More districts are facing tough NCLB sanctions
By Joetta Sack-Min
When T.C. Wallace Jr. became superintendent of the Lansing, Mich., school district last year, one of his first tasks was among the most daunting a school administrator could face: reconstituting all three of the district’s high schools.
The schools had been deemed chronically low performing under the state’s standards and had failed repeatedly to meet adequate yearly progress benchmarks under the No Child Left Behind Act. Those schools are not a rarity -- many other low-performing schools across the country are facing NCLB’s toughest sanctions this year and are taking a variety of actions to improve students’ learning.
Wallace and the Lansing school board were prepared to take drastic steps. “When I came into the district I had an opportunity to spend several months in a consultant role,” Wallace said. “During that time, I was able to gather a lot of data on student achievement and started to do the research necessary to develop some strategies for interventions that would yield higher achievement.”
After he became superintendent last July, he convened a panel, which met with community members and worked with the local teachers’ union to set goals and outline a plan for reconstitution.
Next year, two of Lansing’s high schools will have new leaders, and some teaching and support positions will be changed. They will also have reform specialists on staff.
Among other actions, intervention plans will be designed for struggling students, and parents will be notified of their child’s progress. District leaders have vowed that student achievement will be raised by 10 percent for every category of students in each school, or more interventions will follow.
Under NCLB, which went into effect in 2002, Title I schools that fail to meet adequate yearly progress in one or more categories for multiple years face the law’s toughest sanctions, which include state takeovers, overhauling curriculum and leadership, allowing students to transfer, or converting to charters.
A recent survey by the Center on Education Policy found no trends in the types of reforms selected and their effectiveness among districts that had repeatedly missed their AYP targets. What worked for some schools did not work for others.
NSBA has lobbied for changes in the law’s AYP requirements and believes interventions for schools should only apply if the same subgroup of students has not met its goals for two or more years, so that resources can be targeted more effectively toward that group. Further, NSBA believes that states should be granted more flexibility to determine a school’s progress toward its AYP goals and more resources and flexibility to implement interventions where needed.
Some districts are seeking help from their state education departments and state school boards associations.
California has the largest number of schools facing severe sanctions, and most of the districts have chosen to implement a new curriculum and secure new leadership, said Fred Balcom, director of the California Department of Education’s division of accountability and improvement.
The Kentucky School Boards Association (KSBA) is part of a multiagency team that is helping districts with struggling schools to increase student achievement and avoid NCLB sanctions.
Through a program that was pilot-tested this year, districts worked with a team of school improvement specialists from the state education department, a KSBA school board facilitator, and mentor superintendent to examine such areas as personnel training, school culture, leadership, and curriculum in low-performing schools.
The Jefferson County district in Louisville is undertaking a more unusual plan for two middle schools deemed chronically low performing. The district is combining boundaries and dividing the student population by gender, sending the girls and boys to separate academies.
The district has already seen promising results from research-based experiments with same-sex classes, said Assistant Superintendent Sandra Ledford.
The district hired new staffs for the two schools -- everyone from the principals to custodians had to reapply for their jobs. The district also upgraded technology, lowered class sizes, and worked with master teachers on staff development. The plan was implemented with the support of the teachers union and local PTA.
“You cannot mandate a major change like this,” Ledford said. However, she added, the most critical component of the plan was ensuring all the newly hired teachers and staff members were willing and able to take on the challenges.
“It’s really hard work in an optimal setting, but when you have kids that bring challenges to schools, we need support from everybody,” she said.
And although most parents supported the changes, students who want to continue in a co-ed environment will be allowed to transfer to other public schools. The district is also monitoring the experiment closely to ensure both the boys’ and girls’ schools receive equitable resources.
Wallace advises any district leader who is considering a restructuring plan to engage parents, teachers, community members, and other interested parties to set goals and help build a better plan for achievement. He says his toughest audience was the teachers union, which was concerned about how some of the more drastic proposals would affect teachers.
“We understand that change is difficult. However, consistent failure is not acceptable, and for this administration to come in and address the needs of all kids requires different intervention, and not business as usual,” he says. “If we don’t address these needs, then who will? And if we don’t address them now, when?”
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