DeLorenzo: Give students a chance to shape their own education
4/25/06 -- Ninety percent of his students could not read at grade level. Teacher turnover had reached 50 percent. Nobody took college entrance tests -- in fact, only one student had even made it to college in the past 20 years.
That was the situation in the Chugach school district when Richard DeLorenzo was hired as superintendent for the remote Alaskan school system in 1994.
At the National Caucus of American Indian/Alaskan Native School Board Members Luncheon, DeLorenzo described how he helped change this far-flung district of some 22,000 square miles -- where 80 percent of the students live in poverty.
DeLorenzo did it, in large part, by trusting his students. Give them the opportunity to shape their own education -- to set their own goals -- and they will respond, DeLorenzo says. Reward them for accomplishments, not seat time, and you’ll see results.
The district devised a system in which students must demonstrate proficiency in 10 areas before they can graduate. The students set their own goals and work at their own pace. This means that some complete their high school work as early as age 14 and are then free to pursue college-level courses. Students who are having problems can get extra help as they work toward their goals.
By moving from a time-based to a performance-based system, Chugach increased math scores from the 54th to the 78th percentile and reading scores from the 28th to the 72nd percentile. Now 70 percent of students take college entrance tests, and annual teacher turnover has dropped to 12 percent. Forty-two days of staff development a year have contributed to the higher teacher retention rate.
That success helped the Chugach school district win the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award in Education in 2001.
Today, having left the district, DeLorenzo is trying to build on that success with an organization he founded called the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition. The coalition began with 10 districts in Alaska, and its goal now is to have an impact on 1 million students in 1,000 districts throughout the country.
To do that, the entire instructional paradigm must change to focus on the needs of individual students, DeLorenzo says. “The current system was never designed to do this. The current system, which is over 100 years old, was to sort kids out.”
What is needed, he says, is the development of schools “where kids are part of the solution, not part of the problem.”
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