to] students," she says.

The second change was how students learn. Holmes brought in System 44, Scholastic's computerized reading program for struggling students. The software allows students to progress at their own pace, allowing them to see their gains clearly and use that momentum to build achievement.

Providing time for plenty of professional development on the technology has been critical to the program's success. "You can put any system into the building, but if the teachers aren't comfortable with it, they seem to put it off to the side," Leimsider says. Also, every classroom in the building has a library and kids are required to read one book a week.

The result: Students at Holmes are showing substantial reading improvement. School-wide English Language Arts scores increased from 42 percent at grade level in 2007–08 to 65 percent the following year. With higher reading scores, students can apply to any high school in the area and feel comfortable they are reading on level, says Leimsider. "The students have high expectations. Now they know they can do it."

Defining the Problem

The problem with lagging readers in middle school and beyond is easy to diagnose—but too often there's no system in place to fix it. Being two grade levels behind by sixth grade is a recipe for disaster as students enter classes that are more about content and less about teaching the building blocks necessary for good reading. Teachers want to help but they need resources, says Carolyn Denton, associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. There is not as much research on adolescent literacy as on teaching beginning readers, but there is a new emphasis on secondary intervention, she says.

"These students come with a history. They've built up ineffective strategies and developed habits," says Denton. "They have all the emotional baggage of having experienced failure."

Without help, their spiral accelerates and they can develop a host of problems, such as a higher incidence of suicide, incarceration, and dropping out. To save these kids, educators need to make helping low-achieving readers a priority.

Complicating the reading problem is the growing population of students whose first language is not English.

How are schools serving the reading needs of this group? "Abysmally," says Kathleen Leos, president and CEO of the Global Institute for Language and Literacy Development in Washington, D.C. "The issue is not about good intentions. It's the system; it's not knowing what to do," she says. The burning question in the field for teachers is: How? Teachers want someone to show them how to effectively teach ELLs in their classroom, not just tell them, she adds.

To help ELLs, Leos says research shows that three areas have to be combined: teaching language development, teaching through content, and teaching at grade level. These students should be in the general classroom during core instructional time because students must learn language through the content—math, science, etc.—and teachers must have high expectations for all students.

Denton also maintains that successful reading intervention programs are well coordinated and purposeful and provide reading not only in language arts class but also across the curriculum. "Some schools get too carried away with too many strategies," says Denton. Her research concludes that it's most effective to give teachers a few strategies and show them how it impacts learning in content areas. The following two examples show that while struggling readers is a problem each district faces, the solutions can happen in elementary schools and in high school.

Finding Success One Student at a Time

Students lagging behind in reading have long been a concern to educators in Hall County, says Gerald Boyd, school improvement specialist for the county in Gainesville, Georgia. The rapid influx of Hispanic students in the past 15 years has increased the number of ELL students to 19 percent in the school system.

In the past, the county has tried a variety of approaches, from establishing transition programs for middle school reading to adding remediation courses to developing intervention programs to give at-risk and failing students intensive instruction to master reading skills.

In 2007, Hall County received a state grant of $2.6 million and spent it on language acquisition academies at six elementary schools. It set up technology labs with special software from Lexia Learning aimed at individualized instruction for students lagging in reading and math. The efforts proved successful with students, especially ELLs. "In a computer lab setting, students can work individually, depending on their level," says Boyd. Students could also access the Web-based program after school and from home.

In 2006, there were 11 Hall County schools on the "Needs Improvement" list. Now there is only one. "We have had good results," says Boyd, who attributes the gain to the technology-based reading intervention program and improving the system of identifying students in need of reading help. Additional instruction within regular classes has made the difference, says Boyd.

Extending RTI to High School

As hard as it is to catch up lagging middle school readers, the challenge is even greater if students have managed to make it to ninth grade with severe reading problems. Of the 750 students at Berkeley Springs High School in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, about 10 made it through the system without learning how to read.

In recent years, the failure rate has been as high as 30 percent for freshman. Principal George Ward decided to attack the problem at its source, so he ramped up the school's reading intervention programs in recent years—and it's working.

In 2001, the school had a "resource room" where students went when they were pulled out of the classroom for extra help. Then, a collaborative model was used in which special education teachers taught with general education teachers. The school had some limited success with reading, but overall, students were not showing much improvement.

The administration realized more was needed and the school instituted an intervention program for struggling readers. (By 2012, West Virginia will require that all high schools have an RTI program, and Berkeley Springs teachers will receive additional training and be fully aligned with others in the state.) With the district's new approach, achievement began to improve.

Moving away from special education labels, the school called the intervention "High School Survival" and reached out to any student who was struggling with reading in a content-specific way—getting help with reading in science or reading in social studies, for instance. When the focus was on special needs students, kids were reluctant to ask for help. But that changed with the new format. "Kids began to put forth effort and found a connection with an adult," says Ward.

The school staff realized they needed to look at what was driving the students' behavior and difficulty with reading. By looking at the whole child, they learned what was happening at home and built trust. When staff members began to work with kids emotionally one-on-one, students learned to cope while improving their academic skills, says Michael Marsh, a counselor at the high school.

At Berkeley Springs, an intervention team of motivated teachers and staff was assembled to tackle the issue of low-achieving students. "The key for us is communication and collaboration," says Ward. "We've transferred ownership to a team in the school, rather than one person. We shifted to the concept that we all have responsibilities." The team talks informally daily, but meets once a month as a group and once a marking period with the principal. This allows problems to be addressed rapidly by staff.

Berkeley Springs is seeing an impact of its efforts. In 2001, just 36 percent of graduating seniors went on to college. In 2008, about 85 percent did. Test scores are improving and the failure rate for freshmen is dropping. More kids are academically eligible for sports and an increasing number are involved in after-school activities. "Self-esteem follows achievement," says Ward. "There is a big difference in the culture of the school. There is an attitude that if we need help, we can get it. Kids feel that this is our school. There are people here who care about us. Kids are happy. They feel that they belong."